“Police
in the United States kill far more people than do police in other
shows
that people of color, especially African Americans, are at greater
risk
for experiencing criminal justice contact and police-involved harm
than
are whites, we lack basic estimates of the prevalence of
police-involved
deaths,
largely due to the absence of definitive official data.”
(J.
Lartey. “By the numbers: US police kill more in days than other
countries do in years.” The Guardian. June 9, 2015.)
Lack
of Confidence
Does
law enforcement have the trust of those they serve? How you answer
that question may depend largely on the color of your skin. While
white Americans tend to have “a great deal of confidence” in law
enforcement, the black/Latino-white divide on attitudes towards the
police remains deep and wide.
Half of whites say they
have confidence in the police to gain the trust of those they serve
compared with only 22 percent of blacks. Whites are much more likely
than blacks or Latinos to say their experience with the police has
been “mostly good.”
(McClatchy-Marist
Poll. “Ferguson and Beyond: Race Permeates Views of Law
Enforcement.” December 15, 2014.)
Rich Morin, a pollster and
senior editor for Pew Research Center, reports findings in a survey
(2016) that show a great divide in confidence – only 33 percent of
African Americans said police do “a good or excellent job of using
the right amount of force in each encounter” compared to the 75
percent of white Americans who believed in the judgment of police.
“Blacks and whites live
in two very different worlds with two very different worldviews on a
variety of issues. One of those areas is police,” Morin said in
2016.
Research Supports Risks
Statistics show police
violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United
States. People of color face a higher likelihood of being killed by
police than do white men and women. That risk peaks in young
adulthood, and men of color face a nontrivial lifetime risk of being
killed by police.
Over the life course,
about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police.
Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 years and
35 years for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups.
Black women and men and American Indian and Alaska Native women and
men are significantly more likely than white women and men to be
killed by police. Latino men are also more likely to be killed by
police than are white men.
(Frank
Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito. “Risk of being killed by
police use of force in the United States by age, race–ethnicity,
and sex.”
PNAS. August 20, 2019.)
Police killings – which
can include shootings, choking and other uses of force – are the
sixth-leading cause of death among men of all races ages 25-29,
according to a study published by the Proceedings of the National
Academy of the Sciences.
According to Frank
Edwards, lead researcher of the study and an assistant professor at
the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, the numbers
“may be an undercount.” Edwards cites other research that shows
“stop and frisk” and aggressive policing can affect both mental
and physical health. Edwards concludes …
“There’s clear
evidence that shows the harmful and distinct ways police violence
expands inequality. Policing plays a key role in maintaining
structural inequalities between people of color and white people in
the United States.”
A
January 2015 report
published in the Harvard Public Health Review,
“Trends in U.S. Deaths due to Legal Intervention among Black and
White men, Age 15-34 Years, by County Income Level: 1960-2010,”
suggests persistent differences in risks for “violent encounters
with police”:
“The rate ratio for
black vs. white men for death due to legal intervention always
exceeded 2.5 (median: 4.5) and ranged from 2.6 (95 percent confidence
interval [CI] 2.1, 3.1) in 2001 to 10.1 (95 percent CI 8.7, 11.7) in
1969, with the relative and absolute excess evident in all county
income quintiles.”
Why do some experts fear
matters may actually be much worse? There exists an absence of good,
official data. A March 2015 report from the federal Bureau of Justice
Statistics (BJS) concludes that the current Arrest-Related Death
(ARD) program – which aims to track persons who die in custody in
America at the state level – typically
only counts “about half, at best, of all deaths in police custody,
and the coverage rate may be as low as 36 percent.”
The
Bureau report also finds victims are majority white (52%) but
disproportionately black (32%) with “a fatality rate 2.8 times
higher among blacks than whites.” Most victims were reported to be
armed (83%); however, “black victims were more likely to be unarmed
(14.8%) than white (9.4%) or Hispanic (5.8%) victims.”
(Sarah
DeGue, PhD,1 Katherine A. Fowler, PhD,1 and Cynthia Calkins,
PhD2.
“Deaths Due to Use of Lethal Force by Law Enforcement.”
Am J Prev
Med. Nov 2016.)
