By Rachel Lu
Monday, January 04, 2016
Is it rational for black men to fear they may be killed
by police? The Washington Post has
just released a new, groundbreaking study on police violence that may help
answer that question. It investigates every fatal police shooting in the United
States in 2015. You can see the data here.
Plenty of arresting details come out of this study. Those
who followed the Tamir Rice case may be interested to know that
realistic-looking toy guns were involved in fully 3 percent of the shootings.
Almost 10 percent of victims were unarmed when they were killed, and a very
disproportionate number of these were black. About a quarter of the suspects
were fleeing when they were shot, while a quarter struggled with mental
illness.
The headliner, though, is something we already knew: a
lot of Americans get killed in police shootings. As of Christmas Eve, police in
America had fatally shot 979 people across the United States. (The Guardian, with a similar study, puts
the number over 1,000.)
That’s a lot, when you consider that multiple European
countries can count on one hand the number of fatal police shootings each year.
Every country is different, of course, in innumerable ways. Nevertheless, such
enormous disparities should prompt some probing questions.
Are Cops Racist?
This of course is the question on everyone’s mind. The
study won’t definitively answer it, but it may help flesh out the picture of
what’s really happening in America’s more crime-ridden districts.
Some contend this data puts to rest any reasonable
concern about widespread racial bias in America’s police departments. It’s true
of course that young, black men are far more likely to be shot and killed by
police. That’s easily explicable, however, in terms of disproportionate crime
rates, and there’s no evidence that white-on-black violence is in at all
disproportionate to levels of crime. David French summarizes the argument
neatly as follows:
Crime doesn’t break down on neat, proportionate demographic lines.
Criminals are overwhelmingly male (police killed very few women this year, but
no one argues that law enforcement is sexist), and violent criminals are
disproportionately black. In fact, blacks ‘commit homicide at close to eight
times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.’ Even worse, ‘among males
between the ages of 14 and 17, the interracial homicide commission gap is
nearly tenfold.’ In 2014, for example, while black Americans constituted only
about 13 percent of the population, they represented a majority of the homicide
and robbery arrests. 82 percent of all gun deaths in the black community are
from homicide. For whites, 77 percent of gun deaths are suicides.
On face, this is a compelling argument. Blacks commit
more violent crimes (dramatically more, in fact) than whites. Is it surprising
they are disproportionately shot by police? If anything, racial disparities
should be seen as a good sign, that
police are going after the folks who are really committing crimes.
So if you’re raising a black son in America (so the logic
goes), you should simply teach him to be a law-abiding citizen. That should be
protection enough from the hazards of law-enforcement.
Black Lives Matter
May Still Have A Point
As usual, the obvious explanation is a little too
obvious. Let’s consider a slightly more nuanced explanation of the data, which
may give some credence to the anxieties of Black Lives Matter, without assuming
that police officers are raging bigots.
Black men really are responsible for a wildly
disproportionate number of America’s homicides. In some neighborhoods, these
mostly go unsolved. They are primarily committed in the context of gang
rivalries, and police find these cases challenging to close, because available
witnesses are too afraid to testify. (Their families live in these
neighborhoods, and are liable to be targeted if witnesses come forward.)
Law enforcement tends to be less aggressive about
prosecuting “insider violence” (committed among mafiosos, gangsters, or members
of criminal organizations). That’s readily understandable, of course. We all
realize that violence is an occupational hazard of being a criminal, and most of us would agree that a police force
should prioritize the safety of the law-abiding.
Still, one consequence is that the cycle of vengeance
tends to continue, since gangsters have a high level of confidence they can
(literally) get away with murder.
The police that work these neighborhoods are frequently
undertrained and overwhelmed. There are some quiet, mostly unsung heroes who go
on working the cases with few thanks, under harrowing conditions. But many of
the cops who patrol these neighborhoods are really just doing their time until
they can get a better assignment.
Others may care, but just not be up to the difficult task
of imposing order on violence-riddled subcultures. They’re genuinely scared for
their own lives. So (particularly if the climate of their department has not
discouraged this) they get skittish, and sometimes make bad decisions. When
guys with guns are making erratic decisions, people die.
