Liberals Still Vastly Overestimate Police Shootings of Black Men

After the death of George Floyd on 25th May 2020, America was rocked by weeks of protests and rioting – 25 people lost their lives and property damage totalled $1–2 billion.

The protestors’ main grievance was “systemic police racism”. As the media reported endlessly at the time, black people make up around 30% of the victims of police shootings despite comprising only 13% of the population. Black people, it was said, could not even walk down the street without fear of being gunned down by a racist police officer.

Yet the narrative was flawed. After all, victims of police shootings are overwhelmingly male, but this doesn’t mean the police are sexist against men. It is simply that men are more likely to get into situations where a police officer ends up shooting them.

What’s more, activists were vastly inflating the numbers. According to the Washington Post’s police shooting database, only 12 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019 –in a country of 330 million.

We now know that part of the problem was innumeracy. In 2020, Skeptic Research Centre asked a representative sample of Americans, “How many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019?” Options were: “about 10” (the correct answer), “about 100”, “about 1,000”, “about 10,000”, and “more than 10,000”. Results are shown below:

As you can see, “very liberal” respondents – the ones most supportive of the protests – massively overestimated the number of unarmed black men killed by police. Over 50% said “about 1,000” or greater, and only 16% gave the correct answer of “about 10”. It’s possible that America would have been spared the unrest in the summer of 2020 had people been better informed of the facts.

It’s now three years later, and Skeptic Research Centre just asked another sample of Americans the same question. What did they find? There were slight improvements, but “very liberal” still massively overestimated the number of unarmed black men killed by police. Results are shown below:

Fewer “very liberal” respondents gave answers of “about 1,000” or greater, and more gave answers of “about 100”. Yet only 17% gave the correct answer of “about 10” – just one percentage point more than in 2020. “Conservative” and “very conservative” respondents did about as well as last time.

On the one hand, it’s surprising we don’t see more improvement among “very liberal” respondents. There are numerous articles and videos debunking the narrative about “systemic police racism”, and the Washington Post’s database is freely available online; anyone can download it and check the numbers for themself.

On the other hand, it’s not surprising. Why not? Because the mainstream media hasn’t levelled with its audience. Liberal Americans don’t get their news from the kind of outlets that question the narrative about “system police racism”. They get their news from CNN and the New York Times. And those outlets still cover race and crime in a highly misleading way.

You can’t expect people to update their beliefs when they don’t have correct information.