There has been a lot of discussion about the numbers surrounding #BlackLivesMatter and the recent shooting of Terence Crutcher.

I collected some of the best I could find to help show that these shootings are the trees in a vast forest that we all need to see for what it is: systemic racism.

Note that systemic racism doesn’t mean that everyone within a system is racist, but that the system functions in a way that favors one ethnicity over another and our system clearly favors the safety and freedom of white people more than the safety and freedom of black people.

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The numbers for police-related violence and deaths have no standardized reporting structure making the numbers highly variable and difficult to deal with (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/08/how-many-police-shootings-a-year-no-one-knows/?utm_term=.ccc7a2e51525).

The most recent information provided by the federal government spans 2003–2009 (source: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ard0309st.pdf).

And even the federal government thinks their numbers are “highly variable” depending on the state reporting organizations (source: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ardpdqp.pdf).

Because of this disparity the Washington Post has tried to collect the data on their own (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/).

And in that data they have found that black people are 5 times more likely to be shot by police than white people (source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/07/11/arent-more-white-people-than-black-people-killed-by-police-yes-but-no/?utm_term=.7d31c42a04d9).

We also know that black people are disproportionately arrested, convicted, and sentenced more harshly than white people.

Black people are at least 3 times more likely to be arrested than white people in nearly half the police departments in the US and only 173 police departments in the nation arrest black people at rates equal to or less than that of other ethnicities (source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/18/ferguson-black-arrest-rates/19043207/).

Despite having traffic stop rates similar to other ethnicities, black people are three times more likely to have their car and/or person searched (source: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp08.pdf).

And black men, on average, serve sentences that are 20% longer than white men convicted of the same crime (source: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578304463789858002).