Getting percentages/ratios of FBI homicide of police by race

abc1971

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Nov 22, 2017
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Hello everyone. I am new here and have a hard time figuring out percentages. I am in a discussion with someone online and want to be able to continue my debate and talk in terms of numbers and probability. According to the FBI website 32 cops were feloniously killed by whites. And 15 were killed by blacks. And given that whites make up 72.4% of the US population and blacks make up 13%, how much more or less likely is a cop to be killed by a person who is either black or white?

Using other numbers, there are 43 million blacks in the US yet there are 197.7 million whites. Given that there are nearly 5.6 times as many whites yet blacks committed half as many murders as whites how can I work this into percentages of a cop being killed or less likely according to race?

If anyone will answer will you provide the process or direct me on where I can learn to do this so I can finally be able to do this on my own?

I am rather embarrassed by my inability to figure these things. Hope to get some help, thank you!
 
Gross paucity of information. You must consider the other 47 influential factors.
 
According to the FBI website 32 cops were feloniously killed by whites. And 15 were killed by blacks. And given that whites make up 72.4% of the US population and blacks make up 13%, how much more or less likely is a cop to be killed by a person who is either black or white?

Using other numbers, there are 43 million blacks in the US yet there are 197.7 million whites. Given that there are nearly 5.6 times as many whites yet blacks committed half as many murders as whites how can I work this into percentages of a cop being killed or less likely according to race?
Given the proportions of the population, how many cops would whites have killed, where the numbers of deaths consistent with the proportions of the population? How do these rate-based numbers differ from the actual numbers? Where does this lead? (For instance, see the "aside" on this page.) ;)

P.S. If this were a "real life" question, you would probably also need to take into account the distribution of crime. Where violent crime is more prevalent, it is reasonable to expect that events such as, say, gang shootouts will result in more "collateral damage", including both police and civilian lives. However, for homework questions (the provision of assistance for which is the purpose of this forum), there are likely many simplifying assumptions. If you could provide those when you reply, this would be very helpful. Thank you!
 
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I don't have anymore elements to add to this particular question. I just wanted to know what the percentages were and the probability of risks that we could assume given the percentage of people by race.

I thought it was possible to come up with some numbers by what I provided in my original post.

Of course I wasn't going to state it as fact, but given the numbers I was going to use terms such as "several times more or less likely."

I read one article online where an author stated that a police officer was seventeen times more likely to be shot and killed by blacks compared to being shot by whites. I want to refute that number. Given the FBI homicide numbers that I found on their site, 17x more seems way out of proportion. But given the lower percentage of blacks yet still accounting for nearly half the amount of police murders to white I think the number (or the likelihood) of blacks killing more cops than white is just slightly higher, but definitely not 17x more.
 
I don't have anymore elements to add to this particular question. I just wanted to know what the percentages were and the probability of risks that we could assume given the percentage of people by race.

I thought it was possible to come up with some numbers by what I provided in my original post.

Of course I wasn't going to state it as fact, but given the numbers I was going to use terms such as "several times more or less likely."

I read one article online where an author stated that a police officer was seventeen times more likely to be shot and killed by blacks compared to being shot by whites. I want to refute that number. Given the FBI homicide numbers that I found on their site, 17x more seems way out of proportion. But given the lower percentage of blacks yet still accounting for nearly half the amount of police murders to white I think the number (or the likelihood) of blacks killing more cops than white is just slightly higher, but definitely not 17x more.
What did you try, based on the "aside" at the link provided earlier? Given the relative percentages of the two sub-popluations, where did this lead? ;)
 
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