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Report: African-American Chicagoans 10 Times More Likely To Be Shot By Police Than Whites

By Jon Graef in News on Feb 1, 2014 6:30PM

The Chicago Reporter crunched data recently released by the City of Chicago Independent Police Review Authority about citywide police shootings, and found what people of color have already know to be true for quite some time: that African-American Chicagoans are 10 times more likely to be shot by police than white Chicagoans.

"The data show the odds of being shot by a police officer go up for all races in the most aggressively policed neighborhoods, which happen to be mostly black and brown," the Chicago Reporter's Angela Caputo wrote.

Despite that stark statistic, the IPRA found that "the number of police-involved shootings fell to a five-year low in 2013." [Of course, they only started to keep track of those numbers in 2009]. 42 people were shot by police in 2013, compared to a high of 61 in 2009.

But, as Caputo writes, the analysis of such numbers is ultimately futile.

"Whether the numbers are up or down, the fact that nine out of every 10 police-involved shootings involves a person of color underscores the dual interpretation of the Constitution, where communities of color are policed with excessive force and illegal searches and white ones are not," Caputo wrote.

Further number-crunching by the Reporter found that African-American Chicagoans "made up more than three-fourths of police shooting victims" despite only representing less than a third of Chicago's overall population.

For a police department purportedly focused on police legitimacy, the report represents another considerable hurdle in building a positive relationship with Chicago's communities of color.