Young Black Men Still Predominant Victims of Police Violence

Despite the protests, media scrutiny, and all around heightened national attention, young black men in 2016 continued to be the predominant victims of police violence in the United States.

According to year-end figures published Sunday by the Guardian database The Counted, “[b]lack males aged 15-34 were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by law enforcement officers last year,” and were “killed at four times the rate of young white men.”

Overall, the number police killings fell slightly—1,091 last year, according to the Guardian tally, from 1,146 in 2015—but the pattern of brutality has remained consistent.

Of those, “officers were charged with crimes in relation to 18 deaths from 2016, along with several others from the previous year,” the report noted. “These charges included the arrests of officers involved in the high-profile killings of Terence Crutcher in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Philando Castile near St Paul, Minnesota.”

Following another troubling trend, many fatalities occurred when police were called in to help deescalate a conflict or situation.

“One in every five people killed by police in 2016 was mentally ill or in the midst of a mental health crisis when they were killed,” the Guardian reported, and the same percentage of deaths “started with calls reporting domestic violence or some other domestic disturbance.”

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