I wish these statistics were more broadly known and accepted. I tried to initiate a discussion with a group of former classmates, all but one of whom don't want to talk at all--they're white. And terrified. The one who's talking to me is black. The Juilliard incident--a black instructor showed a class the slave-auctioning scene in the 1977 film, Roots, and all hell broke loose--horrified me. He's apparently apologizing to students who say they are traumatized. There's a mass hysteria surrounding words and classroom material. Teaching is becoming an even more impossible profession than it formerly was; I thought of reading some Allen Ginsberg to a class the other day and--too late--remembered that "Howl" includes the phrase "negro streets." I read it, and hope nobody reports me to the dean.
It seems too dishonest to me, too destructive of the writer, too, to erase his language. But I'm not teaching in the U.S.
Yaaaay so I actually went half-crosseyed and downloaded the Washpo stats from 2020 to do my own slicing and dicing. Numbers were slightly different than what John found, though with a similar thrust:
Total killed: 1,020
Total unarmed killed: 55
Total white unarmed: 24 (76% of population, 46% of unarmed killings, 58% of violent crimes)
Total black unarmed: 18 (13.4% of population, 32% of unarmed killings, 36.7% of violent crimes)
Black people were about 4 times as likely to be killed by police, unarmed, in 2020.
They were also were 3.67 times more likely to be involved in the commission - or to be victims of - violent crime.
Full disclosure, crime stats were from 2019, so it's not 100% apples to apples. Point is, like John/Coleman/other folks who have looked deeply, I couldn't find evidence of bias in killing, once I controlled for encounters with police for violent crime arrests.
Of the 1021 police killings that occurred in 2020:
646 Involved suspects with guns
172 with knives
51 with vehicles
29 with TOY WEAPONS…14 OF WHOM WERE WHITE….HELLO T RICE
39 Other
55 Unarmed….24 OF WHOM WERE WHITE
Balance unknown.
The fact that this is left out of the “National Discussion” we’re supposedly having about race is criminal. If we don’t push back against the lies with the truth we’re done as a country. And, ironically, blacks will be those who suffer the most. This is why it’s vital for men and women like Glenn and John…who are black and immune to the claim of racism…to speak the loudest.
Let's just tell it like it is...most Americans are as dumb as rocks. I quote the late and great Malcolm Muggeridge :
"So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.”
The WP statistics cited by John can be filetered and summarized in a number of ways. As deplorable as the Post is when it comes to reporting truth, the Police Killing Data Base they maintain is done quite well. It allows you to filter and summarize in a number of ways. Here are the 2020 stats broken down by category:
Total Killings: 1021
Whites Killed: 457...15/Million
Blacks Killed:243...36/Million
Hispanics Killed: 170....27/Million
Others Killed: 151....5/Million
Men Killed: 983
Women Killed: 38
Now, if there was a shred of validity to correlating race and the nimber of kills, to the relative proportion of the population one would have to conclude:
1. Police are systematically executing men because they are men. Women constitute more than 50% of the population but are nearly 25 time less likely to be shot than men.
2. Whites are being killed at a rate almost 3 times higher than Asians and other non Hispanic non black minorities and are therefore being singled out for execution.
We're a dumb nation that will fall for anything. There's no easy cure for that.
Can someone help explain the statistics: according to the Washington Post database, black people are 2x more likely to be killed by cops than white people, AND there are almost 5x more white people in the USA than black people, so in fact blacks *are* killed by cops significantly more frequently than white people....(I'm not addressing the poverty disparity, simply the numbers in proportion to the population distribution). what am I missing here?
(Number of Killings Per Group/Total Population Per group) * 1M = Number of deaths per million.
But in this case the rates are meaningless because measuring killings as a percentage of the population is bogus on its face. If it were valid, the real beef with cops would revolve around the fact that men are nealry 25 times more likely to be killed by police than women! While we're at it...whites are 3 times more likely to be killed by cops than non hispanic non black minorities (primarily Asians). The "percentage of the population claim is a ruse. As John said...poverty is a better causal factor. Better yet, the rate of violent crime committed it an even better one. Wanna see some magic? Using those factors virtually removes all numeric disparities between the groups. Who'da dunk it?
The 'enge3mtns' or interactiuo9ins between races and Police is also, on a per capita basis, heavily AA as to white, brown asian etc.. IOW, there are a whole lot more opportunities on a comparable basis for something to go south and as we see here, Police kills whites and browns with the same stupidity, lack of training and yes, sometimes animus ( towards others who are NOT THEM as in being a Police) as they they do AA's...
To over-simplify the numbers (just to explain how both can be true), imagine that blacks are 10% of the country and whites are 50% (the 5x number you gave). Now, imagine that 1 in 10 whites get killed by cops while 2 in 10 blacks are killed by cops (obviously not realistic, but that's the 2x number). In a population of 100 people, there'd be 10 blacks, 2 killed by cops, and 50 whites, 5 killed by cops. Blacks killed at a rate twice as high, but whites killed much more frequently because they're just that much more of the population.
