I’ve done some more reading about the problem of police killings. There are about 1100 people killed by police per year in the U.S. (almost all by shooting), compared to roughly 17,000 ordinary homicides. Some questions: Is this too many shootings? And does racism play a role?
Racism
In America, this is commonly viewed as a racial issue: it is said that, due to racism, the police are especially likely to shoot black men. Note: the theory is not that evil cops go out planning to shoot some blacks just for being black. The theory would be that due to stereotypes and implicit bias, police tend to perceive black men as more threatening than white people (or women, for that matter) in otherwise similar circumstances; thus, they are more likely to shoot black men, out of genuine fear for their own safety.
There are some web sites that are designed to give this impression, e.g., https://www.vox.com/identities/2016/8/13/17938186/police-shootings-killings-racism-racial-disparities.
However, I find the case unimpressive. Statistics: Blacks comprise about 13% of the total population, but about 25% of police shooting victims (source). On its face, this might seem to indicate racial bias, though perhaps not as strong a bias as one might expect. (Some sources quote a higher statistic of 31%, but this is based upon an older, less complete list of shootings.)
In response, police sources observe that (a) in most cases, when the police make contact with a suspect, it is because some member of the community has contacted the police to report suspicious or apparently illegal behavior, not because the police found a suspect on their own; (b) in most cases, people who call the police to report suspicious behavior by someone also identify the race of that person; (c) the racial composition of the group of people who are shot by the police matches the racial composition of the people who are reported to the police by members of the community (source).
Point (c) is fairly persuasive as evidence that the problem is not any special racial bias by the police. It could still be that the community in general (i.e., U.S. society) is racially biased, but this isn’t a police-specific problem. (Thus, e.g., anti-bias training for police probably isn’t the solution.) Among the web sites that play up the race angle, I haven’t seen any response to this point. I suspect that U.S. media simply like to milk the race angle because it stirs up emotions and therefore draws attention to their stories.
Excess Shootings
Why do American police seem to kill so many citizens? Two hypotheses:
- a. Because a lot of American citizens need to be killed. Maybe the cops are just doing their job, and these dangerous criminals have to be killed in order to protect the police and innocent bystanders from imminent harm. Maybe the cops have no other reasonable options, in almost all these cases.
- b. Because American cops are trigger-happy. That is, some significant subset of police are overly ready to resort to needless violence.
Defenders of police basically say (a). E.g., Selby looked at shootings of unarmed people in 2015, and concluded, on the basis of a review of each individual case, that only 7% of fatal shootings of unarmed people were questionable; the other 93% were all justified. Presumably, the shootings of armed people are even more justified.
I find this highly implausible. Here is some of the evidence that I think suggests explanation (b):
- American police shoot far more people, per unit of population, than the police in several otherwise similar nations. E.g., 3 times more than in Canada, 9 times more than France, 20 times more than Germany, and 170 times more than the U.K. (source) (Those are the countries for which I was able to easily find statistics.)
- In reply, you might say that American criminals are much more likely to have guns than criminals in other nations. True. But note that only about half of American police shooting victims have a gun. So the police shooting victims in America who don’t have guns still outnumber the total number of police shooting victims (per capita) in other countries.
- You might say that even so, the police in America have much greater justified fear because they don’t know which criminals have guns. I can’t speak to the subjective experience of fear. However, we can objectively assess actual danger, statistically. American police suffer homicide at a rate of about 3 per 100,000 population. Compare that to the overall homicide rate in America of 5.6 per 100,000 population. (source) That means that being a police officer is less dangerous than being an average American.
- American police departments have become increasingly militarized, with the U.S. military transferring billions of dollars of military equipment to police departments across the country in the last few decades. Apparently, there is a police department for the Los Angeles School District, and it has 3 grenade launchers and a mine-resistant armored vehicle (presumably to keep those sophomores in check, as the Economist put it). Academic research finds a positive correlation between acquisition of military equipment and more civilian deaths (source).
