How to Think About Police Brutality
The recent protests over George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police have brought attention to an issue in many communities — relations between police and the communities they serve. Outright police brutality might be rare, but it isn’t a myth either.
Like any social issue, relations between police departments and the public can often distorted and lied about for political reasons. No one can deny that sometimes a police officer uses way too much force. No one can deny that sometimes a cop will take the opportunity to “go to town” on a minority suspect. But, how bad are things, really? How do we know? The claim I’m addressing here is this: How much do we really know about the problem of police brutality, aka excessive use of force by police officers?
Measuring Police Brutality:
Police brutality is only a subset of police misconduct, but this is naturally the sort of police misconduct that concerns citizens the most. Police misconduct is not that unusual according to the CATO Institute. However, of the 1% who commit misconduct in a given year, how many officers unjustly beat, shoot, or strangle someone?
Beginning in 2018, USAToday worked with 100 local newsrooms and a nonprofit called Invisible Institute to compile over 200,000 cases of police misconduct in 10 years. The most important statistic has to be the 22,924 alleged uses of excessive force. The investigation also turned up thousands of cases of official dishonesty, such as obstruction, perjury, and witness tampering.
How many law enforcement officers are there in the United States? Depending gon how you define “law enforcement officer”, the number will vary. According to the geeks at Statista.com, there were 686,665 law enforcement officers in the United States in 2018. The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund claims over there are over 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers in 2020. So, let’s use the larger figure — a nice round number — to talk about the rate of police misconduct.
Let’s do the math. If there were 800,000 law enforcement officers in 2020 and 22,924 used excessive force over 10 years, that would be 2,300 instances of excessive force reported per year, rounding up. That record of 200,000 reports of misconduct yields an average of 20,000 per year. If we can rely on both the 800,000 figure and the 20,000 figure, how much misconduct is there each year? Well, 20,000 is about 2.5% of 800,000. That 20,000 figure covers all kinds of offenses, from killing a subject to speeding when it wasn’t necessary.
Based on percentages, it seems like misconduct happens more often than we’d like, but serious misconduct is probably quite rare. That somewhat solid conclusion doesn’t mean police treat everyone the same, a subject that’s been addressed in the news lately.
White People, Black People, and Police:
After George Floyd’s death in police custody, politicians and activists have paid considerable attention to the different experiences that white people and black people have with police. Unfortunately, the data suggest white people and black people have different experiences of dealing with the police.
What does reliable data tell us, versus what politicians and activists might say? Here are some key facts from a recent Pew Research study:
- 75% of white people and 33% of black people said police did a good or excellent job of using the appropriate amount of force
- Black officers are almost twice as likely as white officers to think that fatal encounters between blacks and police are signs of a wider problem, versus isolated incidents.
- 59% of black men and 31% of black women said they had been unfairly stopped by police.
Arguably, those unfair police stops lead to more violent encounters. Either way, it looks like black people have good reason to be nervous when they see police officers. Of course, people on both sides of the political spectrum like to bring this up for different reasons.
How to Lie About Police Brutality:
A dishonest operator will just rattle off some statistics about police misconduct. If you don’t pay close attention, you’ll get the impression that most police departments are full of corrupt and violent cops. Certainly, some people on the far Left want to spread that narrative.
Other propagandists will share a story or two. The stories will be shocking, invariably involving rape or murder. The conclusion we can reach from those anecdotes is this — someone chose a couple of stories to make a point. As some anonymous wag said, “the plural of anecdote is not data”. In other words, you can’t string together some stories and say you’ve presented data on police brutality.
Another dishonest tactic involves police shootings and how activists frame them. You might read that police fatally shot 1,216 people in 2019 or something like that. I made up the number, but the real number doesn’t matter. You can’t say how many of those shootings were justifiable and how many were not. Maybe it was 98% and 2%. Conservatives and racists might exploit that fuzziness to say that blacks are more aggressive with police, so they get shot more often. If pressed, will they present useful statistics? Probably not.
The clever racist might also point out that blacks commit felonies at a higher rate than whites. This is true, but you need to offer a bit more evidence to make the claim that cops are more likely going to need deadly force when dealing with blacks. Racists cannot or will not do the digging.
Resources:
National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund
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