At the Wall Street Journal Heather Mac Donald challenges the notion that the underlying problem is systemic police racism:
This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed†broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.
The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,†they concluded.
A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.
The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.
The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.
In that litany I do not find the observation “white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects” particularly convincing. That could as easily be indicative of white racism is not. That’s the paradox. Any difference in the handling of black suspects on the part of white officers might be indicative of racism. Moreover, black and Hispanic officers are quite capable of anti-black racism themselves.
I don’t know what the underlying problem is and I do think that our police departments are in substantial need of reform. I’m wary of demand for immediate and unconditional elimination of the killing of black suspects by white police officers if for no other reason that it might actually place more black people in jeopardy than the status quo.
Lets go over some of the problems with her point of view writing. This was clearly not in any way to provide an objective view of the issue.
1) She forgets (?) to note that police reports of shootings of civilians are voluntary and poorly done. The only reason we might have decent data is because some news organizations decided to track shootings. We cant be sure without police records we have all the data.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02614-4
2) Next, she doesnt note the raw data numbers. Blacks are about 2.5 times more likely to be shot and killed when you look at an extended period, rather than just citing two particular years like she did. She then goes to cite Fryer’s work which shows that deaths per encounter were about the same. However, if the rates of encounter are artificially high, due to racism, then it artificially levels the numbers. There is pretty good evidence that riving while black is real.
3) She, like all conservatives, forgets to mention that Fryer’s study also showed that when people were completely compliant with police, the police were still more likely to use force. So by the author’s standard, if police beat black people just for funsies 3 times as often, but shoot them with the same frequency, then they are being treated equally and there is no racism.
4) Yup, black people kill each other. Chicago has a lot of shootings. We all agree, I hope that criminal violence is wrong. Cant we also agree that killing unarmed people already cuff is also wrong? Then cant we also agree that in general killing unarmed people should be avoided?
Heather has committed propaganda, nonobjective analysis.
So do the police have systemic racism? It is hard to tell. That use violence against blacks more often and kill more. That certainly looks like systemic racism. It could also be really bad culture. There could be a small minority of racists amongst police who are responsible for increased violence, but because police culture (and unions) require that any officer be defended no matter what they do and how often they do it, you would get the same statistical outcome suggesting systemic racism. Personally, I kind of favor the latter. Take away the culture and laws that protect those bad police and a lot of things equalize out I bet.
Steve
Does it matter?
The perception is there.
Black mothers interviewed tell the same story, how hard it is to raise aBlack son and prepare him for the first time on his own, spotted, hunted, cornered, captured and killed by the White cops who have no pity.
It’s as real as the razor blades hidden in Halloween candy.
Everyone has heard the story, happens all the time.
Yes, it does matter. If the problem is an incidental one, civilian review boards are a worthwhile strategy; if systemic they’re a waste of time. I would be interested in hearing proposed solutions to a systemic problem that won’t be gradual; I suspect there are none.
As noted, if only a complete, effective, and immediate solution is acceptable only a divorce will suffice.