One has to wonder if unarmed white people are shot, because it doesn't really make the news, probably because it doesn't really get ratings to report on every murder ever. But upgrade it to racism? Suddenly important because racism is a big deal and oh my god I'm drowning in ratings and money!
Note: Racism is obviously bad, but I think these news stories maybe aren't helping promote tolerance and understanding?
If you compare number of fatal unarmed police shootings by race and adjusted for overall crime rate, you're probably not going to find a statistically significant difference. I've got some complaints with how the numbers of unarmed shootings are normalized with regard to overall crime rates by race (for instance, a higher percentage of black
armed crime shouldn't be used to adjust the proportions if we're looking purely at
unarmed shootings). But even then, I'm not sure you're going to find a staggeringly large difference.
The way I see it is that unarmed shooting of black people by the police is much more of a symbolic issue for the racial profiling and police harassment that happens to black people. That might seem kind of biased to only one side of the issue, which it is, but it's not like reforming policing will stop brutality
only against black people. Body cameras, better use of deescalation, and fairer indictments help out pretty much everyone.
