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.