41% Of Police Incidents Are White-On-Black: Douglasville Police

DOUGLASVILLE, GA — About 41 percent of interactions between Douglasville police and suspects over the last five years have involved white officers and Black suspects, according to data released Wednesday by the police department.

According to U.S. Census statistics for 2019, 65 percent of Douglasville’s population is Black or African-American.

The Douglasville Police Department posted the information to its Facebook page in order to be “transparent”— but it offered some caveats along with the data.

“Please keep in mind that the number of officers of any particular race changes based on hiring, firing, resignations, and retirements so an accurate snapshot of officer race totals in one year compared to another year is difficult to do,” the department said in its Facebook post.

Four incident categories — arrests, uses of force, citations and warning citations — were covered in the report. Overall, 28,479 incidents were included, with percentages broken down by category.

Nearly half of all arrests — 46.38 percent — were white on Black from 2015 to 2020. About 25 percent were white on white, 20 percent were Black on white, and only about 9 percent were Black on white. The remainder involved other ethnicities and races.

Incidents involving use of force involving white on Black was even higher, almost 52 percent. White on white was about 22 percent, Black on Black was about 17 percent and Black on white was about 6 percent.

Other categories also showed white on Black as the largest percentage of incidents, with about 44 percent of all written warnings and about 40 percent of all citations.

The post noted that the department reviews all uses of force and tries to address and correct problems as soon as they arise.

Complete numbers along with the original Facebook post are shown below.