This past weekend’s allegedly racially charged pool party incident in McKinney, Texas, was disturbing, but nobody was killed — unlike other allegedly racially charged incidents over the past 18 months, which have left scores of black citizens dead. And while the focus has largely focused on the shooting deaths of black males in comparison to their white counterparts, far less attention has been paid to black female citizens who have suffered similar deaths at the hands of uniformed officers. Even without concrete statistics by the U.S. Justice Department, which often suffers from poor reporting on the local level, it’s clear that while white women are shot by police more often, black women are often fired on under vastly different, often questionable circumstances.

Given that data regarding black female deaths as a result of police intervention is almost nonexistent, explained CNN Legal Analyst Sunny Hostin in a December interview, the results are often skewed far below what their actual numbers truly are.

“There isn’t mandatory reporting, it’s … self-reporting,” Hostin explained to The Situation Room host Wolf Blitzer. “Almost on the honor system.”

Read more at

Image: The All Night Images/Flickr