“Who cares about cosmic inflation during the first seconds of the universe’s existence when black people are getting shot left and right by police officers and vigilantes?” That is what Chanda Hsu Prescod-Weinstein, a postdoctoral fellow in physics at MIT, thought to herself upon hearing the news from Ferguson. Are black people getting shot left and right by police officers and vigilantes? In the St. Louis area in 2014 so far, there have been about 172 murders and 8 “law officer involved shootings”. Here is a map. The light blue balloons are the law officer-involved shootings. (Yellow are St. Louis city murders, red are St. Louis County, and blue are Illinois.) Source: St. Louis Post Dispatch. An interactive version of this map can be found here. How do those numbers compare to national ones? The FBI says there were 12,765 murders in 2012, the latest full year of available statistics. In that same year, there were 410...(Read Full Article)