Skip to content

Monday, Jun. 22, 2020

In 2015, did Black Americans report being encountered by the police more often than white Americans?

Claire Zimmerman, Gigafact
no

In a 2015 survey, a Justice Department agency asked respondents about how often they had contact with police officers. It reported that 23% of white people surveyed had some form of contact, compared with 19.8% of Black respondents. Black drivers reported being pulled over in traffic stops at a higher rate than other groups.

No more recent data is available from the agency, but earlier studies looked at the use of force across the population. Between 2005 and 2011, 5.7% of whites in 2005-2011 had three or more experiences with the police that included a threat or use of force, while 11.7% of Blacks experienced the same. When examining non-threatening and non-forceful experiences with the police, the same report concluded that 11.3% of whites had three or more contacts with the police from 2002-2011, while 14.8% of Blacks had three or more contacts.

Sources

About fact briefs

Fact briefs are bite-sized, well-sourced explanations that offer clear "yes" or "no" answers to questions, confusions, and unsupported claims circulating online. They rely on publicly available data and documents, often from the original source. Fact briefs are written and published by Gigafact contributor publications.

See all fact briefs

Between 2020 and 2022, under close editorial supervision, Gigafact contracted a group of freelance writers and editors to test the concepts for fact briefs and provide inputs to our software development process. We call this effort Gigafact Foundry. Over the course of these two years, Gigafact Foundry writers published over 1500 fact briefs in response to claims they found online. Their important work forms the basis of Gigafact formats and editorial guidelines, and is available to the public on Gigafact.org. Readers should be aware that while there is still a lot of relevant information to be found, not all fact briefs produced by Gigafact Foundry reflect Gigafact's current methods and standards for fact briefs. If you come across any that you feel are out of date and need to be looked at with fresh eyes, don't hesitate to contact us at support@gigafact.org.

Learn More

Latest Fact Briefs

Be a Friend of facts

Help us fund more great fact briefs like this one.