[Police militarization documented through history of Legos.] - There are a number of well-known anecdotes of police brutality. These could be dismissed as isolated cases, and it could be said that looking at media reports is a way of selecting for the worst cases (no one will report exceptionally restrained and non-violent police behavior on the news). However, what is interesting is to look at how the other police react when these cases of brutality occur. Generally, the other police who witness brutality don’t do anything to stop it, don’t report it, and may even joke about it.
- One famous case: Rodney King in 1991. If you haven’t seen it, there is a famous video of the cops beating up King here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb1WywIpUtY. This was after King refused to pull over for a speeding ticket and instead led the cops on a high speed chase in Los Angeles. When they caught him, they beat the shit out of him.
- Apart from the officers directly involved in the beating, another 14 officers witnessed it on the ground, plus 2 in a helicopter. None of them tried to stop it, and none reported it to their superiors as a case of excessive force.
- The police dispatcher who called for an ambulance for Rodney King stated that King “pissed us off, so I guess he needs an ambulance now”, going on to explain that suspects “should know better than [to] run, they are going to pay a price when they do that.” He said this to a dispatcher for the Fire Department, which suggests that police brutality was an open secret, which no one expected anyone to get in trouble for.
- The nurse at the hospital heard the police officers joking/bragging about how many times they had hit King.
- The citizen who filmed the beating tried to report it to the L.A. Police Department. They seemed uninterested, which was when he decided to hand his video over to the media.
- After the King trials, a commission was formed to study police violence in Los Angeles (the “Christopher Commission”). The commission found numerous cases in which police officers transmitted to each other “improper” messages (these were typed into computers and logged, where they could be seen by supervisors), including messages talking about beating suspects, expressing the desire to be involved in a shooting, or making racist remarks. That the officers felt comfortable typing these things tells us something about the culture of the department.
- That commission also found a number of problem officers who had gotten multiple complaints about excessive force. These officers generally received positive performance reviews, in which their excessive force problem would not be mentioned.
- American police get about 8 hours of training in de-escalating situations, and about 58 hours of training in shooting. (source)
- One famous case: Rodney King in 1991. If you haven’t seen it, there is a famous video of the cops beating up King here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sb1WywIpUtY. This was after King refused to pull over for a speeding ticket and instead led the cops on a high speed chase in Los Angeles. When they caught him, they beat the shit out of him.
Briefly, what all this suggests to me is that it’s not just that a few cops are overly aggressive. It is that there is a culture of aggression, and tolerance for aggression, among American police.
Racism vs. Killing
Not every damn problem is racism or sexism. In particular, the problem with police shootings isn’t racism. The problem is killing. The problem isn’t “the police shoot too many black people”. The problem is the police shoot too many people. A quarter of them are black, the other three quarters are non-black; the black victims just get more attention from left-wing sources.
One reason this is important is that if you misdiagnose the problem, then you’ll mis-prescribe solutions. For example, hiring more black officers, or giving police officers racial sensitivity training, will not significantly address the problem.
Misdiagnosing the problem according to one’s ideological presuppositions also risks turning it into divisive, left-vs.-right issue. Obviously, everyone should be opposed to unnecessary violence against any group. Still, if the issue is portrayed as mostly a problem facing black people, then many Americans are going to pay less attention to it — as opposed to the case where the issue is correctly portrayed as a problem facing citizens in general.
Arguing that police violence is about racism is an effort to make the police look worse. I think that is part of the motivation. But there is something deeply corrupt here: it’s as though we feel it’s not enough to complain that people are being killed unnecessarily — who cares about a little murder, as long as it’s equally distributed across races? — so we have to add racism to the charges. Suddenly, then we care.
I have been pointing to a philosophical shift where police have gone from being “peace officers” to being “law enforcement”.
It seems to be clear that the issue is a fundamental one, not simply racism. Although it could still be that racism causes a disproportionate impact on minority communities. Especially for less than lethal encounters.
Good article.
The most interesting things to me that point to B. Is the difference in rates in which police shoot people by state. If every department was only as trigger happy as NYC the rate would drop to less than half. Which says to me it’s an issue of training an culture, not racisim
http://www.copinthehood.com/2019/01/state-variation-in-police-involved.html
That’s a good point. It looks like New Mexico has the highest rate, New York the lowest (among states with at least 20 police killings). It’s hard to believe that New Mexico has criminals 10x more dangerous than New York.
