American policing: The data (op-ed)

 

During the trial of Derek Chauvin, the white Minneapolis police officer charged with murdering a black man named George Floyd, another police shooting took place right outside of Minneapolis in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota. 

This time a white female officer shot and killed a 20-year-old black man who attempted to flee the scene after he was pulled over.  The problem was the officer pulled her firearm, but thought she drew her taser.

She thought wrong. 

Since her wrong thought resulted in the death of a person, she was charged with manslaughter and should be convicted.

But that’s for a jury to decide in a court of law.

Unfortunately, in the court of public opinion, where American policing is on trial, there is no jury, there’s only judges.  Here are two rash judgements made after the Brooklyn Center police shooting.

1).  Brooklyn Center’s mayor said, “I don’t believe that officers need to necessarily have weapons every time they’re making a traffic stop.”

2).  MSNBC contributor Jason Johnson said, “We need to abolish American policing as it currently exists. It doesn’t work … Do you know the average homicides that are actually solved by police departments? Only about 35 percent.”  Then he stated, an unarmed black person is five times more likely to get shot by the police than a white person.

Now, if the former President of the United States would have recited the same statistics MSNBC would have put the following fact-check on the screen.

1). According to recent statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program, the national clearance rate for murder was 61.6 percent and for aggravated assault 53.3 percent.

2).  The Washington Post has annually tracked all incidents of Fatal force use by police since 2015.  The annual tracker states: Although half of the people shot and killed by police are white, black American’s are shot at a disproportional rate.  Black Americans account for 13 percent of the US population, but are killed by the police – twice – the rate of white Americans.

Obviously, Johnson felt the need to exaggerate some of the figures in order to advocate for abolishing the police.  All of this hysteria is a natural reaction to how often white police officers are shown shooting black people on the national news, but the frequency of national news coverage is not a reflection of reality.

Here’s the latest data available from the – Contacts Between Police and The Public – report conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.  The recent report was the twelfth in a series that began in 1996 and is calculated every three years. 

Among persons age 16 and older:

1). About 61.5 million residents had at least one contact with police.

2). Whites (26 percent) were more likely than blacks (21 percent), Hispanics (19 percent), or persons of other races (20 percent) to experience police contact.

3).  There was no statistically significant difference in the percentage of whites (12 percent) and blacks (11 percent) who experienced police-initiated contact.

Also, according to CNN 48 police officers were shot and killed on the job in 2020, compared to 51 in 2019.  Thirty officers were killed by a handgun, 13 were killed by a rifle, and one was killed with his own weapon.  (The type of weapon in the other 4 is unknown.)  However, in 2020 there were 18 unarmed blacks killed by the police and in 2019 there were only 12.

A quote attributed to Mark Twain goes, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics”.  Today, Twain might have said, “There are statistics, the news and their damn narratives.”

First published in the New Pittsburgh Courier 4/21/21