Anyone familiar with U.S. crime statistics, and especially murder statistics, is aware that the nation has gotten much safer in recent decades. Homicides, in particular, have declined since the 1990s.
Yet, not all people are equally able to enjoy this great boom in public safety.
According to FBI data, the number of black people murdered annually in the United States bottomed out in 1999 (at 5,855) and has climbed by an astounding 27% (to 7,407 in 2018). Blacks make up 52% of all murder victims, even though they comprise just 12% of the U.S. population. Whites of all ethnicities, who make up more than 70% of the population, are killed each year in smaller numbers (6,088 in 2019), even as their population swells with new Hispanic arrivals.
It is clear enough, then, that crime chooses its victims with a racial bias. That fact looms in the background of the current debate over police brutality, especially when it generates silly ideas such as abolishing or “defunding” the police. The fact is, blacks benefit disproportionately from policing — provided that it is done properly. Were the police to disappear, blacks would suffer disproportionately.
Unfortunately, policing is often done badly. The recent death of George Floyd illustrates once again that police officers are not only endowed with the same faults as everyone else, but also given a lot more power and authority to put those faults on display. They can be callow, ill-tempered, callous, or cynical. Some are even racists. Unfortunately, the act of giving someone a badge and telling him to keep order on behalf of the community does not make him less violent or cruel — but thanks largely to the near-certain intervention of police unions, it can make him less accountable.
This issue, including how central to the question race is or is not, is more complicated than the terms of the current debate would admit. For example, amid the media’s monomaniacal focus on race, no one is discussing how police in the U.S. are just flat-out failing to employ appropriate tactics for de-escalating even relatively low-risk situations, let alone more difficult ones. Over and over again, they can be found choking out low-risk suspects in trivial crimes or shooting pet dogs upon their arrival at a private residence. This speaks to a misguided goal, no doubt reflected in most state and local forces’ faulty police training, to try to “take control” of situations rather than to be satisfied with merely defusing them. Yes, there are and will always be cases where force (and even lethal force) is required and fully justified, but it’s probably no accident that police in other countries somehow manage to handle unarmed criminals with far fewer deaths.
Beyond tactics, cases like those of Floyd and Eric Garner imply that police forces are exceedingly poorly trained in standard procedures. They also seem unwilling to correct fellow officers, even where it means letting a suspect suffer or die.
One argument we do not accept — it is a fallacy — is that one can somehow justify or excuse police violence against blacks on the grounds that black-on-black crime is so common. This argument, which comes up too frequently, is a deflection that borrows from the playbook of identity politics. It attempts to impute collective responsibility to all blacks for what a relatively small number of individuals did. To put it another way, the “black community” has no more obligation to “get its act together” regarding such criminality than the “white community” of today bears responsibility for Timothy McVeigh, Nickelback, Ken Lay, or slavery. We all make individual choices, and we have to accept personal responsibility for them.
One final disturbing problem is illustrated in the recent viral confrontation in Central Park. Amy Cooper threatened to call the police and tell them that a black man was harassing her, simply because he had asked her to comply with the local leash law. When she made this threat, she was counting on two all-pervasive perceptions: first, that blacks fear officers as a potential threat to their lives, and second, that officers can be counted on to be especially unforgiving and antipathetic toward blacks. This speaks to a further truth. Whatever their intentions and whatever gimmicks they try, police forces are utterly failing to generate goodwill in communities that desperately need more, not less, of their services. Clearly, something big needs to change.