Chrisitiane. The WAPO is statistically accurate—or close enough. However, and this may seem counterintuitive, but police kill twice as many white people as black people. Both statements are accurate.Please read my post below. Elzbss is also accurate as he is quoting JM. If you really do not understand the numbers I suggest you try a little bit harder. The key point is JM is not about stats per se. Don’t get lost in numbers. The main point is we have politicized an issue which might have some element of truth but not enough truth to be a defining point about race. I suggest you look for other essays by JM. He has a great deal,to contribute to this subject.
Thanks- I read most of what JM writes and am in agreement with the arguments. I was asking for help with actual statistics. I expect accuracy on all ‘sides’ of this argument.
? He says they kill a disproportionate number of black people relative to white people. He says they are killed proportionately to their rate of poverty. Poor people are killed more, and more black people are poor. That was what he said in this article.
I like that the Professor keeps pounding on this point. It must be pounded on. The website, Statista, states that from 2017-March 2021, police have killed 4250 people. 22% are classified as Black. 41% are classified as White. 16% as Hispanic (and odd classification as Hispanics can be any race). 17% as “unknown”. Obviously they are not unknown—-but there is apparently no record according to Statista. 3% are other . In our whites are evil world, it is surprising Hispanics rarely show up on our nightly news as victims of police——why? I can only guess. Assuming unknowns are proportionally distributed it is 48% white, 29% Black, 19% Hispanic and 4% other. The police in US do kill a much higher percentage of people than the EU and Japan——seemingly as much as 20x more per 100,000. Yet, as distasteful this sounds, Statista states 14+ million people were arrested in 2019—so, 1 out of 14000 people were killed attempting to be arrested—-which seems low to me. If we were driven by racism, this seems remarkably low.
The race “issue” in America matters and is serious. The Professor has written much about this in a very thoughtful way in almost all of his writings. Focusing on police action against one race as a defining characteristic of America, turns all attention away from far more important issues to improve the economic conditions of black people and poor people in general. It is phony. It is political. Those who scream the loudest are the most dishonest and have other agendas.
It is designed to take our eye off the real problems we face. That is is why JM must keep pounding on this issue.
I doubt police keep track of statistics—-they are likely to keep track of their situational condition.
Agencies like the FBI, DOJ keep track of crime statistics and police shootings. About 1000 are shot by police every year in recent years. Black people represented 12 percent of the population in the states we studied, they made up 25 percent of the deaths in police shootings
By comparison, white people represented 62 percent of the population—and made up 54 percent of the deaths in encounters with police.
Cops kill white people just as easily as they kill black people as a fact. Yet it would seem that white people are not as concerned about police shootings of white people as black people are concerned about police shootings of black people. Why is this? I don't know the answer, but I suspect the explanation will explain a lot about why this fact is so hard for people to accept.
Because they figure that virtually everyone who is killed by police is 1. a criminal, and 2. resisting arrest. And while unnecessary death is a shame and undesirable, the interests of criminals resisting arrest are just not high on the list of things to devote political energy and sympathy towards. There are about a hundred different causes and injustices and groups of people that need help that one can choose to focus on, before one is going to allocate energy to the rights of criminals resisting arrest.
I also think that because many white folks don't have the idea that all cops are out to get them, they're more open to the idea that tragic mistakes sometimes happen, especially in dangerous, high-adrenaline, split-second situations, and that cops make mistakes just like everyone else does. Similarly to lethal car accidents, everyone hopes to bring tragic mistakes and accidents to a minimum, but they aren't seen as a reason for assigning moral blame or generating moral outrage.
In my town, at the end of this past summer, right when the George Floyd incident and protests were still big news, a 13 year old white autistic boy who was unarmed with no weapon, who was running away in fear of cops called by his mother to check on him for an autistic meltdown, was shot by the cops 12 times. And that didn't become big news or generate any political protest. I was shocked that it wasn't a big news story. Even a disabled child with no weapon getting shot TWELVE times -- on video! -- didn't warrant anything more than a few local news stories. I don't think the officer who shot him has been charged, either, though the boy's mother has sued. I suppose it was chalked up as one of those tragic mistakes, and something the cop will probably regret for the rest of his life.
An update from Nov of the shooting of the autistic 13 year old shot in Sept: "Body camera footage released in September showed that Barton [the mother] told police her son could have a gun, but she wasn't sure whether it was real." The boy has permanent injuries and family was suing the police.
Because a significant portion of the population believes it "can't happen to me." And they approve of it, thinking that compliance ensures safety. In a strange paradox, the focus on black people getting killed feeds that delusion.
People should check out Sam Harris’ latest podcast. He interviews Rener Gracie (of the Gracie Brazilian Jiu Jitsu dynasty) about police training, and their appalling ineptitude when going “hands on” with resisting suspects. The problem starts way before race, or guns, or the media. The truth is that if the police (or the gun fans who’ve responded here) had even minimal training on how to safely restrain people, they wouldn’t need to resort to lethal force at all in 99% of cases.
