[Answer]

Originally Posted by Pharaohs Army

I believe it was a 2016 study by Roland Fryer (a black guy) of Harvard University.
The paper is titled "An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force".
10 major police departments from Texas California and Florida

There are a couple issues with this. One of them being, as you pointed out, the very small sample size. This is observing 10 police departments out of (according to google) 17,985 police departments in America

The second issue is that this is not a scientific study, it's a working paper.

Here's a link:
https://www.nber.org/system/files/wo...399/w22399.pdf

You can see on the first page, it specifically states

NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been
peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies
official NBER publications

This is incredibly important, because this is treated a lot more casually than a scientific study. In science peer review is everything. A single scientist could be funded by Tobacco and draw the conclusion that there's no link between second hand smoking and heart disease. That doesn't mean that the data is accurate, or that the data has been interpreted correctly by the author. Peer review is a required in scientific studies and demands that professionals who are all experts in their respective fields do their best to ensure that the study done is valid and credible. Science is only considered valid when there is a consensus among scientists that the study can produce repeatable results

Further, this paper seems to indicate that from these 10 police departments, white people are more likely to be shot in "police-civilian interactions in which the use of lethal force may have been justifiable by law"

Which is interesting, but kind of misses the point. The vast majority of the instances that people are outraged over, such as Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, etc. are instances of black people being killed in police-civilian interactions where use of lethal force is NOT justifiable by law

So it is an interesting finding, and I'd genuinely like to know if the same results could be replicated on a larger scale than 10 police departments. But it's also looking at a different topic, and does not have enough scientific backing for anyone to claim that

white people are actually more likely to be killed by police than black people

Which is not what the findings have concluded at all.

Let's say that white people ARE more likely to get shot by a police officer than a black person in an interaction that justifies lethal force (which is what the study claims).

If black people get profiled and pulled over a disproportionate number of times, they can still be killed more often

For example, if police shoot 15% of white people they encounter and they encounter 5,000 white people then that means they shot 750 white people

If police only shoot 10% of black people, but they pull over 10,000 black people then that means they shot 1,000 black people

So if you want to be precise, you'd need to say something more along the lines of "There's an working paper published in an economics journal that shows evidence that in an encounter that justifies lethal force, white people are more likely to be shot than black people"

but stating "It's a fact that white people are actually more likely to be killed by police than black people" is wrong for all 5 of the reasons I've posted above