Source – alternet.org

– According to a sweeping new New York Times report, one out of every six black men in the United States is missing. 1.5 million black males between the ages of 25 and 54 have disappeared from free society, mostly as a result of death or jail.

What makes these numbers even more staggering is the fact that the death rates of young black men have continually dropped since the 1990s. Despite the decrease in homicides, United States prison populations have increased since 1980, the report notes. There has seemingly been an increases in discussions about the racial disparities of our society, as a result of recent high-profile police shootings. The gap of missing people is even wider in the places that have become associated with cop violence recently: North Charleston, where Walter Scott was shot, has a more severe gap than the national average. Ferguson, Missouri has the largest gap, with over 10,000 black men missing. According to a ProPublica analysis, “The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.”

The New York Times puts the conclusions of the report in context, “There are more missing African-American men nationwide than there are African-American men residing in all of New York City — or more than in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Houston, Washington and Boston, combined.”

“The numbers are jarring,” Becky Pettit, a sociology professor at UT-Austin, told the Times.