In California (where I live), police must receive 664 hours of training TOTAL to receive a badge. To be a barber? 1500 hours. After getting their badge, the average police officer receives 4 hours of training on arresting people every 2 years. That’s everything: legal issues, weapons, de-escalation...everything. That means about 1 half-hour of training on grappling every 2 years. Mr. Gracie advocates 1 hour of BJJ training every week as a minimum to achieve basic competence. This basic level of training would allow officers to avoid the “Amygdala blackout” that occurs when your life if threatened. Police that have received the basic BJJ training are confident, and remain calm. They don’t freak out and pull their gun, because they are confident that they can handle the suspect safely.
Anyway, I can’t recap the whole conversation here, but if you want to comment intelligently on this issue, you should check it out. It’s free.
Once you understand that cops are just regular people who have simply not been adequately trained to do their jobs, the whole tenor of this debate should change (unless you’re just using your favorite hammer, and looking for nails to whack).
Rosa Brooks (recent book: Tangled Up in Blue, about American policing) was on Bill Maher last night & made the same point: police receive far too little weapons training.
Lack of training in going hands on drives then use their weapons, which is the worst possible option in almost every situation. Truly effective BJJ training would make the use of weapons rare. Paradoxically, the current furor over George Floyd has led to restrictions on less violent techniques. Cops who can’t go hands on effectively are forced to use strikes, Batons, tazers , and guns. The problem can be dealt with before weapons are even considered. Likewise, the issue of police violence can be addressed directly, and preempt the heated political dialogues that are fracturing our society. And the cops WANT this training. They don’t want to shoot anyone if they can help it, right? This is the reality.
Again, my intent was to recommend the Rener Gracie interview. His organization posts tons of videos where they breakdown what went wrong in arrests. It’s illuminating.
There is a police department that’s put this training into effect, and the results have been pretty incredible (Merietta, GA... not sure of the spelling). Fewer shootings, fewer injuries to cops, and most importantly, fewer injuries to citizens. Happy cops, happy citizens... that what we all want (unless you’re employed in the grievance industry)
Look, there IS no magic bullet. No matter what "system" we use to train officers the decisions around when to use only bare hands against an opponent that may be much larger physically, more powerfully built, more obviously aggressive, will be made (as they should be) on the basis of the officer avoiding physical injury. If some jackass that is 6'5" 320 lbs. comes running at an officer screaming obscenities, I don't care who the officer is or how competent s/he is in BJJ or Tai Kwon Do or whatever supposedly invincible martial art, the officer is stooopid if s/he fails to utilize some kind of tool (baton, pepper spray, Taser) in self-defense. In ordinary dealings with ordinary drunks, druggies, mopes and dopes the ordinary tools that officers are given in virtually every Department are adequate to the purpose of officer survival. It's the unordinary cases, very large people or very experienced fighters who may also be drunk, drugged, enraged or mentally ill that cause the career-ending injuries to officers. Officers are generally very aware of that.
Marietta, GA is a relatively small town (Population around 60,000) with a small-town atmosphere. It has a police force of 119 sworn officers. They have a very robust community outreach program including a citizens academy, encouraging residents to ride along with officers on patrol and a generally very transparent department that actively seeks cooperation from its citizens. That may explain much of the positive relationship between citizens and police.
Small towns also have the advantage of getting rapid feedback on the officers they hire and more personal interactions among officers, chain of command and city administration.
Listen to the interview. It’s not simple, but addressing the mechanics could really help both the cops and the people they are sworn to protect and serve. And critically, cops, citizens, politicians, all love this approach. And it saves money! Win win. Practical. Doable. Realistic. Listen. Watch the Gracie “breakdown” videos. You will almost certainly learn something that will deepen your understanding of the issue, and most importantly, give us a clear plan for an improvement that we could actually make happen
I did listen to the Sam Harris interview. My question is, in how many police encounters is the police officer even physically close enough to the suspect to make the use of Jujitsu practical? Sam never asked that question.
In the Michael Brown case, as we learned from the Steele documentary, Brown started charging the officer from some distance away. Should the officer have waited until Brown was close enough to apply Jujitsu techniques simply on the hope that Brown wasn't armed? How would Jujitsu be useful in a traffic stop where the suspect pulls a gun out of the glove box?
One of the issues brought up in the interview was the meager amount of training the police get. If the average police officer gets only 650 hours of training (compared to 2 to 3 years in Germany), how much of that limited time should be devoted to mastering Jujitsu?
I’m a high school teacher, and I know my training to deal just average bratty behavior was way less than you’d hope, much in the same way Gracie noted cops are far less prepared than the public imagines when it comes to dealing with violence. Have you ever gotten red in the face because someone offended you? Think of the variety of responses you get from teachers who lose their patience with students. We’ve all had hours of theoretical training on child psychology, but in a practical scenarios when things get heated, we are often left to our “instinct.” I air quote that because if we haven’t gone through lots of role-playing and scenarios, there is only a fight or flight that kicks in, with no muscle memory to fall back on. I say all of this because my experience in the classroom helps me understand where Gracie was coming from in explaining how more training would result in less dangerously violent interactions with police.
