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1/n Using the Washington Post Shooting Database (2015-2020), I entered the names of all 'unarmed' 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'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'd expect you'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 'unarmed' is. Many of the victims weren'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 '# of cases' can give the impression that the police are unwarrantedly preying on people who were just..
9/n ...'minding their business' (though some certainly were).
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.
