As of June 3,
Mapping Police Violence had counted 28 unarmed blacks and 51 unarmed whites who died at the hands of police in 2019.
Those numbers are higher than the Washington Post’s in part because Mapping Police Violence tracks police killings more broadly and includes officers who are off duty.
In 2019, among those who were unarmed when they encountered police, there were five black people and 12 white people who died from tasers, beatings or other uses of force by police, according to Mapping Police Violence’s data. Off-duty officers killed four unarmed blacks and five unarmed whites. Those deaths won’t show up in the Washington Post data.
What’s considered armed?
Another reason Mapping Police Violence counted more unarmed people killed by police is that it
considered victims
in possession of toy guns, BB guns, airsoft guns or
rocks to be unarmed. The Washington Post’s database doesn’t include those people in its unarmed tallies.
In 2019, at least eight black people and 16 white people were killed by police while in possession of a toy weapon or something similar, according to Mapping Police Violence.
...
Elder’s claim also ignores the fact that the same Washington Post data shows black people are disproportionately shot and killed by police, experts said.
"There may be more unarmed whites than unarmed blacks killed each year, but the rate of shooting unarmed blacks is much larger," Fridell said, citing a
report from the Washington Post that summarized years of findings from its database.
Black Americans represent 13% of the U.S. population, the report said, but they accounted for about a quarter of police shooting victims over four and a half years of data collection.
"They're over-represented in the data," said Brian Burghart, the founder of Fatal Encounters.