Are Statistics
Victimizing Law-Abiding Innocents?
Now, let’s return to the question of statistics. We know
that lots of black men commit crimes, and that lots of black men are shot by
the police. At first glance, the rough parity seems to make sense.
We needn’t see the police as racist in order to suspect
that a youngster like Rice would have had better odds if he’d been white.
Thinking more about the dynamics of neighborhoods in
which these shootings take place, we might want to ask more questions. Are the
people getting shot the same ones who are
committing crimes? The majority probably are, but remember, we’re talking
about neighborhoods in which homicides are committed in large numbers, but
mostly not solved, while too many officers remain undertrained and skittish.
It isn’t silly for innocent people who “look like
criminals” in obvious ways (like being young, black, and male) to worry they
may be at significantly greater risk of being mistaken for criminals, even if
they aren’t doing anything illegal.
Taking all of this into account, we should probably be
interested in the fact that unarmed
black men are seven times more likely than whites to be fatally shot by police.
Unarmed doesn’t mean innocent, of course, but that’s still a very big number.
Is it really strange that residents of high-crime neighborhoods
often view the police with fear and resentment? Is it wrong for parents to feel
that it might be dangerous to let their black sons play with water pistols or
wear hoodies? That’s a depressing thought.
We needn’t see the police as racist in order to suspect that a youngster like Rice would have
had better odds if he’d been white. That’s a grim thought, too.
More Resources and
Higher Standards
Let’s be clear. An 18-year-old black man is in far more
danger than I am of being shot by the police. That likely holds even if we’re
standing on the same street corner, behaving the same way. At the same time,
black men are far more likely to be shot by other
black men than by cops.
Those two facts are related. Insofar as police make bad
mistakes, that’s largely because they’re being asked to tackle big problems
with limited resources. They deserve to be cut some slack (though, crucially,
not an infinite amount).
We don’t have to choose between a pro-police stance and a
pro-racial-justice stance. We should support law enforcement and the rights of minorities. Even if we
agree that most police officers probably aren’t personally bigoted, we should
be bothered by a justice climate that leaves even law-abiding blacks feeling personally threatened, with some
justification.
It’s a problem, and instead of mulling over the
complexities of moral responsibility, we should be looking for ways to address
it. The most obvious conclusion is that we should invest more resources in better-quality law enforcement in
high-crime areas.
Real police reform is going to involve a lot of
tit-for-tat. Raise salaries, so police forces can recruit talent more
aggressively, and push for merit-based pay scales that reward the sorts of
officers who do useful and needed things (de-escalating tense neighborhood
situations, closing homicides). Invest more in training programs that help
officers learn to defuse tense situations, and to keep themselves safe without
using excessive force.
At the same time, strip union contracts of provisions
that hinder Internal Affairs divisions from investigating use-of-force
complaints. (If you think this will frighten talented people away from
policing, consider that juries in general are very sympathetic to cops, even despite the public relations fiascos
of the past few years. They are reluctant to convict cops unless the abuse of
power is truly egregious.)
If you’re wondering where the money will come from to pay
for these improvements, consider that both crime and incarceration are very expensive. By reducing both,
effective policing tends to pay for itself.
Raise transparency with body and dashboard cameras, and
respond seriously to complaints of low-level police bullying. Think of this as
the flip side of the “broken window” theory: bully cops can do far more damage
to the force’s reputation than immediate ramifications might suggest.
Crucially, we must
get away from using the police as a major source of revenue. As Ferguson,
Missouri, clearly shows us, pressuring cops to act as your niggling
tax-collectors is not worth it given
the cost in public resentment and reduced police effectiveness.
Law-abiding Americans should be able to move safely
through public spaces, regardless of what they look like. Black kids shouldn’t
have to get tutorials from their parents about staying safe from cops.
Shouldn’t we all be able to agree on these things? Let’s support our police by
giving them the resources they need, and demanding that they be the good guys.
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