Some readers of the editorial “The Truth of Black Lives Matter Movement” took exception to the idea that black Americans are “disproportionately killed in encounters with the police.” One commenter even pointed out an article in The Washington Times describing an analysis by Peter Moskos. The analysis falsely claimed that whites were predominantly victims of police violence, not blacks; claiming that race is ultimately irrelevant.

It’s hard to get real data on this. The statistics Mr. Moskos uses are deeply flawed. He drew his conclusions from a website called killedbypolice.net, which tracks news reports of fatal shootings by police. Some 25 percent of the entries have no race listed.

In any case, the numbers are misleading. “Based on that data, Mr. Moskos reported that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black,” the Washington Times article said. “He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic.”

However, this can be misleading, because whites make up 60 percent of the population of our nation, with blacks making up only 12 percent. When observing the proportion of the race being victims of police violence, blacks suffer immensely.

When Mr. Moskos adjusted his data to account for that, he found that black men were 3.5 times more likely to be killed by cops than white men. That’s inconvenient.

So Mr. Moskos did what other deniers of reality on this issue do: He landed into the results data on the homicide rate among African Americans and then proclaimed that if you take that data into account, whites are at higher risk than blacks.

A fairer analysis, at ProPublica, found that black males aged 15 to 19 were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than white males in that age group. And The Washington Post reports that unarmed black men were seven times more likely to be killed by police this year than unarmed white men.

The purpose of the “Black Lives Matter” movement is not that the lives of African Americans matter more than those of white Americans, but that they matter equally, and that historically they have been treated as though they do not.