Obama "assured" NPR that the issue of mistrust between police and minority communities isn't new. He claimed, though, that it hasn't been widely discussed until now, and that the current discussion is "probably healthy."
But the problem that has surfaced under Obama isn't "discussion" of police-community relations. The problem is race rioting and violence against the police.
The Ferguson rioting; the chants calling for "dead cops" now; the assassination and attempted assassination of police officers; the reluctance, or even the refusal, of the police to respond promptly to calls for help -- these are phenomena we haven't witnessed since the 1970s.
These phenomena aren't "discussions,"and they certainly aren't "healthy." They are evidence of a deterioration in race relations and signs of a breakdown in society.
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Race Relations Tank, Part II
Race is morally irrelevant and in a correctly functioning world would be legally irrelevant. But that is not the world we live in, and discussing race on a criminal law blog has become, unfortunately from my point of view, inescapable.
President Obama says that race relations have improved. This is simply false, as I noted in Race Relations Tank.
The reason they've tanked under the President's grievance-pumping Administration isn't hard to figure out. The flashpoint was the Ferguson riot. To say the least, things have not improved since. Here's a start on the explanation:
Recently we have seen a rise in the number of citizens who are killed during interactions with police officers. Growing up in a small Indiana town with a police officer for a father, I was taught to respect the police, that they are our friends. I was never frightened about encountering an officer, quite the contrary I would welcome such interaction. What I have now learned is that this is a result of the bubble of white privilege in which I was raised.
I have no idea what it’s like to walk down the street and fear being stopped by the police. My parents never had to teach me what I’ve now learned some African Americans feel they have to teach their children: be careful when you’re with the police, make sure you make yourself as unthreatening as possible, don’t resist, just stay calm and make it out of the interaction alive.
Now that I’m finally awake and aware of this issue, and with the national attention police shootings have been getting in the past few months, I started to research. I set out to find statistics on the number of citizens who are shot and killed by police yearly, but this information proved hard to find. The Bureau of Justice Statistics does keep records of what they call “Arrest-Related Deaths” which are deaths that occur while in police custody any time from arrest through incarceration. This number clearly contains broader information than I was seeking, and is unfortunately years behind, but nonetheless we have that from 2003-2009 there were more than 4,800 deaths of Americans while in police custody .
In a 2011 article in the Law Vegas Review Journal Alan Maimon wrote, "The nation's leading law enforcement agency [FBI] collects vast amounts of information on crime nationwide, but missing from this clearinghouse are statistics on where, how often, and under what circumstances police use deadly force. In fact, no one anywhere comprehensively tracks the most significant act police can do in the line of duty: take a life." The federal government keeps records on obscure illnesses and the NSA combs through our phone records but no one in the federal government has concerned themselves with compiling data about how many people are maimed or killed by the police, the very people entrusted with protecting average American citizens. So now I ask, why is this information not compiled? The most obvious answer might just be that “they” (the powers that be) don’t want us to know.
Because this information is unavailable from the government, we must look to citizens and groups who do their own research on these incidents. Jim Fisher from his namesake true crime blog has compiled research from 2011 and reported that active police officers shot over 1,100 people that year, resulting in more than 600 deaths . A 2014 USA Today article reported that there are over 400 police shootings per year reported to the FBI, but then points out that only a fraction of local police agencies report this information . And far more minorities are killed in police shootings than their white counterparts . The statistics on criminality do not support the idea that minorities are more likely to commit crime or specifically violent crime; blacks and whites tend to commit most crimes at roughly the same rate. So what can account for minorities being killed far more often than whites by the police? It stands to reason that racial bias plays a role.
And what is causing this spike in police shootings across the nation? Some suggest that the militarization of the police is to blame. The government authorized the spending of billions on weapons and armor to be used by our soldiers to fight our wars over the past decade, and now that more troops are coming home, this military-grade weaponry has been passed on to local police departments to be used on our citizenry. I have yet to hear a convincing reason for why local police departments need tanks capable of withstanding IED explosions, or the high-powered firearms suited for the battlefield. And we cannot discount the affect that uniforms and tools have on one’s mentality. When one is armed to the teeth he may feel comfortable being much more aggressive than he would if he were meagerly armed like the police in Europe.
Distrust of the police is at an all-time high with protesters even calling for the murder of cops. While many questions about why this is happening and how we can make it stop are left unanswered, what’s clear is that a society cannot sustain when there is not lawful order.
Sources:
Burch, Andrea M. “Arrest-Related Deaths”, Bureau of Justice Statistics, accessed at http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4943.
Fisher, Jim. “Jim Fisher True Crime Statistics”, December 25, 2013, accessed at http://jimfishertruecrime.blogspot.com/2012/01/police-involved-shootings-2011-annual.html.
Id. Johnson, Kevin. “Local Police Involved in 400 Killings Per Year”, USA Today, accessed at http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/08/14/police-killings-data/14060357/.
Id.
A comment and a question.
The comment is this. You say, "The statistics on criminality do not support the idea that minorities are more likely to commit crime or specifically violent crime; blacks and whites tend to commit most crimes at roughly the same rate."
That is false, and by a goodly margin.
The question is this: Do you think Tsarnaev should get less than the death penalty on the theory that one of his victims, Martin Richard, had, like you, a life of "white privilege"?