Most of the time, the complaint is that black people are being killed by police disproportionally. It's not often explicitly said what they are killed disproportionally to, but it is usually implied as compared to demographics. This chart says a black man is 3x more likely to be killed by police than a white man.

The uncomfortable fact is that black people also commit a disproportionate amount of the crime in the USA.

I was curious to see whether these police killings are disproportionate to the amount of crime being committed. Is a black criminal 3x more likely to get killed than a white criminal?

Digging into the numbers, on this database there were 3,379 killings of white people by police, and 1,945 black people. In 2018 there were 589k property crimes committed by white people, vs. 264k by black people. [1]

For each black crime, there were 2.2 white crimes.

For each black killing, there were 1.7 white killings.

So, yes, the data does support that black crime leads to a disproportionate amount of killings at the hand of the police, even accounting for higher rates of crime. A black criminal is 30% more likely to die at the hands of the police than a white criminal. Not 3x, however.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/252486/number-of-propert...

EDIT: dead comment below points to some other statistics from the FBI: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

If we look at the rates of violent crime categories only (murder, robbery, and aggravated assault), the data actually indicates that a greater proportion of these crimes are committed by black perpetrators.

There are 1.6 white perpetrators of aggravated assault per black perpetrator, 0.8 white robbers per black robber, and 0.85 white murderers per black murderer.

This suggest that in this category, the police killings are actually disproportionate in that more white people are killed by police than the rates of violent crime committed would warrant.