Protesters on the front lines have not spent their pandemic lockdowns studying data from the FBI or Bureau of Justice Statistics, in anticipation of the day when they would go public en masse equipped with a case.
The visible outrage ignited by George Floyd’s death hasn’t been driven by data. It has been driven by a video showing the entire event of his horrific death and, preceding all that, years of experiences of African Americans’ interactions with police.
Relying on experience as a method of interpretation is wholly human. What we see and touch, what happens to us and others, is what we most immediately know.
Republican Sen. Tim Scott has, on multiple occasions, outlined his interactions with police, having been stopped seven times in one year as an elected official for, as he said a few weeks ago, “just driving while black.” Those experiences undoubtedly contributed to his determination that “there’s too much abuse within law enforcement towards African American men.”
In a Sunday essay, conservative writer David French outlined the experiences of his black, adopted daughter, Naomi, who was once questioned by a police officer while at a department store “about who she was with and what she was shopping for.” This, in addition to other experiences, led French to write, “It became increasingly implausible that all the explanations were benign.”
Even for those who haven’t shared in those experiences, watching Floyd die on camera and watching the officer refuse his pleas for relief imparts a great deal of information itself in the absence of experience.
These anecdotes have meanings and ought to be admitted as evidence in any conversation about what’s going on with police and race. There is a risk, however, of imputing an undue measure of representativeness onto police everywhere.
Where anecdotes are challenged as not representative, data rains down. Heather Mac Donald is among the outspoken voices arguing against allegations of systemic police aggression and racism. Her 2016 book, The War on Cops, offered a strong statistical rebuttal to prevailing conclusions about policing during the late Obama years. Mac Donald was back with the data earlier this month. She pointed to study after study challenging claims that police departments are racist all over.
The data is compelling, and it also ought to be admitted as evidence in any conversation about what’s going on with police and race. However, in using use of force as the only, or even the primary, determinant of whether or not police single out minorities, data arguments like this one leave much aside. They don’t tell us anything about those who share the experience of Scott or Naomi French. Granted, they aren’t equipped to do so, but their utility against “systemic racism” or claims should be recognized as only partial.
What we are trying to do is formulate a complete picture. That effort has us trying to square experiences with data sets, and it proves challenging. The thing to recognize is that both have limits, but that both demand inclusion in the conversation.
