I found a study on the world socialist website (of all places) that looks at poverty factors in police killings. The results are not at all surprising if you’ve paid any attention at all to who has been killed by police over the past couple decades.

In summary, people killed by police DO NOT have race in common as a factor. The factors they have in common, in order of commonality are: gender (the overwhelming majority of people killed by police are men) poverty (3/4 of people killed by police live in poverty), and age (most people killed are between 18–34).

Once you look at police killings through the lens of poverty, there is little discrepancy in the rate of killing by race. More black people tend to be poor, so there’s a higher than proportional number of black people being killed. But far more white people are killed in total — and if you strip out race they are identical cohorts in terms of nearly every other factor you’d care to mention.

And before I go further: I support ending the police wholesale, and I don’t want anyone killed by police, even if they’re unlucky enough to be poor, EVEN if they’re accused of a serious crime.

That being said, if you look at this study, you’ll note that the race that’s LEAST likely to be killed by police when you look at confounding factors, are latinos. Poor latinos are killed significantly less per capita than poor blacks, and even less than poor whites.

Does that suggest that police are racist towards whites in favor of latinos? Does it also suggest that police are racist towards poor whites in favor of rich blacks?

The assertion that this problem is all about race is missing a huge part of the problem and it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. We can certainly agree it’s partially about race, but as I’ll show, race is a small part of a much bigger problem.

For instance, from the study: “ non-Hispanic whites experienced 1.169 deaths per 100,000, blacks 1.357 per 100,000 and Hispanics 0.856 per 100,000.”

So there’s a slight difference between poor blacks and poor whites, in favor of whites. It amounts to 0.188 more black people per 100,000 killed than white people. There’s no way to know, but let’s concede for the sake of argument that those 0.188 black people are killed due to systemic racism in society and policing. And while we’re at it, let’s assume we 100% fix police racism to get rid of that 0.188 difference. We still have the other 1 out of 100,000 poor black people being killed. We’ve only stopped 16% of black people from being murdered by police, and an even smaller fraction of the total.

We’ll still have thousands of other non-black, poor people being murdered by police!
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/21/kil2-d21.html