“Columbus Police Shoot and Kill Black Teenage Girl” ran the NPR headline. “Ohio Police Fatally Shoot Black Teenage Girl Just Before the Chauvin Verdict,” said the Washington Post. Although not entirely untrue, these headlines — and the opening paragraphs of the stories — omit what any honest person would consider a remarkably important fact: that Ma’Khia Bryant, who was shot, was attempting to use the knife she was wielding to stab someone. This significant component of the story appears several paragraphs in, and briefly.
People take actions in furtherance of goals. For what purpose is this inflammatory reporting, which deliberately omits such an important factor, conducted?
Following the initial reporting, hundreds of students at Ohio State University engaged in a sit-in and then a rally to call on the university to break ties with the Columbus Police, whose officer had shot Bryant.
Polls of Americans show that numerical estimates of unarmed people shot dead by the police are usually off by one or two orders of magnitude. But there simply is not a growing epidemic of deadly police shootings of unarmed black people in the United States. According to Washington Post data, of the 1,000 people shot and killed by police in 2019, some 600 were armed with a gun, 54 were identified as entirely unarmed, and 20 were of “undetermined” status regarding whether they had a weapon. Among the 54 identified as “unarmed” and for whom a race was indicated, 12 were “black” and 26 were “white.”
If we count those considered unarmed, those with an undetermined status, and those whose “weapon” was a car, there were 135 such people shot and killed by police in 2019, among whom 31 were identified as “black” and 62 as “white.”
