There is a small war raging on the streets of America. It seems like a never-ending narrative; police clashing with local communities. One side of this coin is law enforcement and the other, the populations they serve. The primary problem with most mainstream analysis is that it focuses on only one side. Either victim advocacy reigns or law enforcement justification prevails. Very little work is done comparing these two areas. The hope here is to put into context exactly who is in the greatest mortal danger from whom.

A set of complied data, from a number of sources is used to make this comparison. First, data about victims of law enforcement is from the Fatal Encounters database (here). This data source is not authoritative but seems to be more comprehensive than the CDC or FBI offerings. There are, however, some major drawbacks with this dataset, which includes all deaths caused by any law enforcement officer regardless of circumstance. This criteria includes deaths caused during domestic violence or off duty actions. Secondly, for police deaths, the FBI’s Law Enforcement Officers: Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) database is used(here). Finally, the census data is used for population normalization. Please keep in mind that all figures are my calculated statistics from raw data and should be treated as approximations.

This first visual compares the major category of interest, race. This chart compares yearly average total killings. For example, on average, 332 African Americans are killed by police and also are responsible for killing 24 law enforcement officers.