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Some readers of our editorial “The Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’” took exception to the idea that black Americans are “disproportionately killed in encounters with the police.” One commenter pointed us to an article in The Washington Times describing an analysis by Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York. The analysis purports to show that white people are more likely than black people to be killed by the police.

It’s hard to get real data on this. The statistics Mr. Moskos uses are deeply flawed. He drew his conclusions from a website called killedbypolice.net, which tracks news reports of fatal shootings by police. Some 25 percent of the entries have no race listed.

In any case, the numbers are misleading. “Based on that data, Mr. Moskos reported that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black,” the Washington Times article said. “He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic.”

That may be true, but whites make up 63 percent of the population of this country. Blacks are just 12 percent.

When Mr. Moskos adjusted his data to account for that, he found that black men were 3.5 times more likely to be killed by cops than white men. That’s inconvenient.

So Mr. Moskos did what other deniers of reality on this issue do: He larded into the results data on the homicide rate among African Americans, and then proclaimed that if you take that data into account, whites are at higher risk than blacks.

A fairer analysis, at ProPublica, found that black males aged 15 to 19 were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white males in that age group. And The Washington Post reports that unarmed black men were seven times more likely to be killed by police this year than unarmed white men.

The point of the “Black Lives Matter” movement is not that the lives of African Americans matter more than those of white Americans, but that they matter equally, and that historically they have been treated as though they do not.

And yes, for the record, it is troubling to hear anyone chant slogans calling for violence against police officers as a small number of people did recently outside the Minnesota State Fair.

But consider what Ta-Nehisi Coates, a columnist for The Atlantic, wrote about the rioting that erupted in Baltimore earlier this year after Freddie Gray died in police custody. At the time, many public figures called for calm, and said that quiet protest was the best response.

“When nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself,” Mr. Coates wrote. “When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. When nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, while the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. And none of this can mean that rioting or violence is ‘correct’ or ‘wise,’ any more than a forest fire can be ‘correct’ or ‘wise.’ Wisdom isn’t the point tonight. Disrespect is. In this case, disrespect for the hollow law and failed order that so regularly disrespects the community.”

Our columnist Charles Blow wrote at the time that one could argue that the rage of blacks in Baltimore “was misdirected, that most of the harm done was to the social fabric and the civil and economic interests in the very neighborhoods that most lack them. You would be right. But misdirected rage is not necessarily illegitimate rage.”