San Diego City Councilwoman Myrtle Cole has received calls for her resignation since she said that police are targeting African-Americans because of a proliferation of black-on-black crime.

Summarizing recent community meetings about race and policing, Cole said, “One of the things that they brought up was the racial profiling issue. That was something that, when asked, I said, 'I support my community, but let me just tell you, what I want to do is make sure that we know there’s more black-on-black shootings in our nation than ever before.'”

Cole gave numbers for Chicago, 360 shootings and murders, Memphis, 120 shootings and murders, and San Diego, 28 homicides, for the first six months of 2016. Her office declined to make Cole available to provide source citations or be interviewed for this story.

Her public comments at a council meeting on July 26 came in a national context, and her assertion about a record number of black-on-black shootings is mistaken. Murders of black victims by black offenders have trended down since 1995 following the general drop in crime over that timeframe, according to data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting.

U.S. murders by race value Source: FBI

Crime statistics that include the race of both the victim and perpetrator are hard to come by at the local level. In San Diego, the arrest rate for black suspects in violent crimes that might involve guns is higher than the black population. But robbery is the only one of these crimes for which black suspects are arrested at a higher rate than whites.

Violent crime arrests, by race San Diego County 2014 value Felony Homicide Rape Robbery Assault Kidnapping Weapons Source: California Office of the Attorney General, 2010 U.S. Census

Few state or local crime databases track victims’ demographics. The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting database maintains national data showing that people of all races are more likely to murder those of the same race. About 82 percent of white victims were killed by whites in 2014, according to the database. Just under 90 percent of of black victims were killed by blacks that same year. That trend is consistent with previous years as well.

U.S. murders by race

In her controversial comments, Cole went on to say of police, “They’re not going to stop a white male. They’re not going to stop a Hispanic male or Asian. They’re going to stop an African-American because those are the ones that are shooting.”

A 2015 study from the University of California, Davis, analyzed a database of police shootings for potential racial bias and found that departments with a higher rate of bias did not correlate with counties that had higher crime rates, even if researchers looked at race-specific crime rates. In other words, high black crime rates did not make it more likely for police to be biased against black residents — so that justification does not hold up.

The study found that in the areas of study, which included San Diego, an unarmed black American is 3.49 times more likely to be killed by police than an unarmed white American, which the study called “evidence of a significant bias.”

In 2014, about 20 percent of suspects arrested in San Diego County for homicides were black, according to data from the California Attorney General’s Office. About 26 percent of arrested suspects were white, and just over 46 percent were Hispanic.

Almost 15 percent of those arrested on weapons charges in 2014 were black. Thirty-four percent were white, and about 45 percent were Hispanic.

Cole has since apologized for relating “two distinct issues to one another.”

“I condemn racial profiling in all forms and all instances,” she said in a written apology.

I sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding I may have caused. I'm open and willing to listen to the community. pic.twitter.com/dCsaUf9A9f — Myrtle Cole (@CD4MyrtleCole) July 28, 2016

The community reacted strongly to Cole's comments, calling for her to step down.

At the council meeting, Cole called for the release of a delayed study on racial profiling in traffic stops that Data Watch previously reported will now be out in October instead of June.

The original 2014 report from the San Diego Police Department that instigated the study found that black drivers are pulled over at a rate twice their driving-age population while whites are pulled over at a rate less than once their driving-age population.

Drawing any conclusions from that data has been dismissed in favor of the forthcoming study because of concerns that the driving-age population might not represent the actual driving population.

National context

Cole’s comments join the national dialogue about race, policing and crime that has grown since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, two years ago this month.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has also blamed black communities for crime. He tweeted, among other things, that blacks kill 81 percent of white victims, which is not true. Politifact gave him a “Pants on Fire” rating for his comments.

Donald Trump's tweet about black crime rates was factually incorrect. The picture has since been removed, but the San Diego Union Tribune was able to find an archived version of it. Lauryn Schroeder

In a report released Wednesday, the Department of Justice found “systemic deficiencies” in the Baltimore Police Department’s practices involving the civil rights of black residents. In Baltimore, the rate of stops for black drivers was 1.4 times the driving-age population.

That report came out of an investigation following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody in 2015.