US POLICE KILLED 1129 PEOPLE IN 2017

The database Mapping Police Violence reports that police in the US killed 1,129 people in 2017; an average of three people every day. The number is unacceptable but not surprising--US police officers have killed more than 1,000 people every year for at least the past three years.

As has been the case for many years, the color of your skin matters a lot, with Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans being killed a far higher rates than whites, independently of whether or not they were suspected of a violent crime or were armed.

One out of 1,129

 Credit: Vimeo.com

As has also been the case for many years, the US is an extreme outlier compared to other countries. As documented by the Guardian, US police kill more people in a few days than police in other countries do in years.

Our nation's current attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is doing everything he can to make this situation worse. He's ended an Obama-era federal police oversight program that had cut the police killing rate in cities with some of the worst rates of police killings. Trump too is doing his best to make things worse by repeatedly demeaning and besmirching the patriotism of the NFL players protesting police violence, along with the Black Lives Matter movement.

How about a national new year's resolution to save 500 lives by cutting the rate of police killings in half? Even if we were to accomplish that, US citizens would still be at far greater risk of being killed by their police than people in other countries, but at least it would be a start.

It can be done. Studies have shown that police departments that require officers to use all other means before shooting cut their killing rate by 25 percent, as do departments that require that all use of force be reported. Simply banning chokeholds and strangleholds cuts police killings by 22 percent.

It can be done, but not with the kind of leadership currently coming from Washington.

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You can read earlier posts on this subject here and also here.

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US POLICE KILLED THREE PEOPLE A DAY IN 2016

The international newspaper The Guardian has been tracking killings by police in the US since 2015. They've just published their findings for 2016. The numbers continue to be shocking, both in terms of racial disparities and the enormous contrast between the US and other countries.

Protest following the death of Akai Gurley, 11/20/14--Credit Wikimedia

The basics:

--Police in the US killed 1091 people in 2016, slightly down from 1,146 in 2015.

That represents a rate of 3.4 deaths per million people in the US. For perspective, that's 44 times the rate in the UK, 38 times higher than in Germany, 24 times the rate in Canada and 15 times that of France.

--If you're Black in America, your risk of being killed by police is 2.3 times as high as if you're white.

--If you're a Black man 15 to 34 years old, your risk of dying in a police encounter is 9 times that of whites and 4 times higher than a white man your age.

--If you're a Native American, you have 3.5 times the risk of being killed by police than if you're white.

--Deaths at the hands of police vary greatly state-by-state. Police in Alaska, New Mexico and Oklahoma are 3 times as likely to kill people as the national average, and 10 times more likely than police in Delaware, with just one such death in 2016 and a population just under 1,000,000.

In recent years, videotapes of shootings by police under questionable circumstances have shocked millions of people, provoked multiple demonstrations and riots, and brought the issue of police use of lethal force in the US out into the open. Although the statistics for 2016 (and earlier years) clearly show a serious racial bias in US policing, we should be equally concerned about the fact that US citizens, regardless of race or ethnicity, are far more likely to die at the hands of police than citizens of any other western nation.

You can read about some of the causes and possible cures for this ongoing epidemic in two earlier postings:

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE US--DUE PROCESS VS STREET "JUSTICE"

OFFICER-INVOLVED DEATHS IN BLACK AND WHITE

And you can read an update for the first 10 months of 2017, showing a continuation of the same deadly pattern, here.

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE US--DUE PROCESS VS STREET "JUSTICE"

As I discussed in an earlier post, "Officer Involved Deaths in Black and White," there's an enormous gap between justice as its administered in our courts and "justice" as it is meted out in the thousands of fatal encounters with police that take place in the US every year.

Justice in a court of law / Credit Slater and Zurz

First, a little background about capital punishment.

The US is the only western nation that currently enforces the death penalty. Thirty-two states and the US federal government apply it; 18 states and the District of Columbia do not. There were no legal executions in the US between 1967 and 1977. Since then, more than 1400 convicts have been executed, an average of about 40 people per year (just 20 in 2016, a 25-year low). The death penalty has not been shown to decrease murders or other crimes. The murder rate in non-death-penalty states is consistently lower--30 percent on average--than in death-penalty states. Nonetheless, capital punishment in the US retains strong popular support.

As you would expect, the death penalty is only applied for very serious offenses. These vary from state to state, for example intentional homicide with aggravating circumstances such as rape, multiple victims, or the killing of an on-duty police officer. At the federal level, treason, espionage and large-scale drug trafficking are also capital offenses. The constitutional right to due process guarantees that even after a fair trial, conviction and sentencing, convicts facing death have access to legal appeals that can delay their execution for years--currently an average of more than 14 years.

None of the above is true on the streets:

--Rather that 40 per year, 1000 to 2000 people die in encounters with police every year--25 to 50 times more than are legally executed.

--As multiple notorious cases have shown in recent years, a fatal encounter with police can stem from a broken tail-light, shoplifting, carrying a crucifix, or as minorities have been reporting for years, walking, driving or parking while Black, Hispanic or Native American.

--As a depressing number of videos show, "due process" is often reduced to minutes or even seconds between an officer's first contact with a suspect and a fatal barrage of shots.

--Fatal encounters with police are far from fair with respect to race or ethnicity. A recent study in the American Journal of Public Health analyzed 2,285 "legal intervention deaths" in the US between 2010 and 2014 and found that Blacks, Native Americans and Alaskan Natives were 2.7 times more likely to die in police encounters than Whites, and Hispanics 1.6 times more likely to die.

--The interactions between police and the people they are supposed to serve and protect vary greatly from state to state. Police in New Mexico, with a population just over 2 million, killed 28 people in the first half of 2016. Nevada, with a comparable population, saw just 4 police-related deaths. Arizona has a slightly smaller population than Washington, yet Arizona police killed more than twice as many people. Californians are three times more likely to die in an arrest-related event than New Yorkers. There's something wrong with this picture.

Justice on the street / Credit A Gude

Of course, this does not mean that all or most of those deaths are illegal or illegitimate. Police officers do represent the front line of our system of justice, place their own lives at risk (although not nearly as much as the public believes), and have to deal with many difficult and sometimes dangerous people and situations. University of South Carolina criminologist Geoff Alpert points out that in 98.9 percent of cases, killings by police are found to be justified.

However, justified does not mean necessary or just. The number of police killings places the US at the ragged edge of other developed countries. A few examples:

The US has about 6 times the population of England and Wales. Yet US police killed more people in the first 24 days of 2015 than police in England and Wales over the last 24 years.

The US has about 4 times the population of Germany. US police kill two or three times as many people every week as German police do in a year. Almost twice as many unarmed Black men (19) were killed by US police in 2015 than all the people killed by police in Germany that year (10).

The police in Kern County, California--population 875000--killed 14 people in 2015. That's almost three times as many as were killed that year by police in Germany and the UK combined--total population 145,000,000.

Police in my home town, Albuquerque, New Mexico, killed 28 people between January, 2010 and July, 2014. That's more than twice as many as police killed in Germany during the same time period. Albuquerque has a population of 556,000. Germany has a population of 80,620,000. That means that the citizens of Albuquerque were 300 times more likely to die at the hands of police than the citizens of Germany.

Clearly, there's something different about how US police are trained, governed and see their relationship to the rest of us, compared to police in other countries. You can read a thoughtful expert commentary by criminal justice professor Paul Hirschfield at this URL.

Hirschfield identifies a variety of contributing factors, but emphasizes that police in other developed countries receive significantly more training than in the US, including  much more training in how to manage critical situations--for example dealing with agitated or mentally ill people--without resorting to lethal force.

He also focuses on national and international standards which typically permit lethal force only as a last resort and when absolutely necessary. In the US, standards are far more lax. Most states empower police to use lethal force if they reasonably believe they or someone else is at risk of imminent or grave harm. In the vast majority of cases, review boards, district attorneys, judges and juries give police officers enormous leeway concerning the circumstances or behavior that could have justified their perception of risk, resulting in a lack of accountability. A recent in-depth study by Reuters reveals how police union contracts across the country can shield officers who repeatedly use excessive force or even engage in clearly criminal acts, for example by expunging their records every few years. A recent Pew Research Center survey finds that 72 percent of police officers nationwide agree that badly performing fellow officers are not held accountable.

It's in large part that very low bar to the use of lethal force in the US that leads to the kinds of killings that outrage us all too frequently. Both training and the legal standards for the use of lethal force need to be improved if the police are to be seen not as soldiers on the front line of a war, but as the face of justice in our communities and on the streets.

OFFICER INVOLVED DEATHS IN BLACK AND WHITE

If you consider yourself a member of the fact-based community, you might be interested in some new research about deaths at the hands of police in the U.S.

Memorial to Michael Brown, Ferguson, Missouri. Credit: Jamelle Bouie

The study was carried out by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York. They analyzed data from the National Violent Death Reporting System for the years 2009 through 2012. The 812 fatal encounters they studied came from 17 states that voluntarily provide the CDC with relevant statistics.


You can access the full report, "Death Due to Lethal Force by Law Enforcement," here. 

I'll list some of their key findings:

The victims were predominantly male (96.1%), as were the police officers involved (97.4%). 

Blacks were 2.8 times more likely to die at the hands of police than whites.

If you assume that blacks are more likely to be armed in these fatal encounters, you would be wrong. Black victims were 1.6 times more likely to be unarmed (14.8%) compared to whites (9.4%).

