The data down below was created from articles and papers based on both Black and white perspectives of the events. I’ll start in advance by pointing out the fact that a labelled the news sources as being “Sensational”. In my estimation, these papers are somewhere in between Sensational and Informational but I label them Sensational to err on the side of caution even though to my knowledge the data within them was accurate and often I’ve even found data overlap from one source to the other. That being said, I’ve provided within this table 6 different charts based on the data that was provided and these are my key takeaways:

1) Despite being the minority population in the city, Black people were the overwhelming number of victims in this riot. In this dataset over 70% of those victimised were Black with less than 18% being white. The data on offenders has a lot more blindspots but even there we can see 33% of offenders are white and only 24% Black out of the cases where we know the races. One thing to note is it’s completely possible that the way I’ve chosen to label Offenders and Victims may bias the data. For instance, some might say that if an officer was threatened and had to shoot in self-defense then maybe he’s the victim. But in my view, if we scrub the words Offender and Victim of their moral weight we can fairly say the person who suffered the most damage in a one-dimensional way can be called the Victim and that to me is sufficient for this analysis.

2) The vast majority of both Victims and Offenders were Male. It seems that Females were either often avoided or sparsely involved in the events. Even when we look at pictures of the event it appears as over 80% of those participating are Male above all else. between this and the last point, it’s clear that Race was the dividing line, not Gender.

3) The location data is interesting because most of where these riots and assaults took place were areas where black and white neighbourhoods intersected. Places like Hastings St. where Blacks and Whites overlapped more than in other parts of town which were squarely Black or squarely White experienced the most violence.

4) Beyond race, the biggest offenders and the most common category was offences by police. Police Shootings were the greatest in the category of offences with Assaults (both by crowds and individuals) trailing 2nd place behind them. This is before even considering over categories of police offences such as police brutality and general harassment. I believe based on the readings that police were heavy-handed on Black “offenders” and often indifferent towards Black victims overall although I will recognise there are some genuine instances where police lives may have been threatened and they were forced to take action. It’s true that police is a job that puts you in situations where you’re more likely to experience the danger of bodily injury so that can explain why police are so overrepresented here despite being such a small part of the population but at the same time it’s hard to ignore accounts of interactions with the police from the Black community which showed a genuine bias and racial animosity from them. Even reports by the police / officials proved to be very biased in where they placed the blame so I’m inclined to say the police simply acted out of line in the vast majority of these cases based again on the readings and descriptions of individual cases. The fact is, Blacks were the minority of the city population and most of the rioters were white with many of the rowdiest ones being white based on this data. If the police were not biased you’d expect the statistics to be more equal between Black and white instances of police killings and even saying that is downplaying the extent to which it was skewed.

This analysis further solidifies the idea that this was a Race Riot but also it gave me perspective on just how bad it was for the Black population given that even the police seemed rigged against them.