Is there racism here?
I have Black friends (and adoptive white friends) who are so afraid that they’ve felt forced to sit their kids down to have a difficult conversation about following orders – not out of respect for police authority, but out of self preservation.
A great many others believe that the issue of racially motivated police shootings is a lie born out of some destructive liberal agenda that’s not backed up by any data. There’s not a problem here, we don’t need to make any drastic changes, and we certainly shouldn’t be frightening our children.
To all of this, some reflections.
Before we talk about racism and unarmed shootings, we should first look at America’s overall problem of lethal force. More people die in the US at the hands of law enforcement than in any other comparable, developed country. Consider the following from prisonpolicy.org:
Is this because people in America are more deadly than they are in New Zealand, that this level of force is required? In general, and specifically with regards to violence in the US, crime rates have been on the decline for a few decades, but, according to data collected at mappingpoliceviolence.org, and Washington Post, lethal force rates aren’t.
Unfortunately, there’s not much federally collected data, so we have to rely on studies from third party groups. Legislation was passed in the mid 90’s requiring departments to report lethal force encounters, but provisions weren’t made with regards to enforcement, resulting in our current lack of data. In response, the FBI launched its “National Use of Force Data Collection Program” in Jan 2019, but only 5,043 out of 18,514 federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies participated.
Because governmental transparency in this arena continues to be a marginal priority, other researchers have stepped in to fill the gaps. But their data paints a somewhat bleak picture and is easily condemned as “liberal,” dismissed by the “nothing to see here” crowd.
Regardless, American law enforcement seems to have a lethal force problem, one that’s systemic, i.e., seen throughout the system, not limited to a specific department or geographic region.
The next thing that should be considered is America’s alleged race problem. Personally, I don’t think we’re a racist country, and I don’t believe that all cops are racists. I don’t know anybody who does. But rest assured that America has a problem with racism, one that shows itself in many of our “systems.” And nowhere does our problem show itself more clearly than the burr we get in our saddle when someone tries to bring it to our attention. We’re like the alcoholic uncle who starts throwing things at the suggestion that he might be drinking too much.
There are other signs of course, things I’ve talked ad-nauseum about and will spare you from this morning. But it’s fascinating that we’ve come to believe that a country with our history of racism somehow made it all magically disappear. We transitioned from slavery in our formative years to Jim Crow for another 100, then as we celebrated Civil Rights, American racism changed its clothes and learned to blend in a bit better, ushering in things like mass incarceration, wage/employment/housing disparities, and multiple other inequities that are easy to dismiss because they don’t look like they did back in the day.
It’s still with us, but because we’re convinced that it’s not, it’s guaranteed to leak into nearly every expression of American life. Ever wonder why churches are so (still) segregated? Is that because Christians are all racist assholes? No. It’s simply because we’ve not managed to see the way racism is working itself out in our lives. It also means that racism is a problem among white Christians.
But again, if someone tries to bring it to our attention, we’ll throw our beer across the room and start yelling at everybody.
I have no problem believing that America’s racism has wiggled its way into our law enforcement system; that our police are, at the least, tempted to view Blacks differently than they do whites, especially with regards to which race has a higher propensity to cause harm.
In their defense, violent crime rates in the Black community are significantly higher than those among whites. But if we incarcerated whites at the same rate that we’ve incarcerated blacks for the past 50 years (and well beyond), you’d see a significant shift in white America’s violence as well.
Not only do we have a dysfunctional relationship with lethal force, we incarcerate more people, numerically and per capita, than any country in the world. Again, is that because American’s are inherently more criminal that folks in Russia, or China, Nigeria, etc?
According to the UN, our homocide rates are relatively low compared to other countries, and in general, there’s no data to support the idea that America has a comparatively abnormal crime problem. So why the astronomically high incarceration rates?
Our legal system is driven in large part by the idea that harsh punishment will reduce crime, sending a message to would-be criminals that the consequences aren’t worth the crime. We’re not nearly as focused on the correctional, restorative aspects of law enforcement, as evidenced by our shooting problem. To us, crime is a bug that must be squashed on the spot whenever possible.
