In the absence of US governments and media doing their public service jobs to inform the people in this country, The Guardian steps up to the plate. The data. Without hyperbole or even comment.
Leaving it up to us to ask why so many people in this country die in encounters with the police. Are there simply more threatening violence prone or out of control people in this country that can only be subdued by potentially fatal force delivered by police officers? Possibly. But by a factor hundreds of times higher?
Paradoxical. Contrary to the accepted position of the NRA that threatening violence prone or out of control people will take greater advantage of “good guy” individuals or police that aren’t armed and prepared to shoot a perceived miscreant. If that were true, wouldn’t such people in a population perptrated much higher rates of attacks on police and unarmed individuals in other western countries than the US? Places where their risk of being injured or killed are much lower?
(Ukraine is so impressed with US policing that they’ve welcomed US police training instructors for their new recruits. That the US pays for the instructors was an added bonus.)
Should the spouses or signficant others of police officers that are killed by their police officer spouse or significant other be included in the listing? “The Guardian” presents the data and it’s left to others to do the calculations. On a per capita basis, are spouses and SOs of police officers more or less at risk for being shot by their partner than those in relationship with non-police officers? Or any other specific profession? Don’t know. However, police officer shootings of spouses and SO being more than zero tells us that too many police officers are violence prone and/or too easily become out of control. Precisely the profile of people that a society doesn’t want to employ as police officers. And unlike the general public, these public employees can and should be vetted and then trained to the highest possible standard.
US law enforcement employees and organizations are feeling that they are currently under unfair attack. Maybe they are. However, unless and until they can account for why they kill and injure a much higher percentage of armed and unarmed Black, Latino, and Native American people than white people, their whining should fall on deaf ears. There are no valid statistics that support a position that white people are engage in less criminal behavior, or are less violence prone or liable to become out of control than minority population.
Yet, to chalk up all of the disparity to LEO inherent racism lets US society at large off the hook for what we’ve done. We have assigned LEOs the role of clearing our streets and communities of what are considered “undesirables.” The druggies, crazies, and petty theives that we don’t want to see and have instituted draconian laws to put them behind bars. Then we reward LEOs for “collars” and make excuses for them when they kill or injure those that don’t quickly and easily submit to their authority regardless of how unwarranted the demand for submission is.
The societal norm in the US is white people. As such, LEOs, regardless of color, perceive the world through a white lens. People of color, particularly young and male, stand out from the background of whiteness. Added to that is the much lower rate of employment for those that are young, male, and/or not white. What are they supposed to do with their comparatively excessive, daily hours of idleness? Sequester themselves from ordinary public interactions, activities, and spaces? And if they don’t are viewed as vulnerable and acceptable LEO targets?
Why do I say “we” and not “we white folks” wrt to the assignment given to LEOs? For the simple reason that white people don’t call for LEO protection at a higher rate than minorities do. We all want and expect LEOs to provide us with a certain level of protection from those that would do us harm or are up to no good.
BLM and white liberals apparently reject a socio-economic analysis of the disproportionate rate of cop killings of Black people. Not sure what their answer to the problem is. Or maybe I’m not listening well enough. Or not inclined to think that arresting, convicting, and imprisoning every LEO that kills a Black person would be a robust and effective solution. (Note: I totally support the indictments of the LEOs involved in the death of Freddie Gray. The cop shooting deaths of John Crawford III, Tamir Rice, and Walter Scott are even clearer instances of murder by cop. But not all killings by cop are as clear cut.) Those LEOs would be replaced by new LEOs drawn from the same population employment pool as the current LEOs and would get the same form of training. Why, in the aggregate, would the new ones perform their jobs any better than the previous ones? (Lobotomies to extract racism don’t exist.)
There is also the high risk to overplaying a hand. Those of a certain age have seen overplayed hands that lead to backlashes that makes things worse again and again. “The Blue Line” becomes more robust and clever and ever more intractable and difficult to pierce. People, and here it is disproportionately white people, become more fearful and easier for TPTB to manipulate into supporting “our cops.” (A variant of the “support our troops” BS that was crafted in the wake of the Vietnam War that even “good” liberals go around spouting today and IMHO was instrumental in repressing objections to the Bush family wars and the subsequent conversion to waging wars with unmanned drones and US funded proxy armies.)
Facts collected and soberly and calmly absorbed and discussed in a search for reasonable and possible changes that can make us better may not get us there quickly. But emotionally screaming past each other doesn’t put us on a path forward and that’s not the worst possible outcome. So, a big thanks to The Guardian for initiating and continuing to collect the facts we need to know.