I hope my analogy helps you understand that in almost any profession, dealing with the public requires way more training than is usually provided. Many of us get lucky and happen to attend a really good one that teaches us to de-escalate situations, and others simply hear from a veteran colleague who suggests something like “yell” or “threaten” or “lay down the law.” Cycles of violence really only get broken with proper education, which is the basis of restorative justice. If you really believe in restorative anything, you can’t point the finger at the individual and say they are to blame, and shame on them. You have to have compassion to see the whole situation for what lead up to it on both sides, and how to move forward to prevent other similar things from happening.
The most frequent response to these obvious results is that black interaction with police outside of a shooting is the issue. DWB being the prime example. The Wapo data does not inform on this issue.
The problem here is quite simple: the media. They never consider the points you raise and never will, because it's too wonderful a moral preening opportunity. They are the brave virtuous not-racists, the people forcing us to come to terms with America's dark racist past and present, the people who are righteous and necessary and on TV.
I think you mean black people are 2.5x (not 2.5%) more likely to be killed by a cop. (36 per 100,000 vs. 15 per 100,000 whites according to the WaPo database you linked to). Poverty rates are also about 2.5x. (21% for blacks, 9% for whites). https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/
I think many police shootings, whether the person is black or white, are justified, especially if the person has a gun which is real or looks real and is pointing it at police. For example, I understand that the popular narrative that arose around Michael Brown's death is false, he in fact was shot in the front while rushing toward the officer to grab his weapon. He had previously tried to grab the officer's gun while the officer was still in the car, resulting in a gun shot to Brown's hand.
I looked up the case of the 17 yr-old white Hannah Williams and I found it was covered on national media including CNN, NY Times, etc. Her father had made a phone call to police saying she had taken their rental car and she may want to hurt herself. Police video was released showing that she got out of her car and pointed a replica gun at police before she was shot. The other case about the man with Down's syndrome being shot who had a toy gun took place in Sweden.
There are several cases of blacks being shot that I believe are totally unjustified such as Elijah McClain, Walter Scott, Bettie Jones, Philando Castle, Kurt Reinhold (shot after jaywalking), etc. Also there are way to many people (black & white) shot during mental health crises.
I think a big problem is the attitude that police have when they approach blacks or try to take them into custody. A recent example is the case of black, fully uniformed US Army officer Caron, Nazario who was stopped while driving a brand new car with the temp. license taped inside the back window. He drove for 100 sec. to a well lit spot to pull over, and 2 VA police officers jumped out with guns drawn and spoke in a way that was hostile, rude, & disrespectful. He held his arms up outside the car window, then was ordered to get out of the car. He was afraid to put his arms down to open the door because he was thinking they would claim he was going for a gun and shoot him! They police officers ended up assaulting him and knocking him down. I think those two police officers would treat a white person in the same situation very differently and it would just be a routine traffic stop.
I would recommend Shelby Steele's documentary "What killed Michael Brown?". It is available on Amazon Prime and is well researched and thought provoking investigative and contemplative piece on how narratives on police brutality are spun and impact of such highly publicised police killings and subsequent riots on the communities where they occur.
I watched Steele's doc. Just excellent, measured, rational analysis that he also personalized by talking about his upbringing in the 1950s when black families were more intact before the liberals began the welfare scam.
Here's a twist -- one reason that one got coverage is because Al Sharpton got involved. According to the article that John cited: "Williams' family is working with civil rights leaders Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jarett Maupin of the National Action Network to find answers to what they said 'appears to be another unjustified shooting of a young person of color.'" I'm a bit confused...
Well said. One of those officers has since been fired. The others should be, too. The incident was disgraceful and may well have been racially motivated. I am the last one to assign racism to these cases, but there was no excuse for those cops' behavior.
The thing that I find frustrating about police shooting statistics is that to really make sense of racial or other disparities, you need to isolate justified shootings from unjustified shootings. Just saying, "The police shot X people this year" doesn't mean much; you need to subtract out the justified shootings (which may not be simple, since people will disagree about what is justified, and you can't necessarily trust the police themselves to make the call) and see if there is a statistically-significant racial disparity among unjustified shootings. What the results of this analysis would be, I have no idea, but it would be more relevant to the question of racial bias in policing.
I believe that is why these kinds of analyses usually focus on the ~100 *unarmed victims* of police shootings each year (as I believe McWhorter is referencing here), instead of focusing on the ~1,000 *victims* of police shootings each year. It is not a perfect heuristic, but when the victim is unarmed it may be reasonably assumed that the shooting was unjustified (or so the logic goes, anyway).
Professor,
It is the rate of killing, measured against population - in both cases.
We should be investigating very closely all killings of anyone by police.
I wish these statistics were more broadly known and accepted. I tried to initiate a discussion with a group of former classmates, all but one of whom don't want to talk at all--they're white. And terrified. The one who's talking to me is black. The Juilliard incident--a black instructor showed a class the slave-auctioning scene in the 1977 film, Roots, and all hell broke loose--horrified me. He's apparently apologizing to students who say they are traumatized. There's a mass hysteria surrounding words and classroom material. Teaching is becoming an even more impossible profession than it formerly was; I thought of reading some Allen Ginsberg to a class the other day and--too late--remembered that "Howl" includes the phrase "negro streets." I read it, and hope nobody reports me to the dean.
