Subtle Truths, I: Police Violence
“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.” --Oscar Wilde
Two lessons that we all need to have drummed into our heads as part of critical thinking training:
I. A ton of the information you’ve heard about contemporary issues is bogus – outright false, cherry-picked, distorted, or otherwise severely misleading. (I’m sure you already know that “the other side” does that. Well, your side does it too.) I really had no idea how bad the situation was when I was younger (or maybe it was less bad then?). The longer I live, the more bullshit I see. My default reaction to politically relevant information that people give me is now “I bet that’s not true. I bet that if I go look it up on Google, I’m going to find out that what you’re telling me is bogus, in some way that I can’t now anticipate.”
II. The truth is usually complicated. It’s almost never that one side of an issue is totally right. Any policy that is being considered probably has reasons both for and against. Usually, some of the things said by the liberals are right, and some of the things said by the conservatives are also right. If two people are having a fight, it needn’t be that one is right and the other wrong; more often, they are both wrong in some ways. (But, because the world is complicated, this principle itself isn’t even always true – pace Oscar Wilde, sometimes the truth is actually simple.) This lesson isn’t satisfying to tribal humans who like simple morality plays. But it’s the truth.
So now I’m going to start giving examples of what I mean. First case study: the issue of police violence.
Stuff I Heard on TV
1. You’ve heard that American police kill a lot of civilians unjustifiably. Comment:
It’s hard to say how many shootings are unjustified. American police kill ~1100 people a year, which is much more (per unit of population) than police in other Western, liberal democracies. However, one might argue that the higher homicide rate is due to police having greater justified fear of armed criminals, because the U.S. has the world’s highest private gun ownership rate. However, it remains the case that police officers are killed less often (per capita) than members of the general population; thus, if they are very afraid of being killed on the job, this fear is mostly unjustified.
2. You’ve also heard, or maybe just assumed, that a lot of this police violence is racist. You might also be under the impression that it’s almost all black people who are being killed by the cops.
First, note that most police homicide victims are white, even though nearly all the victims reported by the media are black (apropos of lesson (I) above). The argument for racial bias is this: blacks are only ~13% of the population, and ~28% of the people killed by cops. So perhaps that extra 15% is due to racism. Now, even if you took that argument completely at face value, there is still something odd about treating police violence as chiefly an issue about racism, when the argument only claims that 15% of the cases are due to racism, leaving 85% due to something else.
However, as I’ve noted repeatedly (but no one else ever seems to be aware), when the police make contact with a suspect, this is usually because a citizen called the police to report possible criminal behavior by someone, and the racial makeup of the class of police shooting victims matches the racial makeup of people who are reported to the police for suspected criminal behavior (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0980181704).
Furthermore, if you control for rates of violent crime or weapons offense arrests, police are less likely to shoot blacks than whites (https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1061&context=criminaljusticefacpub). Number of violent crime or weapons arrests is a reasonable benchmark since it seems that these would be the kind of cases most likely to lead to a shooting. Blacks are about 20-30% less likely to be shot than whites, per violent-crime-or-weapon-crime arrest. If you focus just on homicide rates, then whites are about 2.7 times more likely to be shot by the police than blacks, per homicide criminal. (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325752754_Is_There_Evidence_of_Racial_Disparity_in_Police_Use_of_Deadly_Force_Analyses_of_Officer-Involved_Fatal_Shootings_in_2015-2016) This, again, could be relevant since murderers are the people most likely to be justifiably shot by the police. (Note: this is not because the police are justified in conducting impromptu executions in the field. It’s because actual murderers are most likely to be creating a threat that requires immediate lethal force to stop.)
It's impossible to prove the absence of racial bias, and no doubt there are at least some cases of racist shootings. But overall, the evidence does not make a compelling case for widespread racism in police shootings. The simplistic narrative that everyone assumes after watching the news media reports is bogus. The media is trying to push your emotional buttons, so they can get your attention and sell more advertising space.
Two Crazy Extremist Views
These days, it seems that people are expected to have one extreme, idiotic view or the other. If you reject the one stupid extreme, people think you’re defending the stupid opposite. On this issue, here are the simplistic extremes:
a. “Abolish the police”
“We don’t need any security force to catch criminals in our society. Just shut down all police departments. Police are pretty much all evil, racist bastards, and pretty much all police shootings are unjustified.” So someone doesn’t accuse me of attacking a straw man, here:
The title of that NYT editorial summarizes it: “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”
b. “Police can do no wrong”
“Police are the good guys. If they shoot someone, it’s probably because he deserved it, because he wasn’t following the cop’s orders or he committed a crime or something.”
I think this view has been prevalent in America (though I assume less so today). I think this because of the history of police abuse cases, in which (until just recently) it’s been almost impossible for cops to get convicted, and when they do, they get drastically lighter sentences than non-cops would get for the same charges. (Instructive case: the Rodney King beating, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdktDOeG2VI. Despite being caught on videotape, the cops were initially acquitted.)
My Super-Subtle Views
Notice that I’m not taking either stupid extreme. American police are too aggressive, but not all criticisms of them are sound. They’re not just going around shooting people out of sheer racist hatred. They’re actually serving a necessary function (protection from criminals), and probably most shootings are actually justified. Yet we still probably have too many unjustified shootings, and too many bad cops. (How do we define “too many”? Well, more than we would have if we implemented some reasonable reforms.)
Almost all the people who get killed by police are in fact criminals. I can acknowledge that, but still think we should avoid killing them. I’m not pro-criminal, but I’m not pro-killing-criminals either. See what a subtle position that is?
Here’s an instance of my super-subtle position that some but not all police homicides are justified: George Floyd killing: Unjustified. Ma’Khia Bryant shooting: Justified. (https://www.foxnews.com/media/valerie-jarrett-columbus-police-makhia-bryant-break-up-a-knife-fight)
In case you’re not sure what I'm alluding to, a cop shot a black teenage girl who was trying to stab another black girl. Valerie Jarrett, the president of the Barack Obama Foundation, tweeted: "A Black teenage girl named Ma'Khia Bryant was killed because a police officer immediately decided to shoot her multiple times in order to break up a knife fight. Demand accountability. Fight for justice. #BlackLivesMatter."
BLM activist Bree Newsome tweeted, “Teenagers have been having fights including fights involving knives for eons. We do not need police to address these situations by showing up to the scene & using a weapon against one of the teenagers. […] Everyone should be frightened that the ruling white elite have done such a thoroughly successful job of not only disconnecting us from the means of basic self-sufficiency but also convincing us we need armed white officers to manage our children & communities.” (https://twitter.com/BreeNewsome/status/1384726316684042242)
Do all black lives matter? Because when Bryant was shot, she was just about to stab another black woman. I don't think white elites just brainwashed blacks into thinking that they don't want to be stabbed.
And I don’t think this is just a weird fluke. Police are not just out murdering all the time; a lot of what they’re doing is actually protecting people, including people in black communities, from crime. Again, I know this is super-subtle. But if we believe that black lives matter, then our response to police violence cannot be to call for withdrawing all protection from black communities.
(Note: As I’ve claimed before, we could improve things by privatizing the police function and having market competition among security providers. So I don’t favor keeping the status quo, and yet I also don’t favor having no protection at all. Again, subtle & complex.)