"The actual number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen." I think you mean, the reported number of unarmed black men shot dead

"The actual number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen." I think you mean, the reported number of unarmed black men shot dead by American police in 2019 is thirteen. (But surely we've learned that police reports are not necessarily completely accurate.) And I think that some people believe that a suspect's being armed is not justification for summary execution, barring extraordinary circumstances, so in their minds the caveat of "unarmed" is a distinction without a difference. Therefore they might be more concerned with the total reported number of black persons shot dead by American police, which is 235. As long as we're on that subject, here's an interesting (albeit somewhat misleading) fact I discovered that I haven't seen cited anywhere else. While 235 fatal shootings by officers doesn't seem like a huge number compared with the total population, consider that there were about 697,195 police officers in the US in 2019, meaning that each officer had a 1/2967 chance of killing a black person that year. Contrast that with the oft-cited black-on-black murder rate: 7484 blacks were murdered in 2019. Let's (erroneously) assume that every single one was killed by a black male. The total black population in 2019 was 46.8 million, 48% of them male which comes to 22.4 million black males. So the chances of a black male murdering another black person is only 1/2933. That's right, a random police officer is very slightly more likely to have killed a black person than a random black male is likely to have killed a black person. So if it's true that blacks ought to fear other black males, then the fear that some black people have of police officers as a class might be correspondingly justified.