A long time ago when I was in the
service stationed in Germany, I received a letter inviting me to my sister’s
wedding in small town Wisconsin. I put in for two weeks leave and decided to
take a real vacation for once. I flew in to JFK, spent three days in Manhattan
taking in the sights and the museums—and in the hotel I stayed in, a quarter in
the slot was required to get the TV to
turn on for a couple of hours. Then I took a bus to Washington D.C. and spent a
few days there, before taking another bus “home,” although not before I
stopping briefly in the bus depot in Cleveland, where I was born but had never
actually “seen” before.
Next was Chicago, where I was
“shocked” to see in the lobby of the depot one section of seating entirely
occupied by white people, and the one behind it occupied entirely by black
people; I thought it was pretty “weird,” which I suppose is to be expected when
you have deal with all kinds of people at close quarters every day as if we
were all one big happy “family.”
But there was another stop that
sticks in the memory, In between New York and D.C., the bus stopped at the
Greyhound depot in Philadelphia; Thankfully I was only there long enough to observe
a black police officer drag a black man into a restroom and beat the shit out of
him before dragging him back outside. There seemed to be a lot of black people
just hanging around; no one seemed
particularly fazed by the proceedings, maybe because the cop was a “brother,”
and the guy he was beating on probably “deserved” it. Maybe they would have seen it differently if the officer was white.
This was before the Internet,
social media and cell phones for one to record a video of what happened. It is
interesting to note that it was the Rodney King incident—which was not a lethal
encounter—which foreshadowed today’s protests, riots and politicization of
black grievance because it was recorded on video, and it was seen all over the
country. That the police officers who did the beating were white naturally “enhanced”
the outrage.
It is it interesting, however,
that we don’t hear much about black police officers involved in shootings,
particular of black civilians. We only hear cases like that Muhammad Noor, the
black Minnesota police officer who shot a white woman for the same excuse white
officers go unpunished for shooting black females, but was convicted for
homicide and received a 12-year prison sentence, while the victim’s family
received $20 million in compensation. Since there was no “outrage” by black
activists, it is safe to assume that they were willing to sacrifice one of
their own just to demonstrate their belief that all police, regardless of
color, are accountable. Of course the Noor case wasn’t about police
accountability—it was about gender politics.
Truth always seems to be
sacrificed to suit politics, although still more so by the political right. In 2019,
a National Academy of Sciences study revealed that black police officers were
50 percent more likely to use lethal force against a black civilian than a
white one; it also showed that black officers were similarly more likely to use
lethal force against Hispanic civilians. On the other hand, Hispanic police
officers also used lethal force 50 percent more often against black civilians
than white civilians—but were more than twice as likely to use it against
Hispanic civilians (2.2 to every one white civilian).
This study was attacked in many
quarters that assumed it was an attempt to take racial bias out the question. But
the study itself drew no such conclusion, although others did apply that notion
in order to deny what the numbers suggested. Many pointed out that black and
Hispanic police officers (as well as white) usually patrolled “high-crime”
areas, which, of course if you stop to think about it puts most of these officers
in a tough spot to begin with—especially when people expect to keep them “safe,”
and that these days an increasing number of people “push the envelope” by
showing police little respect at all and not only refusing to obey commands,
but physically altercate with them—and those that do almost always have a very
good reason to avoid police attention that have nothing to do with race.
The NAS study found that race was
only a reliable predictor of who police used lethal force against in relation
to the rate of violent crimes they committed; as mentioned previously, the
latest Justice Department statistics show that blacks are actually less likely than other groups to be shot
by police when one takes into account the number of violent crimes they commit.
The study states that
We found strong support for these predictions, as the race of a person
fatally shot closely followed race-specific homicide rates. Race-specific
violent crime was a very strong predictor of civilian race, explaining 44
percent of the variance in the race of a person fatally shot. This reveals that
the race of a person who is fatally shot closely tracks same-race violent
crime, at least as indexed by CDC homicide data. We largely replicated this
pattern with population data. Race-specific population rates accounted for 43
percent of the variance in civilian race, showing that the race of a person who
is fatally shot also closely tracks population size.
