Sunday, April 25, 2021

Do black police officers act any differently than white officers when it comes to black "suspects"?

 

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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