Over the past six months there's been a lively debate about the demographics of those killed by police -- a debate haunted by the fact that the government's data on this topic are not particularly good. Vox provided an overview in August; ProPublica made the striking claim in October that black males in their late teens are killed at 21 times the rate of comparable whites; Slate argued that ProPublica's disparity couldn't be explained by racial differences in crime rates; I reanalyzed the FBI data (with a special focus on age) and found that blacks are actually more heavily represented among homicide offenders than among those killed by police.
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