It seems too dishonest to me, too destructive of the writer, too, to erase his language. But I'm not teaching in the U.S.
Yaaaay so I actually went half-crosseyed and downloaded the Washpo stats from 2020 to do my own slicing and dicing. Numbers were slightly different than what John found, though with a similar thrust:
Total killed: 1,020
Total unarmed killed: 55
Total white unarmed: 24 (76% of population, 46% of unarmed killings, 58% of violent crimes)
Total black unarmed: 18 (13.4% of population, 32% of unarmed killings, 36.7% of violent crimes)
Black people were about 4 times as likely to be killed by police, unarmed, in 2020.
They were also were 3.67 times more likely to be involved in the commission - or to be victims of - violent crime.
Full disclosure, crime stats were from 2019, so it's not 100% apples to apples. Point is, like John/Coleman/other folks who have looked deeply, I couldn't find evidence of bias in killing, once I controlled for encounters with police for violent crime arrests.
Addendum to my prior post:
Of the 1021 police killings that occurred in 2020:
646 Involved suspects with guns
172 with knives
51 with vehicles
29 with TOY WEAPONS…14 OF WHOM WERE WHITE….HELLO T RICE
39 Other
55 Unarmed….24 OF WHOM WERE WHITE
Balance unknown.
The fact that this is left out of the “National Discussion” we’re supposedly having about race is criminal. If we don’t push back against the lies with the truth we’re done as a country. And, ironically, blacks will be those who suffer the most. This is why it’s vital for men and women like Glenn and John…who are black and immune to the claim of racism…to speak the loudest.
Let's just tell it like it is...most Americans are as dumb as rocks. I quote the late and great Malcolm Muggeridge :
"So the final conclusion would surely be that whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brought the walls of his own city tumbling down, and having convinced himself that he was too numerous, labored with pill and scalpel and syringe to make himself fewer. Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over--a weary, battered old brontosaurus--and became extinct.”
The WP statistics cited by John can be filetered and summarized in a number of ways. As deplorable as the Post is when it comes to reporting truth, the Police Killing Data Base they maintain is done quite well. It allows you to filter and summarize in a number of ways. Here are the 2020 stats broken down by category:
Total Killings: 1021
Whites Killed: 457...15/Million
Blacks Killed:243...36/Million
Hispanics Killed: 170....27/Million
Others Killed: 151....5/Million
Men Killed: 983
Women Killed: 38
Now, if there was a shred of validity to correlating race and the nimber of kills, to the relative proportion of the population one would have to conclude:
1. Police are systematically executing men because they are men. Women constitute more than 50% of the population but are nearly 25 time less likely to be shot than men.
2. Whites are being killed at a rate almost 3 times higher than Asians and other non Hispanic non black minorities and are therefore being singled out for execution.
We're a dumb nation that will fall for anything. There's no easy cure for that.
John McWhorter is not just a brilliant thinker—he's the kind of brilliant thinker we badly need right now. This article is one of many prime examples.
Can someone help explain the statistics: according to the Washington Post database, black people are 2x more likely to be killed by cops than white people, AND there are almost 5x more white people in the USA than black people, so in fact blacks *are* killed by cops significantly more frequently than white people....(I'm not addressing the poverty disparity, simply the numbers in proportion to the population distribution). what am I missing here?
(Number of Killings Per Group/Total Population Per group) * 1M = Number of deaths per million.
But in this case the rates are meaningless because measuring killings as a percentage of the population is bogus on its face. If it were valid, the real beef with cops would revolve around the fact that men are nealry 25 times more likely to be killed by police than women! While we're at it...whites are 3 times more likely to be killed by cops than non hispanic non black minorities (primarily Asians). The "percentage of the population claim is a ruse. As John said...poverty is a better causal factor. Better yet, the rate of violent crime committed it an even better one. Wanna see some magic? Using those factors virtually removes all numeric disparities between the groups. Who'da dunk it?
The 'enge3mtns' or interactiuo9ins between races and Police is also, on a per capita basis, heavily AA as to white, brown asian etc.. IOW, there are a whole lot more opportunities on a comparable basis for something to go south and as we see here, Police kills whites and browns with the same stupidity, lack of training and yes, sometimes animus ( towards others who are NOT THEM as in being a Police) as they they do AA's...
To over-simplify the numbers (just to explain how both can be true), imagine that blacks are 10% of the country and whites are 50% (the 5x number you gave). Now, imagine that 1 in 10 whites get killed by cops while 2 in 10 blacks are killed by cops (obviously not realistic, but that's the 2x number). In a population of 100 people, there'd be 10 blacks, 2 killed by cops, and 50 whites, 5 killed by cops. Blacks killed at a rate twice as high, but whites killed much more frequently because they're just that much more of the population.
Chrisitiane. The WAPO is statistically accurate—or close enough. However, and this may seem counterintuitive, but police kill twice as many white people as black people. Both statements are accurate.Please read my post below. Elzbss is also accurate as he is quoting JM. If you really do not understand the numbers I suggest you try a little bit harder. The key point is JM is not about stats per se. Don’t get lost in numbers. The main point is we have politicized an issue which might have some element of truth but not enough truth to be a defining point about race. I suggest you look for other essays by JM. He has a great deal,to contribute to this subject.