What
do these statistics say about the links between
structural racism – both within a police department and throughout
society – and police violence. The first study to examine the
relationship between structural racism and racial disparities in
fatal police shootings at the state level, published in the Journal
of the National Medical Association (2018),
finds “states with a greater degree of structural racism,
particularly residential segregation, have higher racial disparities
in fatal police shootings of unarmed victims.”
Senior author Michael
Siegel, professor of community health sciences, reports:
“States that have higher
rates of racial segregation, incarceration, educational attainment,
economic disparity, and unemployment tend to have higher levels of
police violence against African Americans.”
(Michael Siegel et al. “The Relationship Between
Structural Racism and Black-White Disparities in Fatal Police
Shootings at the State Level.” Journal of the National
Medical Association. Volume 110, Issue 2, April 2018.)
What Is the Solution?
Why does American law
enforcement “as a system” find unarmed nonwhite civilians
threatening enough to shoot and kill more often than unarmed whites?
That is a question which begs an honest answer. Just consider these
figures from 2015:
* Police killed at least
104 unarmed black people in 2015, nearly twice each week.
* Nearly 1 in 3 black
people killed by police in 2015 were identified as unarmed, though
the actual number is likely higher due to underreporting
* 36% of unarmed people
killed by police were black in 2015 despite black people being only
13% of the U.S. population
* Unarmed black people
were killed at 5x the rate of unarmed whites in 2015
(“Mapping
Police Violence.” U.S. Census. 2014.)
Abigail Sewell, a
sociologist at Emory University, believes part of the solution may be
to reduce unnecessary police contact in the first place. Programs
that help young men of color find jobs might help keep them off the
streets and away from cops. If unnecessary police contact were
eliminated, she said, the incidence of fatal police violence might be
lower – and racial disparities might be diminished too.
“But I’m not sure if
the disparities would disappear altogether,” Sewell says. “These
women and these men … are living in neighborhoods that are
overpoliced, where the police are very brutal in the way they treat
citizens.”
Living in a state of
constant fear can lead to chronic stress. Perhaps mental health
professionals could be called upon to address psychiatric issues
instead of asking police to do so, since they typically do not have
training for such tasks.
Retired Police Maj. Neill
Franklin highlights the need for cultural and logistical shifts in
policing. He points to the “war on drugs” waged by the federal
government as an example.
That campaign “is
clearly a public health issue when it comes to addiction, but for
decades we have been using our police departments as the tip of the
spear in dealing with this public health issue,” said Franklin, who
now serves as executive director of the Law Enforcement Action
Partnership, an advocacy group comprising criminal justice
professionals.
That spear, he said, has
often been pointed toward black communities in inner cities.
(Anima Kahn. “Getting killed by police is a leading cause of death for young black men in America. Los Angeles Times. August 16, 2019.)
It is also clear that
police officers’ use of lethal force is much more common than
previously thought, and that it varies significantly across the
country. Aggressive policing over time can increase local levels of
violence and contact with the police.
Then, of course, there is
the lightness or darkness of a person's skin and his or her ethnic
group to consider. Racism
exists in 2020. It is a part of the police community. It is alive,
well, and functioning.
Consider this report from
2019:
“Police departments in
at least five states are investigating, and in some cases condemning,
their officers' social media feeds after the weekend publication
(June 2019) of a database that appears to catalog thousands of
bigoted or violent posts by active-duty and former cops.”
The posts were uncovered
by a team of researchers who spent two years looking at the personal
Facebook accounts of police officers from Arizona to Florida. They
found officers bashing immigrants and Muslims, promoting racist
stereotypes, identifying with right-wing militia groups and,
especially, glorifying police brutality. All the posts were public.
(Associated
Press. “Research Uncovers Cops' Racist,
Violent
Social Media Posts.” June 5, 2019.)
We can be sure that the
risks of police violence against people of color are real. It is time
to shed light on the problem, accept the horrifying realities of the
research, and support changes for equality and justice. Given our
fundamental need for proper enforcement, we must protect not only
officers of the law but also those whom they serve.
No American should be
subject to undue harm from the police. Aggressive police behavior is
intolerable. Racial prejudice – in word or in deed – has no place
in law enforcement.
“Is it
possible for white America to really understand blacks’ distrust of
the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police,
without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time
in our nation’s history?”
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