The details of the Sonya Massey case are disturbing. After all, it was Massey, a 36-year-old African American, who had called the police because she was concerned about an intruder in her home. There was no evidence of such a threat. Instead, one of the officers became agitated over a pot of boiling water Massey was holding in her hand. For reasons that seem impossible to justify, the officer fired three shots, killing her.

As upsetting as this outcome is, it was frustrating to listen to NPR’s framing of this incident as yet another example of a “systemic” problem of “unarmed black people being brutalised by white law enforcement officers”.  As a professor of criminology in the United States, I know a thing or two about police shootings, and it is misleading to describe this issue in such inflammatory terms.

The Washington Post maintains a database recording all lethal police shootings of civilians in the United States since 2015. By the end of 2023, this source included information about 9,254 incidents. In 94% of those cases, the victim had a weapon. About half of the unarmed civilians killed by the police were in the process of fleeing. Of course, fleeing the scene does not justify shooting, but it is worth noting how rare it is for the police in the United States to use lethal force in a situation that resembles the circumstances of Massey’s death. That scenario describes about 3% of the cases, at most.

What about race and gender? Massey was a black woman. Between 2015-2023, the police shot and killed a total of eight unarmed black women. In other words, this demographic represents less than 0.1% of the civilian victims of lethal police shootings. So why did critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw post on social media yesterday that “black women make up less than 10% of the population, yet when it comes to killings by police, we make up a 3rd [33%] of them, with the majority unarmed”?

A renowned scholar with tenured faculty appointments in not one but two prestigious law schools should not be making such misleading statements about race and gender in public. Yet the reason she may be able to get away with it is because she resides in an environment that has made it taboo to question even the most outlandish claims about racial disparities.

In the name of “antiracism”, this culture has elevated such intellectual “lightweights” as Dr Ibram X. Kendi into positions of power and influence. Kendi is famous for stating that any social outcome which lacks parity across racialised groups (such as the National Basketball Association?) amounts to direct evidence of racism, and that “the only cure for past discrimination is present discrimination.” Insights like these were recognised with a “Genius Grant” by the MacArthur Foundation and $50,000,000 in donations to establish a Center for Antiracist Research that has failed to produce any research.

Not only do academics look the other way when neo-racist ideologues peddle in bad arguments, they also punish scholars who dare to conduct open inquiry into these matters. In 2019 PNAS, one of the most prestigious outlets of scientific research, published a study of police shootings showing that white officers were no more likely than black officers to target black civilians. After relentless pressure from the academic community, the authors agreed to retract their research, even though an independent review found nothing wrong with the findings. The only “flaw” of the study was the attention it was getting in conservative political circles. As such, the study was deemed “dangerous” to the agenda.

The media is complicit in this bias. A 2020 study by Zach Goldberg discovered that police killings of civilians are nine times more likely to get reported if the victim was black rather than white. No wonder ordinary Americans hold distorted views of both the scale and the nature of the problem.

In light of the best available evidence, racial disparities in police shootings have little to do with racial bias and a lot to do with “bias” against violent offenders. After all, men are 20 times more likely than women to be killed by the police, yet nobody is concerned about anti-male bias. Really, law-abiding Americans of any race have little reason to fear police violence. In 2021, the number of unarmed black people killed by the police was 11. This number equals a fraction of 1% of all homicide victims within the African American community.

Scholars and journalists interested in lethal violence in America should focus on the totality of the phenomenon. Pushing tendentious and misleading narratives about a marginal aspect of a very serious problem benefits no one.