“We” make laws. “We” hire LEOs to enforce those laws. When that enforcement goes wrong, some people blame the victim for violating the law(s) and not passively accepting being cuffed, and some people blame the LEO for real or perceived excessive use of force and often in combination with racism on the part of the LEO. Militarizing local police forces has likely contributed to a heightened sense of “us” against “them” mindset among LEOs. Steroid use among LEOs to bulk up is likely another contributing factor to the excessive use of force.
The big picture that this country arrests, convicts, incarcerates and paroles at a rate something on the order of four times what it was back in 1970 garners little or sustained attention. And cops back then weren’t noted for being “to serve and protect” public employees in most communities. Nor does a majority in this country comprehend that the criminal justice system disproportionately targets minorities – white people are very good at rationalizing such statistics. They are less good at rationalizing killings within US borders.
What makes any discussion of killings by police difficult is that too much of the data is missing or non-existent. While we know incarceration rates over the decades, we don’t know the actual incidence rate for police homicides in the past or present. From the Wall St. Journal, Hundreds of Police Killing are Uncounted in Federal Statistics.
Law-enforcement experts long have lamented the lack of information about killings by police. “When cops are killed, there is a very careful account and there’s a national database,” said Jeffrey Fagan, a law professor at Columbia University. “Why not the other side of the ledger?”
Why not indeed. Can this not be changed right now? Mandatory federal reporting of all homicides and shootings perpetrated by police officers is not unduly burdensome. Within twenty-four hours to the FBI. The FBI would in turn report every incident within twenty-four hours to the CDC and Bureau of Justice Statistics. Then mandatory reporting of the disposition of the case to the FBI. All three agencies would have authority to seek additional relevant information and communicate with the other agencies of the requests and answers when received.
It’s known that almost all of these cases will be closed as justifiable homicide in the line of duty. But let’s see the numbers. Let’s allow other agencies the ability to audit and provide some oversight.
Racism in this country is endemic. Everybody knows that. And that much of the brutality towards our fellow citizens is far too easy to cover-up and hide it from the nation. However, every once in a while, the conscience of fair-minded peoples is shocked into doing the right thing. Never enough. Never as thoroughly or completely as it should be. But a small step forward. For those of us of a certain age, we did see that during the Civil Rights movements in the 1950s and early 1960s. Congress and LBJ weren’t acting without the consent of the governed when the Civil Rights Acts were passed.
We saw it twice in the election of Barack Obama.
If all those unreported killings by police are minorities and mostly African-Americans, it completely changes almost everything that has been said about the recent killings of African-Americans by LEOs that have made national news.
We need the truth NOW. Just as we needed to see this:
And this:
