Maybe in your search for articles to support your agenda, you might have found that the whole 28 hours thing is blatantly inaccurate.
[h1]The viral claim that a black person is killed by police ‘every 28 hours’[/h1]
By
Michelle Ye Hee Lee December 24
Search the phrase “every 28 hours” on Google, Twitter, Instagram or Facebook and thousands of messages like these will come up. This is the phrase that has gone viral after police-involved killings of black males in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island, N.Y.: “Every 28 hours, an unarmed black person is killed by police.” It is now being used to describe the deaths of two New York City police officers, to draw comparisons between the deaths of police and deaths of unarmed African Americans killed by police.
PolitiFact
rated this claim false in August when a CNN commentator Marc Lamont Hill said it on air. Hill corrected his statement after the PolitiFact article.
Yet the claim is still being perpetuated widely. It’s written on signs at protests, shared through #every28hours or written on social media memes. Where did this statement come from, and is it accurate?
[h3]
The Facts[/h3]
The figure “every 28 hours” comes from an April 2013 report titled
“Operation Ghetto Storm” by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The report analyzed officer-involved killings of African-American victims in 2012. The report “is a window offering a cold, hard, and fact-based view into the thinking and practice of a government and a society that will spare no cost to control the lives of Black people,” according to the preface.
It’s not hard to debunk the claims using basic findings and methodologies from the report. (Twitter user @FeministaJones did it in
a series of tweetsusing Storify.)
The Pinocchio Test
There are many variations of the report’s findings out on the Internet. This fact check focused on the claim that “every 28 hours, an unarmed black person is killed by police” — which is not true, based on the findings in the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement report. The victims studied in the report were not all unarmed, and they were not all killed by police.
Yet this alarmist statement continues to be perpetuated on social media and in protests, and it is inaccurate, especially when distilled to a hashtag.
I'll save that rant for another time
