Police Shootings & Racism
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)
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.