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1/n Using the Washington Post Shooting Database (2015-2020), I entered the names of all & #39;unarmed& #39; black and white police shooting victims into ProQuest and created a tally of search results.
2/n What I find is that news media content covering black victims is about 9x greater than that of white victims (whether one compares the medians or the means).
3/n To account for the skewed distribution of the data, I used a quintile/median regression to regress the # of results onto the incident/victim-relevant variables included in the Washington Post dataset. None of these variables explain the difference.
4/n For transparency sake--and to allow you to replicate how I gathered the data--here is how I went about doing the searches
5/n Obviously, the approach used here is limited by the holdings in the ProQuest archive. ProQuest doesn& #39;t have EVERY single newspaper article every written. So the counts above may not reflect the *actual* number of articles written about these cases.
6/n But the disparity appears real. And I& #39;d expect you& #39;d observe it in every other news database one could look at.
7/n One thing that became clear to me when looking up these cases is how misleading the term & #39;unarmed& #39; is. Many of the victims weren& #39;t simply going about their days until the police came and blew them away. A non-trivial number attacked/charged at police, and no few of them..
8/n...were wanted murderers/violent offenders. This is not to say the decision to pull the trigger was always justified. But it does speak to how simply presenting & #39;# of cases& #39; can give the impression that the police are unwarrantedly preying on people who were just..
10/n One final data-point I neglected to include above:
32% of white victims turned up 0 search results as compared to 12% of black victims.
32% of white victims turned up 0 search results as compared to 12% of black victims.
11/n Another thing: Keep in mind that the dataset begins in 2015. Thus blacks who were killed in 2014 (Michael Brown, Tamir Rice etc.) are not included.
