Actual public understanding of the issue turned out to be wildly, provably, out of sync with reality. For instance, when US citizens were polled and asked how many unarmed black Americans they believed had been shot by police in 2019, the numbers were off by several orders of magnitude. Twenty-two percent of people who identified as “very liberal” said they thought the police shot at least ten thousand unarmed black men in a year. Among self-identified liberals, fully 40 percent thought the figure was between one thousand and ten thousand. The actual figure was somewhere around ten.20
