“George Floyd wasn’t the first victim.” What’s made a difference today, he believes, is the presence of cell phones and body cams. Images from Birmingham proved just how bad things were; today, such images are easy to record and share.
“I remember being beaten by police in Watts. I didn’t have a cell phone I could pull out. I just took the beating. Had a sore head in the morning, but I felt lucky to be alive. The summer of Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s death is far beyond anything I could have imagined in the ’60s. The summer of ’63 was a summer of protest, but the scale of what’s happened this summer is larger than that.”
– Clayborne Carson, a Stanford University professor who edited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers and attended the original March on Washington
Police have killed at least one Black man or woman every week in 2020. Data show that police have continued killing Black men and women at disproportionate rates, even after the death of George Floyd sparked international protests against racism and police brutality.
Using databases from Mapping Police Violence and The Washington Post, CBS News has compiled a list of 164 Black men and women who were killed by police from January 1 to August 31, 2020. Many of the cases remain under investigation.
This data is based on reported and verified cases, and does not necessarily account for all incidents in which a person was killed by police. But based on the known cases, police have killed at least one Black person every week since January 1, and only two states — Rhode Island and Vermont — have reported no killings by police this year.
(“Police in the U.S. killed 164 Black people in the first 8 months of 2020.” CBS News. September 11, 2020.)
In a recent Pew Research Center survey (2019), around nine-in-ten black adults (87%) said blacks are generally treated less fairly by the criminal justice system than whites, a view shared by a much smaller majority of white adults (61%). And in a survey shortly before last year’s midterm elections, 79% of blacks – compared with 32% of whites – said the way racial and ethnic minorities are treated by the criminal justice system is a very big problem in the United States today.
Black Americans were three times more likely to be shot and killed by police officers during interactions where the victim appeared to pose little or no threat to officers, researchers in the Journal of Urban Health found.
“This finding comports with prior LIH research that finds that black Americans are not only disproportionately likely to be killed by law enforcement but are disproportionately unlikely to present an objective threat of deadly force (as measured both directly by mention of use of force by victim in incident narratives and by proxy through victim’s armed status.”
(Joseph Wertz et al. “A Typology of Civilians Shot and Killed by US Police: a Latent Class Analysis of Firearm Legal Intervention Homicide in the 2014–2015 National Violent Death Reporting System.” J Urban Health. March 2020.)
Denial and Devaluation
Despite evidence to the contrary, denial about the scope and the breadth of racist and White nationalist ideas, beliefs and practices in the US runs deep. The reaction of many police officers and their supporters has been to insist instead that “Blue Lives Matter.” And many people in opposition to Black Lives Matter simply reply “All Lives Matter.”
Why the denial? Even more important, why the devaluation? Devaluation is more straightforward in some ways than denial. It holds that the thing we are talking about is actually not as important as the victims imagine it to be.
Devaluation says that actually, even if victims can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that something happened exactly as they have been claiming that it did, the audience will simply minimize the seriousness of what occurred, refusing to classify what happened as an injustice. There was either no injustice because the claimed brutality did not take place (denial) or there was no injustice because the brutality that plainly did take place is tolerable (devaluation).
(Sherry F. Colb. “Denial and Devaluation as Weapons Against African Americans and Women.” Verdict. February 28, 2018.)
Police violence against Blacks is anything but “tolerable.” The racial attitudes that lead police to choke and to shoot Black people are the same that exclude Black people from employment and investment opportunities. The cold, hard truth is that to be Black in America is to frequently endure an ongoing state of assaults, affronts, and insults.
Dr. Elwood Watson – a professor of history, African American Studies, and Gender Studies at East Tennessee State University – explains …
“Many White people tend to resort to a position of denial. To these Whites, it is not other people, but rather, it is Black people themselves who are the culprits. The usual narratives are: “There must be more to the story. “They must have been guilty.” “What were they doing in the neighborhood” “If they just cooperated with the police.” And so on.”
(Elwood Watson. “Black Lives Continually Demeaned, Devalued, Dehumanized.” Diverse. April 24, 2018.)
Systemic Racism and Police Violence
Research shows that police violence is one of the leading causes of death among black men. Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to die from police brutality. And black women 1.4 times more likely than white women.
There is robust empirical evidence in the field of social psychology that white Americans associate African-American men with violence and dangerousness. Consider first “shooter bias.” The basic finding is that participants are faster to “shoot” blacks with guns than whites with guns, and faster to “not shoot” whites without guns than blacks without guns.
(Brian A Nosek et al. “Pervasiveness and Correlates of Implicit Attitudes and Stereotypes.” EUR. REV. SOC. PSYCHOL. 1, 13. 2007)
One way to read these findings would be to suggest that it easier for participants to perceive that a black person is armed than it is for them to perceive that a white person is armed, and easier for them to perceive that a white person is unarmed than it is for them to perceive that a black person is unarmed. Scholars suggest that stereotypes associating African Americans with violence provide at least a partial explanation for this difference.
(B. Keith Payne. “Prejudice and Perception: The Role of Automatic and Controlled Processes in Misperceiving a Weapon,” J. PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. 181, 185–86. 2001)
There is reason to believe that “shooter bias” might be even more pronounced among police officers. A body of research suggests that people are particularly prone to the kind of error “shooter bias” reflects when they are in mortality-salient circumstances — that is, circumstances in which they are made to think about their death.23 Because it is reasonable to frame everyday policing as a mortality-salient context, the higher rates of identification error associated with mortality-salient scenarios may be endemic to police officer life.
(Kristopher I. Bradley & Shelia M. Kennison. “The Effect of Mortality Salience on Weapon Bias.” INT’L J. INTERCULTURAL REL. 403, 406–07. 2012)
Researchers therefore interpreted their findings as evidence that blacks in America have become so associated with danger that even viewing them has come to trigger the same kind of heightened attention and awareness people manifest in the presence of biologically threatening stimuli.
While this hyper-attentiveness has also been demonstrated in response to other social stimuli, such as angry faces, it is notable that black men attract attention even in the absence of any aggressive, angry, or threatening facial content. In other words, a black man who is providing literally no evidence of threat is nonetheless likely to attract the attention of police officers, so ingrained are the stereotypes linking him with threat.
(Patricia G. Devine. “Stereotypes and Prejudice: Their Automatic and Controlled Components.” J. PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. 5, 11–12. 1989)
(John F. Dovidio et al. “Racial Stereotypes: The Contents of Their Cognitive Representations. J. EXPERIMENTAL SOC. PSYCHOL. 22, 29–32. 1986)
(Jennifer L. Eberhardt et al. “Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing. J. PERSONALITY & SOC. PSYCHOL. 876. 2004)
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