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