- More likely, studies have shown Black residents in the United States are more likely to be stopped by police than whites.

They are more likely to have force used upon them by police and they are more likely to be shot by police than whites.

Let's break down the national statistics.

Data journalists and researchers at the Stanford Open Policing Project have been collecting information about traffic stops since 2015, here are their findings.

Police officers stop more than 20 million drivers in the US each year.

An early project report included nearly 100 million traffic stops made from 2015 to 2018.

Researchers with the project found that Black drivers are 20% more likely to get pulled over than white drivers.

- We also ran a really interesting test called the Veil of Darkness test, which basically looks at sunset, and stops before sunset and after sunset in the same locations.

and at the same time of day because we can do that given daylight savings time so that we can control for any kind of changes in traffic patterns and things like that.

And what we found was that the stops, just the stops of Black drivers dropped after sunset, on average.

Basically those stops were we believe occurring because an officer could, you know like the officer could see the race of the driver and then couldn't see the race of the driver and the stocks dropped.

- In addition, the Stanford Open Policing Project determined that Black and Hispanic drivers were often searched on the basis of less evidence than whites.

- We built a new statistical measure called the threshold test that allowed us to take a look at the kind of the bar that an officer has for deciding to search, and whether or not something was found, whether contraband was found.

And what we found was that basically officers across the board, across the US on average search minorities, more easily than they would search a white driver.

- Most police interactions with civilians come to a routine end.

But in 2016, the center for policing equity released a study showing that police used force at a rate of 273 times out of every 100,000 incidents involving Black Americans.

The rate was 76 per 100,000 for white Americans.

The collection of data regarding fatal police encounters has been largely left to researchers.

One of those researchers is Dr. Michael A. Robinson an associate professor at the University of Georgia.

Robinson co-edited the 2018 book Police and the Unarmed Black Male Crisis.

- And what we found was that this has always been going on.

It's just that before cellphones, no one saw this if it wasn't in the newspaper no one saw it.

We even found that there was no national database, that tracked killing of unarmed - of people by police at all, that maybe 3% of the nation's 15,000 police departments reported it.

There's no federal mandate to report these killings.

So if you didn't read it in a paper, hear it on the news, technically didn't happen if no one knew about it - A presidential task force in 2015 recommended more tracking of fatal encounters.

But the FBI has only recently begun its database.

So, like other researchers, Robinson turned to varying sources for his study of police killings of unarmed people.

- The reason we only looked at unarmed is because those are the ones we thought were unjust.

There are two publications that began tracking the data roughly five or six years ago, The Washington Post and also The Guardian newspaper, which is the oldest European newspaper.

They scoured newspapers from publications all over the country, they get transcripts from radio stations and they listened for killings of police, then they have to verify those killings.

I conducted a study in 2017, where I examined the killing of unarmed Black men from January to December of 2015.

I found that unarmed Black men were killed at a rate of close to five times that of white men and three times that of Latinx men.

People will argue that, well more white men were killed by police.

Well that is true, but if you look at per capita killings per 100,000 you'll see that Black men were killed at a rate of five times that of white men.

- Black Americans make up less than 13% of the US population.

The Washington Post's longer study of all fatal police encounters, finds black Americans are fatally shot by police at more than twice the rate of white Americans.

That study started in 2015 and the post closed it in January, 2020.

- As a single mother, I am the mother of a Black man, a Black child.

He's 12, and the things that I have to have conversations with him about, you know you can't wear a black hoodie.

You know, if something happens and you get pulled over by the police you don't reach for your registration, you make sure that your hands are up so that they don't think that you're trying to do something.

And above all you have to comply with what they say, it's yes sir, no ma'am, yes ma'am, because if you don't treat them in that way if you give them any inkling that you are resisting, that could turn for the worst, and that's something that we don't we don't wanna have to experience that.