Today in misrepresented statistics: Police aren’t more dangerous than criminals in Honduras.

On our first Unsafe Space, a political comedy show I help run, it was claimed that police in America have a higher murder rate than criminals in Honduras or Venezuela.

I contested the statistic, but we ran out of time before I got to explain why.

There’s actually two different claims here: the original one made in a NY Daily News article by Edward Peter Stringham, and the one made in the show, based on a slight misinterpretation of the article (though an understandable one, because the article is misleading).

First, obviously when police kill people they shouldn’t, it’s horrible and they should be brought to justice. Reforms necessary to help prevent killings and punish those responsible should be done.

But I think it is also important not to let any claim slide that seems to support whichever side you are on.

It’s part of how sides — and solutions — get further apart. It also gives the other side credibility, because by disproving those claims they can claim to represent the truth.

The murder rate in Honduras, the world’s highest, is 90 per 100,000 people.

The murder rate in the US is 4.5 per 100,000 people.

US police kill approximately 1,100 people a year.

With a population of 318.9 million, this means 0.34 per 100,000 people annually are killed by police.

(For black Americans, who represent ~30% of people killed by police and number 41.7 million, it would be 0.79 per 100,000 people).

To give you a sense of the scale of the difference, if the police in the US caused the same murder rate as people in Honduras, they would kill 287,000 people a year, which I think we can all agree is a pretty lofty goal. It’s basically Pittsburgh.

So how does Stringham reach his conclusion?

He divides the number of people killed by police by the number of police — not the overall population — to reach what he calls a “police kill rate” of 125 people killed per 100,000 police officers. He then compares that to the aforementioned murder rate of the overall, civilian population of Honduras (90 per 100,000). Finally, he references the US government warning on travel to Honduras and suggests police here are an even greater threat.

Distinguishing a “kill rate” from a “murder rate” is a subtle and and confusing difference that misleads people, as on our show, to believe police officers in the US are more dangerous and kill a higher percentage of the population than criminals in Honduras. In truth, that claim is off by a factor of over 300.

The problem comes from an apples-to-oranges statistical comparison.

If you wanted to determine whether police were more dangerous than Honduran murderers per individual, you’d want compare the “kill rate” of Honduran murderers to US police. To get this, you’d have to divide Honduran murders by the number of murderers in Honduras (though that number’s hard to find as they don’t typically list it as their occupation on their taxes). This number would assuredly be far higher; for example, the “murderer kill rate” for first-time murderers would be over 100,000 per 100,000, since some kill more than one person.

If you wanted to compare the amount of people killed per capita by each, you would use the statistics earlier, that show Honduran murderers kill 300 times the amount of people per capita that US cops do.

Comparing the per-cop rate with the overall-in-society rate to evaluate a travel warning would only make sense if you were planning to visit a country containing 100% US police officers, which you probably weren’t unless you have a really shitty travel agent. And even if you did, you probably wouldn’t have the same odds of committing violent crime as a randomly chosen American, as fun as adventure tourism sounds.

The other giant ignored factor, ignored not only in this but in countless blogs, is that police “killings” are overwhelmingly not murders.

A murder, by definition, is “the crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought.” It does not include killing in self-defense or to stop another from killing.

The vast majority of people killed by police are done so in clearly justified circumstances — when police are getting shot at, have to stop a shooting, etc.

To get a sense of what the overall picture of what police killings look like, check out the “Killed by Police” blog at killedbypolice.net, an attempt to document every officer-involved killing (and an important outcome of the Black Lives Matter movement).

While Stringham references the blog, it’s worth going a step further and reading the source articles. In doing so, you realize the controversial cases we hear so much about are not very representative of police killings — which may be why of the 1100 people killed by police, you only really hear about a few of them.

Here were the last 10 posts on Killed By Police as of when I wrote these words, along with the link used on the site:

1. A man who was running from police with a stolen flagpole struggled with police and died after being tasered (notable since the question “why don’t they just use a taser?” is often asked).
2. A person shot and fatally wounded a sheriff’s deputy, and was in turn fatally wounded by him, after the deputy was responding to a domestic violence call.
3. A person who led police on an 18-day manhunt after killing a dentist (and previously wounding two SWAT team members with a shotgun) was killed in the California mountains.
4. Two people who the police were called on for suspicious activity fired at police, who returned fire. One of the criminals was killed and one escaped.
5. A man who charged at deputies after being tasered was shot and killed.
6. A man on multiple drugs who ran from a car crash and fought with multiple police officers even after being tasered and then shot died.
7. A man who allegedly refused to drop his gun was shot and killed by police.
8. A leader of the Bloods in NYC who shot a firefighter and set off a smoke-bomb in his apartment was shot and killed after a six hour standoff following an attempt to arrest him for violating parole.
9. After a car chase and standoff, the occupant of a vehicle, said to be armed, was shot by police.
10. After stealing a car and crashing it in a car chase, two thieves ran into an abandoned home, shot a pursuing police dog and one was subsequently shot and killed by a police officer.