Thanks- I read most of what JM writes and am in agreement with the arguments. I was asking for help with actual statistics. I expect accuracy on all ‘sides’ of this argument.
Agree----was just trying to help on the math---I think I sounded condescending! Sorry if I did---but I believe you know it
? He says they kill a disproportionate number of black people relative to white people. He says they are killed proportionately to their rate of poverty. Poor people are killed more, and more black people are poor. That was what he said in this article.
I like that the Professor keeps pounding on this point. It must be pounded on. The website, Statista, states that from 2017-March 2021, police have killed 4250 people. 22% are classified as Black. 41% are classified as White. 16% as Hispanic (and odd classification as Hispanics can be any race). 17% as “unknown”. Obviously they are not unknown—-but there is apparently no record according to Statista. 3% are other . In our whites are evil world, it is surprising Hispanics rarely show up on our nightly news as victims of police——why? I can only guess. Assuming unknowns are proportionally distributed it is 48% white, 29% Black, 19% Hispanic and 4% other. The police in US do kill a much higher percentage of people than the EU and Japan——seemingly as much as 20x more per 100,000. Yet, as distasteful this sounds, Statista states 14+ million people were arrested in 2019—so, 1 out of 14000 people were killed attempting to be arrested—-which seems low to me. If we were driven by racism, this seems remarkably low.
The race “issue” in America matters and is serious. The Professor has written much about this in a very thoughtful way in almost all of his writings. Focusing on police action against one race as a defining characteristic of America, turns all attention away from far more important issues to improve the economic conditions of black people and poor people in general. It is phony. It is political. Those who scream the loudest are the most dishonest and have other agendas.
It is designed to take our eye off the real problems we face. That is is why JM must keep pounding on this issue.
I doubt police keep track of statistics—-they are likely to keep track of their situational condition.
Agencies like the FBI, DOJ keep track of crime statistics and police shootings. About 1000 are shot by police every year in recent years. Black people represented 12 percent of the population in the states we studied, they made up 25 percent of the deaths in police shootings
By comparison, white people represented 62 percent of the population—and made up 54 percent of the deaths in encounters with police.
https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/07/16/the-research-is-clear-white-people-are-not-more-likely-than-black-people-to-be-killed-by-police/
The percentages should be 49%,26%, 21%, 4%—-excluding unknowns —for W, B, H, O.,
Cops kill white people just as easily as they kill black people as a fact. Yet it would seem that white people are not as concerned about police shootings of white people as black people are concerned about police shootings of black people. Why is this? I don't know the answer, but I suspect the explanation will explain a lot about why this fact is so hard for people to accept.
Suggestions?
Because they figure that virtually everyone who is killed by police is 1. a criminal, and 2. resisting arrest. And while unnecessary death is a shame and undesirable, the interests of criminals resisting arrest are just not high on the list of things to devote political energy and sympathy towards. There are about a hundred different causes and injustices and groups of people that need help that one can choose to focus on, before one is going to allocate energy to the rights of criminals resisting arrest.
I also think that because many white folks don't have the idea that all cops are out to get them, they're more open to the idea that tragic mistakes sometimes happen, especially in dangerous, high-adrenaline, split-second situations, and that cops make mistakes just like everyone else does. Similarly to lethal car accidents, everyone hopes to bring tragic mistakes and accidents to a minimum, but they aren't seen as a reason for assigning moral blame or generating moral outrage.
In my town, at the end of this past summer, right when the George Floyd incident and protests were still big news, a 13 year old white autistic boy who was unarmed with no weapon, who was running away in fear of cops called by his mother to check on him for an autistic meltdown, was shot by the cops 12 times. And that didn't become big news or generate any political protest. I was shocked that it wasn't a big news story. Even a disabled child with no weapon getting shot TWELVE times -- on video! -- didn't warrant anything more than a few local news stories. I don't think the officer who shot him has been charged, either, though the boy's mother has sued. I suppose it was chalked up as one of those tragic mistakes, and something the cop will probably regret for the rest of his life.
An update from Nov of the shooting of the autistic 13 year old shot in Sept: "Body camera footage released in September showed that Barton [the mother] told police her son could have a gun, but she wasn't sure whether it was real." The boy has permanent injuries and family was suing the police.
https://kutv.com/news/local/family-of-13-year-old-boy-shot-by-salt-lake-city-police-sues-department
Because a significant portion of the population believes it "can't happen to me." And they approve of it, thinking that compliance ensures safety. In a strange paradox, the focus on black people getting killed feeds that delusion.
People should check out Sam Harris’ latest podcast. He interviews Rener Gracie (of the Gracie Brazilian Jiu Jitsu dynasty) about police training, and their appalling ineptitude when going “hands on” with resisting suspects. The problem starts way before race, or guns, or the media. The truth is that if the police (or the gun fans who’ve responded here) had even minimal training on how to safely restrain people, they wouldn’t need to resort to lethal force at all in 99% of cases.
