Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But there’s no evidence of widespread racial bias
By
George
Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that
law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted
that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the
criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully,
maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to
create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our
institutions and our hearts.”
Joe
Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all
African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black
children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can
“make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush
murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial
service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear
that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go
outside.
Minnesota
Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional
racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed
blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty
verbiage.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment