By Nick Selby
Monday, July 17, 2017
By now everyone knows that police, whether consciously or
subconsciously, are targeting young black men, killing them at a
disproportionate rate.
But what if everyone is wrong? What if race actually has little
causal effect on police shootings?
In fact, the data show just that. If we as a nation can
look seriously at the evidence, we can have a much more productive conversation
about what’s gone wrong and how to fix it.
The Washington Post
recently ran an article about police killings nationwide in the first half of
the year. That story made the same mistake Post
reporters have been making for years by comparing the racial composition of
those killed with the overall racial composition of the United States.
“Police have continued to shoot and kill a
disproportionately large number of black males, who account for nearly a
quarter of the deaths, yet are only 6 percent of the nation’s population,” the
paper reported.
The Post’s
unspoken assumption is that police killings should match America’s overall
demographic statistics. That might sound right at first, but it is well
understood in academic circles that using population as a benchmark can be
dangerous, because not all people are equally likely to come into confrontation
with the police. To borrow an example from Michigan State
University researcher Joseph Cesario, an officer is not as likely to shoot
the cashier selling him a cup of coffee as he is to shoot a citizen with an
outstanding warrant he has just pulled over.
And few activities, from the important to the trivial,
conform to the Census Bureau’s breakdowns of the American population. Black
people, who constitute about 13 percent of Americans — the Post had to focus on men alone to get the figure down to 6 percent
— are 1.4 percent of doctors, 38 percent of barbers, and 16 percent of cooks.
They account for 14 percent of pedestrian fatalities and 74.4 percent of NBA
players but just 8 percent of NPR newsroom employees.
The media would have Americans believe that race is the
single most important and predictive element of fatal encounters between police
and civilians. Yet both the basic data and less superficial analyses than the Post’s show that is not the case. With a
few notable exceptions, violent criminal attacks are the best predictor of whom
police might shoot in America.
Even the
Post itself has noted the
relevant data in the past. “In 74 percent of all fatal police shootings, the
individuals had already fired shots, brandished a gun or attacked a person with
a weapon or their bare hands,” the paper reported in 2015. “Another 16 percent
of the shootings came after incidents that did not involve firearms or active
attacks but featured other potentially dangerous threats.”
Those figures are consistent
with other data. In 2015, two-thirds of unarmed people of any race killed
by police had been in the process of committing violent crime or property
destruction. Fourteen percent were engaged in domestic violence. Ten percent
were committing a robbery, 20 percent a burglary or vandalism, and 21 percent
an assault on another civilian.
More important, cops don’t usually initiate their contact
with the person who is shot. Three-quarters of fatal encounters start with
someone contacting police and reporting the suspect.
Further, more than half of the unarmed people killed by
police suffered from mental-health issues, drug intoxication, physical
disability, or some combination of them. That’s something public-health
policies can address head-on.
That’s why I get so angry at the Washington Post — and other media like ProPublica and the Guardian
— for conflating correlation and causation. Their comparisons might spur
outrage and sell ads, but they also foment discord and distract from actionable
data on police killings.
Had the Washington
Post consumed as much digital ink reporting on mental-health and
drug-policy reform as it spends on shootings, I daresay the ball would have
moved farther than it has. As it stands, since the paper started seriously
tracking police shootings, only Texas has enacted criminal-justice
mental-health legislation.
Police are already conducting work to identify and
re-train or fire the demonstrably small number of its ranks who behave
inappropriately. To presume that solves society’s ills is short-sighted. We
must look to reasons other than simple racism on the part of the police, who
end up holding the ball for a lot of failed systemic issues. A disproportionate
share of America’s violent offenders are African-American males, but not
because they are black. It is because America has failed its black communities,
and those of the vulnerable more generally, for decades. The best predictors of
crime are broken families, living in a bad neighborhood, young mothers, and
other risk factors known since the 1960s: a lack of education, nutrition,
after-school activities, music, art, and other programs that create
opportunity.
America cannot solve its problems in how police and
citizens interact if our most trusted public watchdogs in the press keep muddying
the waters with divisive, superficial analyses. To solve any problem, one must
first take accurate measure of it. Good reporters will see to it that the
information Americans act on is not just technically correct but also grounded
in meaningful and honest analysis.
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