In California (where I live), police must receive 664 hours of training TOTAL to receive a badge. To be a barber? 1500 hours. After getting their badge, the average police officer receives 4 hours of training on arresting people every 2 years. That’s everything: legal issues, weapons, de-escalation...everything. That means about 1 half-hour of training on grappling every 2 years. Mr. Gracie advocates 1 hour of BJJ training every week as a minimum to achieve basic competence. This basic level of training would allow officers to avoid the “Amygdala blackout” that occurs when your life if threatened. Police that have received the basic BJJ training are confident, and remain calm. They don’t freak out and pull their gun, because they are confident that they can handle the suspect safely.
Anyway, I can’t recap the whole conversation here, but if you want to comment intelligently on this issue, you should check it out. It’s free.
Once you understand that cops are just regular people who have simply not been adequately trained to do their jobs, the whole tenor of this debate should change (unless you’re just using your favorite hammer, and looking for nails to whack).
As a military vet, I can confirm that regular training does make a difference. I think this is a great idea.
Rosa Brooks (recent book: Tangled Up in Blue, about American policing) was on Bill Maher last night & made the same point: police receive far too little weapons training.
Lack of training in going hands on drives then use their weapons, which is the worst possible option in almost every situation. Truly effective BJJ training would make the use of weapons rare. Paradoxically, the current furor over George Floyd has led to restrictions on less violent techniques. Cops who can’t go hands on effectively are forced to use strikes, Batons, tazers , and guns. The problem can be dealt with before weapons are even considered. Likewise, the issue of police violence can be addressed directly, and preempt the heated political dialogues that are fracturing our society. And the cops WANT this training. They don’t want to shoot anyone if they can help it, right? This is the reality.
Again, my intent was to recommend the Rener Gracie interview. His organization posts tons of videos where they breakdown what went wrong in arrests. It’s illuminating.
There is a police department that’s put this training into effect, and the results have been pretty incredible (Merietta, GA... not sure of the spelling). Fewer shootings, fewer injuries to cops, and most importantly, fewer injuries to citizens. Happy cops, happy citizens... that what we all want (unless you’re employed in the grievance industry)
Look, there IS no magic bullet. No matter what "system" we use to train officers the decisions around when to use only bare hands against an opponent that may be much larger physically, more powerfully built, more obviously aggressive, will be made (as they should be) on the basis of the officer avoiding physical injury. If some jackass that is 6'5" 320 lbs. comes running at an officer screaming obscenities, I don't care who the officer is or how competent s/he is in BJJ or Tai Kwon Do or whatever supposedly invincible martial art, the officer is stooopid if s/he fails to utilize some kind of tool (baton, pepper spray, Taser) in self-defense. In ordinary dealings with ordinary drunks, druggies, mopes and dopes the ordinary tools that officers are given in virtually every Department are adequate to the purpose of officer survival. It's the unordinary cases, very large people or very experienced fighters who may also be drunk, drugged, enraged or mentally ill that cause the career-ending injuries to officers. Officers are generally very aware of that.
Marietta, GA is a relatively small town (Population around 60,000) with a small-town atmosphere. It has a police force of 119 sworn officers. They have a very robust community outreach program including a citizens academy, encouraging residents to ride along with officers on patrol and a generally very transparent department that actively seeks cooperation from its citizens. That may explain much of the positive relationship between citizens and police.
Small towns also have the advantage of getting rapid feedback on the officers they hire and more personal interactions among officers, chain of command and city administration.
Listen to the interview. It’s not simple, but addressing the mechanics could really help both the cops and the people they are sworn to protect and serve. And critically, cops, citizens, politicians, all love this approach. And it saves money! Win win. Practical. Doable. Realistic. Listen. Watch the Gracie “breakdown” videos. You will almost certainly learn something that will deepen your understanding of the issue, and most importantly, give us a clear plan for an improvement that we could actually make happen
I did listen to the Sam Harris interview. My question is, in how many police encounters is the police officer even physically close enough to the suspect to make the use of Jujitsu practical? Sam never asked that question.
In the Michael Brown case, as we learned from the Steele documentary, Brown started charging the officer from some distance away. Should the officer have waited until Brown was close enough to apply Jujitsu techniques simply on the hope that Brown wasn't armed? How would Jujitsu be useful in a traffic stop where the suspect pulls a gun out of the glove box?
One of the issues brought up in the interview was the meager amount of training the police get. If the average police officer gets only 650 hours of training (compared to 2 to 3 years in Germany), how much of that limited time should be devoted to mastering Jujitsu?
I’m a high school teacher, and I know my training to deal just average bratty behavior was way less than you’d hope, much in the same way Gracie noted cops are far less prepared than the public imagines when it comes to dealing with violence. Have you ever gotten red in the face because someone offended you? Think of the variety of responses you get from teachers who lose their patience with students. We’ve all had hours of theoretical training on child psychology, but in a practical scenarios when things get heated, we are often left to our “instinct.” I air quote that because if we haven’t gone through lots of role-playing and scenarios, there is only a fight or flight that kicks in, with no muscle memory to fall back on. I say all of this because my experience in the classroom helps me understand where Gracie was coming from in explaining how more training would result in less dangerously violent interactions with police.