To use the overall killing rate implies that violent criminals shot by police are all helpless victims, which just isn’t true.

We give cops guns for a reason; penalizing them when they use them correctly doesn’t make sense.

A high justified killing rate doesn’t necessarily represent police abuses so much as higher violent crime rates. The Stringham piece compares US police killing rates to the UK (notably, not Honduras), but the obvious difference — even called out by the police critics on our show — is the role of the 300 million guns in the US. It’s hard to find a reasonable basis of comparison when there’s just no other first world country where you can buy handguns legally online for $150.

Ignoring this dodges the question of a police officer is supposed to do when someone has a gun and refuses to surrender, besides presumably forward them a blog article and hope they understand current societal dilemmas.

It’s important to be critical of police, but not blindly so or bad conclusions are easy to draw. In the original article, Stringham uses his bogus statistics to argue for giving more power to on-campus cops. Ironically, a few weeks later Samuel DuBose was shot by a University of Cincinnati police officer — prompting calls for less power by campus police relative to city police who are, in fact, better trained.

I think there is a lot of misinformation about police violence, often stemming from people getting their information from memes or biased sources and people being afraid to criticize them.

I feel bad questioning it for fear of looking racist, and because I agree with the overall cause of criminal justice reform and don’t want to nitpick.

But I think self-censorship and remaining silent encourages misinformation to flourish, and it also provides a source of frustration for activists who can’t understand why other people aren’t as worked up as them.

One misperception is that there’s been a sudden spike in police violence. As the New York Times reports, what we are seeing has largely always been going on — now it’s just getting taped and reported more. Many people are aware of this (including the Black Lives Matter advocates on our show) but I rarely see it acknowledged online.

Another misperception is the meme-based “white people always get treated nicely, black people get shot for this” narrative, usually accompanied by photos of black/white people in different situations being treated differently by different officers. This is kind of textbook confirmation bias — looking only at examples that support existing conclusions and then using that as evidence to justify them.

For context, 12 million people are arrested annually, so for every person killed by police about 11,000 — 99.99% overall — manage to be arrested without being killed.

Of people killed by police, over 50% are white, so the idea that police won’t kill white people is inaccurate.

While the rate of black people being killed (25–30%) does exceed their share of the population, Britain’s Channel 4 fact checker found it does reflect the black people’s share of violent crime based on crime victims reports. Since we would anticipate police only needing to use violent force when dealing with violent criminals, we’d expect these to match up, and they generally do.

Of course, this disproportionate share of crime likely has its origins in historic racism, poverty and inequality. But then attributing it solely to policing attacks a symptom rather than the cause.

Keep in mind this says nothing about excessive force, abusive behavior which some former police offers attest is common in their departments and is easy to find videos of online. Assuring us officers who are filmed unjustifiably killing or abusing citizens aren’t racist is unconvincing to say the least.

There are certainly bad officers and unions and departments with a culture of covering for them. And police tactics that emphasize the threat of lethal force, with guns being drawn on people for minor infractions, influence the distrust and hatred of police officers.

And while correlational statistics don’t mean causation, when one segment of the population ends up disproportionately jailed or dead it does highlight a broad societal problem that needs to be fixed.

Black Lives Matter is a valid and overdue sentiment that shouldn’t just be focused on police killings. We should be willing to look down the chain and address all the causes of inequality. Unequal education and rough schools, poor public safety and lack of opportunity as well as bad policing all play a role. So do violence within the community, high rates of single parenthood and child abuse. Often these problems reinforce each other, and they should all be strongly addressed — singling out one that can be labeled as other people’s fault does us no favors, and invites distrust because it demands others change their attitudes and behaviors without being willing to change ourselves.

As people focus on killings, the focus goes away from real reforms. In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, 26 recommendations were made by the DOJ and around 200 by a commission including protests leaders, police and community representatives. Yet few calls have been made discussing these specifically or for them to be broadened beyond that city. Obama unveiled proposed changes to the criminal justice system, but these barely register a blip on my news feed.

There are now a set of proposed policy reforms from Black Lives Matter advocates under the name Campaign Zero. Hopefully this can be a starting point for a discussion of policy changes.

One of the problems with a campaign built on social media is that people share emotional things — shocking videos, smug memes, inflammatory posts. Policy proposals or calls for self-criticism don’t elicit the same response. But that lays the groundwork that affects the outcomes of tomorrow. And perhaps it’s an area where we can find more common ground, rather than arguing over the interpretation of one youtube video.

For example, for-profit policing — aggressively using tickets and fines to fill budget shortfalls — is one thing found not only in the DOJ report on Ferguson but in towns and cities nationwide. Getting hit with a $500 fine for parking is an abuse of government that can affect everyone, but particularly keeps poor people locked into poverty. People may say “if you don’t like the police, don’t break the law” but circumstances like this are a reminder and starting point that sometimes the law itself is unjust and hurts people more than it helps.

I understand that anger is necessary and sometimes police shootings can be the canary in the coal mine. But it’s important to use that to fix the mine, not just argue about the canary.

Anyway, those are just my thoughts. Please don’t kill me.