“But there is something deeply corrupt here: it’s as though we feel it’s not enough to complain that people are being killed unnecessarily — who cares about a little murder, as long as it’s equally distributed across races? — so we have to add racism to the charges. Suddenly, then we care.”
So true. I think too many people have adopted a perverse concern of a particular kind of “fairness” that motivates this mindset. In a way, they think it’s better when awful things to happen to everyone because that’s more “fair.” Consider, for example, Donald Trump. He’s often accused of being a racist, but I don’t think he is. I think he’s a narcissistic and a misanthrope, and I think he sees the world as falling into two camps. One camp adores him and licks his boots, and the other camp is literally anyone else. And he acts like a bullying tyrant to anyone in camp two. But whenever he acts badly towards someone in camp two who is also a black person, suddenly people just *know* that this particular instance of bad behavior was motivated by *racism.* I’ve never been able to see why. If you treat everyone like garbage, then it’s trivially true that some of the people you treat like garbage will also be black, or women, or gay, etc. But in any instance when Trump acts terribly towards someone in any of those groups, can we really say with a straight fact that “he wouldn’t have behaved that way if the other person was white or male or straight?” I mean, come on – Trump was preemptively and publicly dancing on the grave of John McCain as the man was dying of brain cancer.
People quite reasonably despise Trump. And when you despise someone, you want to cast them in the worst possible light. But for people of a certain mindset, it’s actually morally superior to treat everyone like garbage compared to treating only some people like garbage. If they acknowledge that Trump’s awfulness is something something he directs at absolutely anyone, that would mean having to award Trump “fairness points” and improve Trump’s moral standing. So they feel a need to act as if Trump is actually mistreating fewer people than he really does. “Fairness” has gained so much importance that being terrible to only some people is now considered worse than being terrible to everyone.
More anecdotal evidence:
The people at large seem to sense that there is a culture of violence in the American police departments. When 4 Swedish police officers on vacation (one of them is my friend :P) helped break up a brawl on the NYC subway, it caused quite a stir in American media, and most of the comments were remarks about how “peaceful” the intervention was. Everyone seemed to think that if it were American police, the incident would have ended with quite a few more bruises for the involved parties…
You can see the footage here:
The problem is that the U.S. has a huge amount of violent and heavily armed gangs like MS-13. In this respect we are closer to many central and south American countries, which helps explain the differences with Europe and Canada as well as the militarization of the police force. They request armored cars after they raid a gang hideout and confiscate an RPG. Then cowboys elsewhere want the same toys. So to answer your rhetorical question: yes, I suspect that the criminals in New Mexico *are* more violent and dangerous than those in New York, because New Mexico is a border state and thus has more drug smuggling and a greater cartel presence.
That being said, I share your distaste for police militarization. The obvious answer here is to legalize all drugs and starve the gangs. Sure, some people are going to kill themselves with heroin. That’s sad, but it’s better than turning our cities into warzones or becoming a fascist police state.
RPGs actually being used in crime seem to be a once every few decades event in the U.S. (they get confiscated much more often than they get used, but apparently mostly from survivalists, not drug gangs). Stories of heavily armed criminals are indeed used to justify the militarization of the police, but they are invariably greatly exaggerated, as the fact cited above that the rate of police being murdered is actually lower than for the general public indicates.
RPGs are certainly an exaggeration. Assault rifles aren’t that uncommon for gangs, though. Though, to be quite blunt, the police basically keep safe by letting the gangs just have the run of their neighborhoods anyway. Cops are generally in no rush to get in the middle of a gang shootout. They just wait for about 30 minutes to an hour after the shots are called in until the gangs have managed to kill each other and flee the scene. This, of course, makes their military equipment especially pointless.
“The obvious answer here is to legalize all drugs and starve the gangs.”
That should cause a large net reduction. However, sex trafficking is growing, and the dominant view seems to be that legalized, regulated prostitution can’t make it go away, because of the strong caps placed on supply by typical women’s preferences and the preferences of their current/future romantic partners.
