Posted by Uofa2 on 5/30/2020 1:17:00 PM (view original):
For young men of color in the United States, police use-of-force is among the leading causes of death, according to a study from the University of Michigan, Rutgers University and Washington University.
Police use-of-force—which includes asphyxiation, beating, a chemical agent, a medical emergency, a Taser, or a gunshot—trails accidental death, suicide, other homicides, heart disease and cancer as a leading cause of death for young black men, who have the highest risk of being killed by police.
About 100 in 100,000 black men and boys will be killed by police during their lives, while 39 white men and boys per 100,000 are killed by police. This means black men are about 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men.
“It’s a striking number,” said study co-author Michael Esposito, a postdoctoral researcher in the Survey Research Center at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “There have been arguments about how widespread of a problem this is. We didn’t have a good estimate about whether it’s a few cases that received a lot of media attention.
“This study shows us that police killings are deeply systematic, with race, gender and age patterning this excess cause of death.”
It's worth keeping in mind that while the data in a well-done study should be trustworthy, the conclusions are still highly susceptible to bias.
So black men are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men...
According to FBI statistics black people are about 4 times as likely to commit a homicide (they provide public data by race and gender, but not both). 3 times as likely for general weapons charges.
I'm not sure I'm convinced that these data provide evidence of systematic racism. Context matters and this is totally out of context. If a group commits more crimes involving weapons, one would expect more armed conflicts with law enforcement, which in turn leads to more police killings.
Also worth pointing out that 100 deaths per 100000 is 0.1%. And internal studies published by various police jurisdictions generally show that 98-99% of all police killings are rapidly dismissed as fully validated (IE the victim posed an immediate threat to the officers and/or 3rd-party civilians). So the remaining 1-2% of questionable killings (the majority of which are also eventually dismissed) represent a .001-.002% cod based on the results of this study.
The huge caveat here is that internal review is generally based on decisions made during a very brief portion of an interaction - what I cited above, the victim presents a credible threat and the officers neutralize the threat. This is almost always written off as justified unless the officer went out of his way to escalate the situation, if not then. The problem is that very few police in this country are trained at all in de-escalation. There's really no way to quantitatively estimate how many of those shootings could be avoided if the officers had better training in never getting to the credible threat stage. Certainly some of the victims are so desperate that it really isn't avoidable. But I have to think a lot of them aren't. If, for starters, black men didn't feel they were in immediate physical danger from the police, it would be far less tempting for them to threaten physical danger themselves. Which comes back to my original point. Spreading what is, in essence, a near-complete myth - that unjustified killings of black men by police officers comprise a significant cause of death and police should therefore be considered morally threatening - in fact only enhances the possibility of interactions with police becoming violent. Which brings me back to my original statement - BLM is fundamentally stupid and self-defeating.
I will say that I have heard some leadership talking about police training in conflict resolution and mediation being a priority. It just doesn't seem to have filtered down to the average protester.