Looking at Numbers

Though I'm not very good at advanced math (anything beyond algebra) I have always enjoyed working with numbers. In my days as a process engineer I relied heavily on statistical process control (SPC) to analyze and hopefully improve mechanical and human processes. Statistics can be misleading and even deceiving depending on the bias of whoever is analyzing or presenting them. Numbers and statistics are being sited frequently recently regarding the corona virus and racial demonstrations. There are a few numbers being tossed about that have caught my attention so I thought I'd do some of digging on my own just to gain a little perspective. 

The United States Census Bureau estimates the population as of July 2019 to be 328,239,523. Of that number 77.6% or 254,713,870 are adults. We're being told that there are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people protesting in the United States. Let's round it up and make it an even million protesters. That number would include all the athletes, celebrities, politicians, kids under 18 and other notables who are jumping on the "I am outraged" bandwagon. If my math is correct, 254,713,870 million minus 1 million leaves 253,713,870 million adults or 99.6% who are not demonstrating, are not outraged, are not demanding that police departments be disbanded, and are not burning and looting. So despite the news media painting a picture of a nation in rebellion, for over 99% of us adults it's pretty much business as usual, corona virus aside.

Next I wanted to see the ethnicity make up of our 328,239,523 Americans. Again from the census bureau, the percentages are:

Non-Hispanic White - 61%

Hispanic or Latino - 16.7%

Black or African American - 13.4%

Asian - 5.6%

Other - 3.3%

An interesting projection by the census bureau is that by the year 2055 the White population will be 48.4%, Hispanic 28% and Black 13%.

On one of the news videos I saw a young female protester holding a sign that read "Stop killing us!" That made me wonder who it is that is killing "us" so I tried to find some stats on police killings. The only useful stats I found was titled people shot to death by police. I know that George Floyd was not shot to death but the stats are indicative of the issue. For the years 2017 to date in 2020, victims of police shooting deaths were:

White - 1,398...40.9%

Black - 755...22.1%

Hispanic - 542...15.9%

Other - 133...3.9%

Unknown - 588...17.2%

Total - 3,416

Unfortunately the 'unknown' number is high and is probably skewing the distribution so it's difficult to draw precise conclusions, but it seems that blacks are being killed in numbers beyond their percentage of the population. But here are some other numbers that may serve to identify who is killing "us". 

From 1976 to 2005, 94% of black victims were killed by other blacks. In 2017 blacks accounted for 52% of all homicide victims. The overwhelming majority of the perpetrators were black. In 2018 when the homicide victim was black, the suspected killer was also black 88% of the time. 

Let me throw out one other number. Zero. To my knowledge zero is the total of all of those people carrying "Stop killing us" signs who have done the research and realized that maybe they're demonstrating in the wrong neighborhoods, and are showing their signs to the wrong people. It might be more impactful if they demonstrated in the high crime neighborhoods, and changed their signs to read, "Stop killing yourselves!" But that's not gonna happen. It's easier to deny responsibility and blame society.

Zero is also the number of celebrities, athletes, politicians and preachers who have had the courage to say that the key to stopping racism is for blacks to clean up their own act first. But in this day and age saying something like that is akin to committing social suicide. 

It's pretty clear who is killing blacks. To really and finally change the situation it's going to take enough of the right people to first, say it, and then do something about it.