Order of magnitude difference in utility loss here (just guessing).
Also less crime, more wealth, less need for women to prostitute themselves. Less need for men to….
actually don’t really know how the John’s side of the market works.
I’ve also heard tell that generally, police around the country have begun to adopt a philosophy based on self-protection, versus one of doing the often very dangerous work that we expect police to do in protecting the lives of other citizens. Not sure if this is true, but if a cop’s first reaction to a situation is to preserve his/her own safety, one wonders why they signed up for the job in the first place.
Here is an interesting interview from what could be said is a proponent of that philosophy:
https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/art-of-manliness-podcast-79-on-killing-and-on-combat-with-lt-col-dave-grossman/
Rates of being a homicide victim of LEO vs average citizens don’t matter much for the argument one way (but perhaps the other).
Only a subset of police officers would be on patrol duty in a dangerous city. Traffic and administrators are also police.
Being a LEO one has a stable job and knows how to manage dangerous situations out of uniform. One would expect cops to be far less likely to be a victim of any crime.
That doesn’t mean that the shooting-situation wasn’t incredibly more dangerous than what a civilian faces normally.
Consider planes being safer than cars, yet during takeoff and landing a bulk of the accidents happen. If a plane was as dangerous during the whole flight as during the critical phases, then planes would be considered death traps. So being a LEO might not be a dangerous career , but making an arrest is an extremely dangerous job.
“American police suffer homicide at a rate of about 3 per 100,000 population. Compare that to the overall homicide rate in America of 5.6 per 100,000 population. (source) That means that being a police officer is less dangerous than being an average American.”
I’m with your overall argument, but this part is massively misleading. That 5.6 reflects gang members, drug dealers, prostitutes and the like, people who face much higher homicide risk. I’d guess that it extends to much greater risk for their families and neighbors as well. It reflects the homeless and the severely mentally ill. But the frame of reference relevant to a police officer’s fear is going to be the set of jobs at which they themselves would otherwise have been employed.
Also reflects the Mormons. It reflects the average American. Most of whom are not poor or particularly dangerous.
Obviously the police come in contact with more homicidal people than the average person.
I don’t think there is an obvious base-rate one should assume, making it not terribly relevant. Also only “killed in the line of duty” matters for whatever one wants to use that fact in some kind of argument.
It’s just a super-irrelevant fact without loads more context.
The police seem to be reacting to those that they have to interact with. Note that the Black Afro-American population is an order of magnitude+ more likely to be involved in violent crime or to be involved in killing an LEO.
The Afro-American response to the police is typically irrational.
Saint Louis (MO) recently had a demonstration-memorial for “Baby-Dim” (sic) who died a year ago. Dim’s granddad was selling stolen firearms and drugs (meth & crack). When the Po-Po hit the door with a warrant for Grand-Dad, “POLICE! WARRANT! Baby-Dim grabs a rifle and opens fire on a SWAT team (shields, hard armor, etc). He didn’t survive.
About a month ago in Memphis (TN) local police and Federal Marshalls served a fugitive warrant. Dim-TN tries to crash his way out with a car, then pops out to shoot his way free. Federal Marshalls have pretty extensive weapons training.
What I see endlessly on the internet videos, and in local news, is the “unarmed” people who try to bluff a weapon and then charge the police. Or just charge like Mikey Brown in Ferguson (MO).
If you fake a weapon, or are threatening, the police are generally too polite to call you a liar. They just show you the hollow points that the juridiction has purchased. The relatively low murder rate of police officers is due to tactics and quick responses to threats. The low murder rate doesn’t mean that fools are not trying.
My municipality has single officer patrol cars. When there is a call, 2-5 cars show up because that deters “stupid”. Most of the time.
I worked a Psychiatry Department (Lab-Rat, no patient care responsibilities) and have seen/heard what some little person can do after too much coke/meth/PCP (diversions of choice “down in the cityy”. Those folks are not rational and they can hurt you.
It isn’t racism. More of our Afro-Am. population are involved in crime than any other demographic and also tend to act stupid when the police show up.
It is not racism.