"Statistically Never Happens": Michael Knowles on Police Killings
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Michael Knowles says police killings of innocent Black people "statistically never happens." We rate that mostly-false — truth score 0.15, confidence 0.85.
The public overestimate he is correcting is real and measured. The zero he replaces it with is contradicted by every tracker that counts.
On September 5, 2026, in "Michael REACTS To Unhinged Liberals... Is This Mental Illness?" (17:41), Knowles tells listeners to "take a look at the crime statistics" and then says killings of innocent Black people by police never happen and have not for a very long time. No source is cited anywhere in the segment.
The steelman first: Skeptic Research Center surveys found 53% of "very liberal" respondents put the 2019 figure at 1,000 or more unarmed Black men killed by police; in the 2021 wave, 40% of the very liberal and 27% of Gen Z still guessed 1,000+. That is an error of roughly two orders of magnitude, and Knowles is correcting it. Heather Mac Donald's "no epidemic" case, Roland Fryer's 2016 finding of no racial gap in shootings once context is included, and the City Journal audit of the Post's "unarmed" coding are all real disputes over the right denominator and the right definitions.
But each of those arguments concedes the incidents occur and attaches a number to them. Mapping Police Violence's year-end report counts 1,314 people killed by police in 2025 — a 5% decline, the first in six years — with 98 unarmed and Black people making up 26% of the total, about three times the per-capita rate of white Americans. The Washington Post's Fatal Force database logged unarmed Black victims every year from 2015 through 2024, at least 135 since 2015. Peer-reviewed lifetime-risk estimates put a Black man's risk of being killed by police near 1 in 1,000. And on March 11, 2026, Boston officer Nicholas O'Malley was charged with manslaughter in the shooting of Stephenson King, described in court documents as unarmed with no weapon in the vehicle; O'Malley pleaded not guilty on March 19, bodycam footage has been impounded ahead of trial, and his account has not been tested in court.
The distance between "14 a year, and here's why that's not systemic" and "statistically never happens" is the distance between a contestable argument and a false one.