I hope my analogy helps you understand that in almost any profession, dealing with the public requires way more training than is usually provided. Many of us get lucky and happen to attend a really good one that teaches us to de-escalate situations, and others simply hear from a veteran colleague who suggests something like “yell” or “threaten” or “lay down the law.” Cycles of violence really only get broken with proper education, which is the basis of restorative justice. If you really believe in restorative anything, you can’t point the finger at the individual and say they are to blame, and shame on them. You have to have compassion to see the whole situation for what lead up to it on both sides, and how to move forward to prevent other similar things from happening.
The most frequent response to these obvious results is that black interaction with police outside of a shooting is the issue. DWB being the prime example. The Wapo data does not inform on this issue.
The problem here is quite simple: the media. They never consider the points you raise and never will, because it's too wonderful a moral preening opportunity. They are the brave virtuous not-racists, the people forcing us to come to terms with America's dark racist past and present, the people who are righteous and necessary and on TV.
I mean, just yesterday in the NY Post: "Chris Cuomo: Police reform comes when 'white people's kids start getting killed'"
https://nypost.com/2021/04/17/chris-cuomo-police-reform-comes-when-white-peoples-kids-start-getting-killed
I think you mean black people are 2.5x (not 2.5%) more likely to be killed by a cop. (36 per 100,000 vs. 15 per 100,000 whites according to the WaPo database you linked to). Poverty rates are also about 2.5x. (21% for blacks, 9% for whites). https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/
I also wondered if this was a mistake because I think I have heard him reference these same stats as a multiple, not a percentage.
I think many police shootings, whether the person is black or white, are justified, especially if the person has a gun which is real or looks real and is pointing it at police. For example, I understand that the popular narrative that arose around Michael Brown's death is false, he in fact was shot in the front while rushing toward the officer to grab his weapon. He had previously tried to grab the officer's gun while the officer was still in the car, resulting in a gun shot to Brown's hand.
I looked up the case of the 17 yr-old white Hannah Williams and I found it was covered on national media including CNN, NY Times, etc. Her father had made a phone call to police saying she had taken their rental car and she may want to hurt herself. Police video was released showing that she got out of her car and pointed a replica gun at police before she was shot. The other case about the man with Down's syndrome being shot who had a toy gun took place in Sweden.
There are several cases of blacks being shot that I believe are totally unjustified such as Elijah McClain, Walter Scott, Bettie Jones, Philando Castle, Kurt Reinhold (shot after jaywalking), etc. Also there are way to many people (black & white) shot during mental health crises.
I think a big problem is the attitude that police have when they approach blacks or try to take them into custody. A recent example is the case of black, fully uniformed US Army officer Caron, Nazario who was stopped while driving a brand new car with the temp. license taped inside the back window. He drove for 100 sec. to a well lit spot to pull over, and 2 VA police officers jumped out with guns drawn and spoke in a way that was hostile, rude, & disrespectful. He held his arms up outside the car window, then was ordered to get out of the car. He was afraid to put his arms down to open the door because he was thinking they would claim he was going for a gun and shoot him! They police officers ended up assaulting him and knocking him down. I think those two police officers would treat a white person in the same situation very differently and it would just be a routine traffic stop.
I would recommend Shelby Steele's documentary "What killed Michael Brown?". It is available on Amazon Prime and is well researched and thought provoking investigative and contemplative piece on how narratives on police brutality are spun and impact of such highly publicised police killings and subsequent riots on the communities where they occur.
I watched Steele's doc. Just excellent, measured, rational analysis that he also personalized by talking about his upbringing in the 1950s when black families were more intact before the liberals began the welfare scam.
Here's a twist -- one reason that one got coverage is because Al Sharpton got involved. According to the article that John cited: "Williams' family is working with civil rights leaders Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jarett Maupin of the National Action Network to find answers to what they said 'appears to be another unjustified shooting of a young person of color.'" I'm a bit confused...
Same here. I was wondering if she might be mixed race but I don't think so. The father must have just reached out to them.
Well said. One of those officers has since been fired. The others should be, too. The incident was disgraceful and may well have been racially motivated. I am the last one to assign racism to these cases, but there was no excuse for those cops' behavior.
The thing that I find frustrating about police shooting statistics is that to really make sense of racial or other disparities, you need to isolate justified shootings from unjustified shootings. Just saying, "The police shot X people this year" doesn't mean much; you need to subtract out the justified shootings (which may not be simple, since people will disagree about what is justified, and you can't necessarily trust the police themselves to make the call) and see if there is a statistically-significant racial disparity among unjustified shootings. What the results of this analysis would be, I have no idea, but it would be more relevant to the question of racial bias in policing.
I believe that is why these kinds of analyses usually focus on the ~100 *unarmed victims* of police shootings each year (as I believe McWhorter is referencing here), instead of focusing on the ~1,000 *victims* of police shootings each year. It is not a perfect heuristic, but when the victim is unarmed it may be reasonably assumed that the shooting was unjustified (or so the logic goes, anyway).