We Belong

Using mathematics, I would like to illustrate both the problems underlying police violence against African-Americans, and the key to their solution.

To begin with, per year around 32 million Americans are stopped by the police, while 1200 or so of such stops result in a fatality. That means one's chances of being killed by the police is 0.00375% per traffic stop, or one in 26,000.

That sounds like a promising statistic for the average American, until you factor in the number of times subsets of them are stopped by the police. African-Americans are almost twice as likely to be stopped. And there has emerged anecdotal evidence of certain African-Americans in particular being stopped as much as 50 to 100 times per year.

So, let us investigate those who run across the police the most. 50 times per year, over the course of the 73 year lifespan of the average African-American, comes out to 3,650 times over the course of a lifetime.

Assuming a 0.00375% chance of being killed per stop, the lifetime percentage chance of being killed becomes 1 - (1 - 0.0000375³⁶⁵⁰) = 12.7923%, or approximately one in eight.

Suddenly the odds are looking much less favorable. As you can see, the problem is not rooted in the chances per stop of being killed (which are quite low), but rather in the sheer volume of traffic stops some individuals are being subjected to.

When one browses the police reports, including those that result in fatalities, it becomes painfully obvious what the culprit is. Ordinary Americans, and African-Americans in particular, are being stopped for the most trivial of reasons: cracked windows, broken tail lights, tinted windows; you name it.

In fact, some Americans are being stopped so often that their deaths at the hands of law enforcement effectively become a statistical inevitability.

To end with, there is an old and noble inclusion in the United States Constitution. It is known as the 14th Amendment, and it dictates among other things that no state is to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." So when enormous statistical discrepancies in law enforcement result in certain people being repeatedly placed in jeopardy of life and limb, the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution is theoretically relevant to such policies and procedures.

So to summarize things: the less serious a legal offense is, the more likely the American bureaucracy is to disproportionately enforce it, and the more likely certain subsets of the American population are to be stopped, questioned, and cited for violating it. And this tsunami of targeted law enforcement eventually makes death at the hands of the police exponentially more likely, to the point of statistical certitude.