In 1976, our incarcerated population skyrocketed and our crime rates followed suit. Today, you don’t have to go far to find a sociologist who believes that our high incarceration rates aren’t helping – especially with regards to their impact on poor/disadvantaged communities – and that our understanding of criminal justice, correction, and restoration, is in need of a massive overhaul.
When someone is released from federal or state prison, they enter life as a felon, with employment, income, voting, and housing restrictions that make life much more difficult. Again, if we were to incarcerate whites at the same rate that we incarcerate Blacks, white life in America would become much more difficult, and you can rest assured that crime rates in the white community would go up.
We imprison Blacks at a rate up to 5x higher than whites for the same crimes, with nobody making any decent apologetic as to why. Seems clear to me that America’s race problem has wiggled its way into the way we punish criminals, or better, that it’s always been there and we’re just now noticing it.
The idea that our race problem is also part and parcel to our lethal force problem should, at the least, be allowed a seat at the table.
But if that’s true, there should be some evidence.
Following is a synopsis of unarmed fatal shooting statistics from 2015 to 2019, borrowed from the Washington Post’s 5 year project to track law enforcement shooting data. I know, WaPo has a heavy liberal bias, but nobody’s arguing with their raw data. Fox News has even referenced it a few times without issue.
It’s tempting to see an even deal; roughly the same number of unarmed whites and Blacks are being shot each year. But what’s problematic, and what doesn’t show in the data, are the rates at which these shootings occur, i.e., what percentage of each group is affected. Those are the numbers that statisticians look at when there’s such a disparity in population numbers. Comparing apples to apples doesn’t work here.
Whites in the US make up 75% of the population, while Blacks occupy 13%. If 32 unarmed whites are shot and killed, and 38 Blacks – as was the case in 2015 – Blacks were shot at a rate nearly 8 times higher than whites.
For the last 5 years, according to this study, a much higher percentage of the Black community finds itself on the business end of lethal force, unarmed. Even in our “best” year – the biggest gap between unarmed white and Black shooting deaths – Blacks were killed at a rate three times higher than whites.
That’s not progress.
Forgive me, as I’ve used this analogy so many times before, but if I slapped you in the face 7 days a week for 100 years, then announced that I’d only be slapping you on the weekends for a further 100 years, I don’t think you’d be celebrating.
If you want to go a bit nerdier, NCBI posted a research paper entitled Findings From the National Violent Death Reporting System, 17 U.S. States, 2009–2012 that concluded:
“This study is one of the first to examine the nature and circumstances of deaths due to the use of lethal force by LE [Law Enforcement] in the U.S. using data from a multistate public health surveillance system. Findings reinforce concerns about racial/ethnic inequities in these cases and identify incident characteristics and scenarios with important implications for prevention.”
On top of this, we have much more video footage and media headlines of unarmed Black victims than we do of other races. Why? Because America only pulls out its phone when this happens to Blacks? Possibly, or it might be that we have a problem that’s articulated throughout our law enforcement system, the same as it has in our correctional system. Coupled with the data above, it’s easy to understand why so many have chosen the latter narrative, and why protests make sense, even when they turn violent.
I don’t condone the violence, by the way, but I understand where it comes from. There’s a deep, tragic unfairness that Blacks in America have been trying to wake us up to for years, but we don’t listen, regardless of how a protest might go down. Colin K. took a knee at a football game and white America lost its mind. MLK protested peacefully and was told on many occasions to stand down. And while Civil Rights Era achievements were nothing to sneeze at, we still find ourselves saddled with an intolerable situation, with much work to do.
And the violence that’s been perpetrated against America in these protests doesn’t begin to approach the violence that’s been perpetrated against our Black brothers and sisters, their parents, grandparents, etc.
It’s tragic how the media is spinning all of this, focusing on the relatively low instances of violent protests, leading us to believe that every Black protester wants nothing more than to burn down the country. The majority of these protesters are peaceful, but that’s not the story we’re given, nor is it the story we want. This all plays into the popular white conservative narrative that our problems would be solved if Blacks could just learn to behave themselves.
We have a long way to go.
If we could all get on the same page, this trip would be way shorter. But because we see Blacks as inherently criminal (as we did in our Antebellum and Jim Crow years), because we categorically refuse to confront racism in ourselves and others, and because we only see a problem when someone removes “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” from our favorite Disney ride, we’re assured a long, painful journey, and many more protests to come.