If you assume that blacks are more likely to have placed the officers involved at risk, you would also be wrong. "Black victims were also significantly less likely than whites to have posed an immediate threat to LE [law enforcement]," the authors write.

The authors cite an earlier study by other researchers using FBI statistics that found that the likelihood of a suspect being killed per 100,000 police stops or arrests was not significantly different among blacks, hispanics and non-hispanic whites. However, the same study showed that compared to whites and Asians, blacks, native Americans and Hispanics were stopped by police significantly more frequently.

That study also produced two statistics that surprised me--a suspect or bystander is seriously injured or killed in one out of every 291 police stops, and U.S. police killed or injured an estimated 55,400 people in 2012.

The 812 deaths in 17 states analyzed in the current study represent just a fraction of the total number of people killed by police during those years. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but the Nevada-based website fatalencounters.org sets out to count every case by collating information from multiple sources. They list by name 3825 individuals who died in encounters with police during those same years.

If you compare either number with the number of legal executions (i.e. capital punishment) in the United States--never more than 100 in any year since 1976, and just 43 in 2012--it becomes obvious that there is an enormous gap between justice applied with our constitutionally-guaranteed due process and what actually happens many times per day on the street. You'll find a more recent, in-depth post on that subject here.

The authors of the current study take pains not to vilify law enforcement officers. They write about the kinds of implicit biases that almost everyone carries, perhaps exacerbated by negative experiences policing particular neighborhoods, training issues, police culture, and a variety of other factors that together may help explain this disparity.

Whatever the causes, the study provides hard data that support what blacks know all too well--that far too many black men die in encounters with police, including a disproportionate number who are unarmed and non-threatening.

But it's also clear that this isn't just a racial problem--it's a systemic nationwide problem involving the police and the communities they are supposed to serve. Even the "safest" Americans, non-Hispanic whites, are 26 times more likely to die in an encounter with police than, for example, a German citizen. 

Whatever happened to "protect and serve?"

Credit: Thomas Hawk

Chimps kill their neighbors—now we know why

Since Jane Goodall first described it in 1979, scientists have known that chimpanzee bands make organized raids into neighboring territories where they attack and kill chimpanzees from other groups. What they didn’t know was why.

Some researchers speculated that the goal of these raids was to seize territory; others thought that it might be a way of recruiting females from a victimized group into the raiders’ band. Some anthropologists argued that such attacks only took place in chimp communities that had been disturbed by human interventions such as providing food.

Researchers Sylvia Amsler, a biological anthropologist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, David Watts, at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and John Mitani at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, say that they’ve proved that the goal of this form of chimpanzee aggression is to take over territory.

They describe their findings in the June 21, 2010 edition of Current Biology.

Amsler and her colleagues studied a large band of chimpanzees—the Ngogo group—in Uganda’s Kibale National Park for more than ten years. They observed dozens of organized raids, usually by large numbers of adult and adolescent males, although occasionally with females as well. The Ngogo band’s raids were focused on a region to the northeast of their home range.  In ten years of what the researchers refer to as “patrols,” the Ngogo chimps killed 21 individuals from that neighboring band.

That represents a very high mortality rate—some 5 to 17 times higher than has been measured among human hunter-gatherer societies, and 23 to 75 times higher than what’s been seen in other chimpanzee studies.

The researchers identify two factors that may account for this unusual rate of violence and killing. The Ngogo habitat is unusually rich, so the band has grown to some 150 individuals, about three times larger than the average chimpanzee band. That means that there are a lot more adult and adolescent males available to form large and successful raiding parties.

Amsler and her colleagues believe that their findings rule out the theory that chimps only kill each other as a result of human interference. They point out that neither the Ngogo band nor its neighbors have ever been provisioned by humans, and that the raiding they’ve observed is clearly adaptive. The Ngogo band has increased its territory by some 22 percent at the expense of its neighbors. As a result, more of its members are likely to survive and reproduce.

Although the chimpanzee raids are eerily similar to human intergroup aggression and violence, the researchers are reluctant to discuss any linkage.

They do speculate, however, that the high level of within-group cooperation that lets chimpanzees form these patrols and carry out lethal raids on their neighbors may tell us something about the evolution of high levels of cooperative behavior within human groups.

It would be ironic if the researchers are right, and that it was our primate ancestors cooperating among themselves in order to compete aggressively with outsiders that made us as cooperative as we are today.

Journal reference: John C. Mitani, David P. Watts and Sylvia J. Amsler, “Lethal intergroup aggression leads to territorial expansion in wild chimpanzees,” Current Biology Vol. 20 No. 12.

For a more in-depth read, click here to see my Suite101 story about this research.

accutane

Robert Adler

For the institute