The study also made the
interesting conclusion that there was evidence that white civilians were more
likely to be targeted at a higher rate by lethal force in relation to their
rate of violent crime than blacks, while the Hispanic civilian lethal force
rate was roughly equivalent to their rate of violent crime. In fact the DOJ
numbers showed a more than 20 percent disparity between the rate of black
violent crime and the percentage of those who lethal force was used against.
Furthermore
We did not find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in
police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White
disparities when controlling for race-specific crime. While racial disparity
did vary by type of shooting, no one type of shooting showed significant
anti-Black or –Hispanic disparity, The uncertainly around these estimates
highlights the need for more data before drawing conclusions about disparities
in specific types of shootings.
The study then heads into rough
waters to explain this “discrepancy” that goes against the grain of the claims
of current political action:
One police-centered explanation is that these disparities reflect
depolicing. Depolicing occurs when police officer’s concerns about becoming
targets in civil litigation and the media spotlight imped officers from
enforcing the law. Such concerns have been heightened due to recent
high-profile shootings of Black men. The disparities in our data are consistent
with selective depolicing, where officers are less likely to fatally shoot
Black civilians for fear of public and legal reprisals…However, depolicing
might be limited to areas of high-profile shootings.
An example of “depolicing” is an
incident that occurred in downtown Seattle in January, 2020. At the corner of
Third Ave. and Pike Street there is a McDonald’s and a smoke shop; the 7-Eleven
that used to be there may still have open at the time. There were usually a
couple of SPD bike cops parked there to keep an eye on things, because there
were a lot of people who just hung around there without any observable thing to
do; maybe it was a place where small-time drug dealing took place. But on that
January day the police were not there, and there was a shoot-out between two
men, later identified as a couple of gangsters named Latrelle Tolbert and William
Ray Tolliver, both with lengthy arrest records. Neither was hit, but nine
bystanders were, and one woman died. I had been at that location many times,
and I could not imagine such a thing happening, but it did.
The NAS offered another
explanation for the disparity it claimed police actually used lethal force at
slightly higher rate against whites than against blacks as measured by their
actual crime rates:
On the other hand, a civilian-centered explanation for these disparities
is that White civilians may react differently toward police than racial
minorities in crime-related situations. If White civilians present more threat
toward police, this could explain why a person fatally shot was more likely to
be White than Black or Hispanic. Among those fatally shot by police, Whites are
more likely (relative to racial minorities) to be armed and pose a threat.
The NAS study admitted that there
are problems with this conclusion, which we can see for ourselves if we are
honest. Outside the rare occurrence when police break into the wrong house of apartment,
in nearly every instance involving black civilians they have either committed a
crime, or behave in a physically aggressive manner to thwart attempts by police
to detain them—and usually both. Many of them were in fact armed: the NAS’ own
data showed that blacks and Hispanics were more likely to be armed than white
civilians in “fatal officer-involved shootings.”
White civilians, on the other
hand, are significantly more likely, according to the data, to have lethal
encounters with police when mental health issues were involved, or they behaved
“suicidal.” The study further implied
that that nothing should be positively inferred by black and Hispanic police
officers being more likely to use lethal force against black and Hispanic
civilians, because “the link between officer rate and FOIS appears to be
explained by officers and civilians being drawn from the same population,
making it more likely than an officer will be exposed to (and fatally shoot) a
same-race civilian.”
Politics, such as it is, dictates
that we ignore crime rates, how civilians—especially those who committed crimes—interact
with police, the level of acceptance of crime in some communities, how those
communities want crime “handled,” and the general level of respect/contempt toward
police in communities of color. Police certainly bring much of this on
themselves when failing to show restraint, or failing to understand the psyche
of people who feel they have done nothing to justify, say, a “routine” traffic
stop. On the other hand, seeing this only as a “black and white” issue—and throwing
Hispanic police under that bus for good measure—ignores the fact that black
crime and the way suspects interact with police is a problem for all officers
who come into contact with it, regardless of their race.
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