CHICAGO - Black residents are 10 times more likely than whites to be shot by police in the Windy City, according to an analysis of recent data from the City of Chicago Independent Police Review Authority.
“In black and Latino, lower-income neighborhoods you will see police officers who are instructed to stop and frisk and aggressively search every day,” civil rights attorney Craig Futterman told the Chicago Reporter, which first crunched the data.
Futterman, who founded the University of Chicago’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project, added, “These opportunities for conflict to escalate present themselves. And they often do.”
The Chicago Reporter's analysis found that while black residents represent less than a third of Chicago's total population, they account for three-quarters of the city's police-involved shooting victims in incidents spanning 2009-2013.
Just last year, amid a widely-reported dip in the city's shooting rate and homicide rate, blacks accounted for more than 67 percent of the city's police-involved shootings in 2013.
Meanwhile, the city has paid out millions in settlements to the families of victims over the past several years.
In the case of Rekia Boyd, an unarmed 22-year-old woman shot by an off-duty officer in 2012, the city ultimately awarded Boyd's family $4.5 million in a wrongful death settlement.
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