"#BlackLivesMatter" people claim that American society, cops especially, under-value black lives. Police brutality cases are all over the news featuring black victims. But another common thread mysteriously slips under the radar: the victims all seem to be male. This raises some questions:

  • Should we support the #BlackLivesMatter movement because it benefits male victims?
  • Should we criticize the #BlackLivesMatter movement for ignoring gender?
  • Do cops disproportionately kill blacks?
  • Do cops disproportionately kill men?

The first two are matters of judgment, but the latter two have more definite answers. Consider this BJS chart of law enforcement homicides. Ignore the stuff about "matching" - that has to do with connecting two overlapping data sets. The 'Total' column gives us a general sense of the demographics of people killed by American police over the last decade. During an average year, that's about 5100 men and 200 women; 2400 whites and 1700 blacks. Going by population, significantly more blacks are killed than you'd expect. But men were killed over 20 times more often than women!

(Feminists are quick to note that) men commit more than their share of violent crimes, so they're more likely to pose a threat and be shot by police. Let's adjust for violent crime rate. FBI crime data has between 2 and 3 times as many male as female offenders (counting only 'crimes against persons') - not nearly enough to explain the 25-fold police homicide gender gap. Meanwhile, there were about 1.6 times as many white as black offenders - enough to explain nearly all of the race gap.

I'm not denying that racism is a serious problem in America. Violent crime rates give only a rough estimate of the rates of posing an immediate threat, and discrimination against blacks might inflate their violent crime stats (just as discrimination against men inflates theirs). Nonetheless, these stats suggest that men as a group face far more police discrimination than do blacks as a group.

MaleLivesMatter