In just two days, two black men were shot to death by police officers in two different states — both of their deaths caught on video.
Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana Monday night, and Philando Castile, a 32-year-old man fatally shot at a traffic stop Wednesday near St. Paul, Minnesota, are the latest in a long list of African-American victims of police killings.
Just how long that list is depends on the source.
The Guardian’s The Counted
Through its project The Counted, the Guardian has documented 136 black victims of U.S. police killings so far in 2016— nearly one-quarter of the 566 victims the Guardian has in its tally as of Thursday.
Out of those 136 victims, all but six of them died as a result of police gunfire. Nineteen of them were unarmed.
The Guardian‘s list of black victims in 2016 is overwhelmingly male — 128 adult and young men compared to eight women, all above the age of 18.
The toll, so far, works out to a rate of 3.32 black victims per one million people. Only the rate for Native American victims was higher at 3.4 per one million people, but only there were only 13 Native Americans among the 566 total.
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But last year, according to the Guardian‘s findings, the rate of African-Americans killed at the hands of police was the highest by a very wide margin — 7.27 black victims per one million people, or 306 African-Americans out of a year-long toll of 1,146 victims of police killings.
And how do the numbers of black people killed by police compare to the number of white people?
The Guardian reported almost half of all victims of police killings were white. And in 2015 a little more than half of the victims of police killings in the U.S. — 581 out of 1,146 — were white. But the overall rate of white people being killed by police, in both years, is significantly lower than that of black victims. The numbers work out to a rate of 1.39 white victims per one million people so far this year and 2.93 per one million people last year.
The Washington Post’s Fatal Force
The Washington Post only looked at people who were shot dead by police in its Fatal Force series.
Its death count, as of Wednesday, stood at 509 — including Castile and an unidentified man armed with a gun killed in Grady Springs, Oklahoma Wednesday. Out of that, 123 victims were black. That’s a slightly smaller number than what the Guardian had counted but it still works out to about 24 per cent of the overall count.
According to the Post, 76 of those victims were carrying guns themselves, nine were carrying toy weapons, and 12 were unarmed. Four of those unarmed black men weren’t trying to flee the scene.
At this point in the year, there have been more than half as many fatal police shootings, involving all races, as last year’s total number of 990.
But there have already been more deadly police shooting than the 465 people shot to death by cops in 2014, the Washington Post reported.
The Post is paying particular attention to whether or not mental illness was a factor in the deadly police shootings.
READ MORE: Alton Sterling shooting: new footage shows deceased empty handed after being shot
Its figures indicate mental illness was a factor in 24 per cent of all of the deaths caused by police-fired bullets. Only three per cent of those victims were black, compared to 16 per cent for white victims.
ProPubica’s Deadly Force, in Black and White
Looking at federal data for 1,217 fatal police shootings between 2010 to 2012, ProPublica found young black men were 21 times more likely to be shot and killed by cops.
“The federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police,” the 2014 analysis found.
ProPublica looked back even further to find that average age of black victims of police shootings, between 1980 and 2012, was 30 years old. For white victims, it was 35.
The non-profit news outlet also discovered a disproportionate number of African-American boys were killed by cops compared to other races during that time. There were 27 African-American boys, aged 14 or younger, killed by police in that same period, while just eight young victims were white.