Police Deadly Force: Then and Now

[Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]

Police Deadly Force: Then and Now
By Yves Smith
Nov 7 2019
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/11/police-deadly-force-then-and-now.html

Yves here. It is noteworthy that some of the findings on police violence in the US don’t hew to popular perceptions, particularly regarding the Deep South. That particular discussion below ties in with an important post we also feature in Links today (hat tip UserFriendly), When Did Democrats Lose the South?

By Rajiv Sethi, Professor of Economics, Barnard College, Columbia University, & External Professor, Santa Fe Institute. Originally published at his website: <https://rajivsethi.blogspot.com/2019/11/deadly-force-then-and-now.html>

On Wednesday, October 30 there was an extraordinary conference at the Schomburg Center, marking the 75th anniversary of Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma. The conference was conceived and organized by Alondra Nelson and Dan O’Flaherty, and video of the entire event is available in two parts here (click on the landing page to see a menu). A companion digital platformbrings to a much wider audience research memoranda written by the many exceptional scholars who worked alongside Myrdal, but who remain largely “hidden figures” to this day.
Speakers at the conference were limited to ten minutes. My own remarks were based on Chapter 8 of my recent book with Dan, which draws on material from the Schomburg archives. The text is reproduced below with a few minor edits and links added (the full session is in the Part 2 recordingstarting at around 2:50:00):
I’m so immensely grateful to the organizers for the opportunity to speak on this occasion, with this amazing group of panelists.

I’d like to speak mostly about crime and policing, which is the topic of my recent book with Dan, and how this work led us to the archives of the Schomburg Center in search of information on the history of police-community relations, and data on the historical use of deadly force.

As many other panelists have pointed out, American Dilemma was built on the work of dozens of researchers, who painstakingly assembled vast amounts information. Only part of that knowledge made it into print, much of the rest remains largely hidden from view.

I’ll talk about what Dan and I found in the Schomburg archives in just a few minutes, but let me begin by saying a few words about what we know about police-related homicides today.

One thing we know is that we don’t know much—there’s still no complete and reliable source of official data on the use of deadly force by police in the United States.

As Paul Butler has written in his book Chokehold, the “information about itself that a society collects—and does not collect—is always revealing about the values of that society. We know, as we should, exactly how many police officers are killed in the line of duty. But we do not know, as we should, exactly how many civilians are killed by the police.”

Even James Comey, when he was FBI Director in 2015, described the absence of official statistics on police homicides as embarrassing, ridiculous, and unacceptable.

But over the past few years, unofficial statistics have started to be compiled, some by traditional media organizations like the Guardian and the Washington Post, and others by relatively new online sources like Mapping Police Violence and Fatal Encounters.

These data only go back a few years, but we can already see a few patterns that I’d like to bring to your attention.

First, the scale of police killing in the United States far exceeds that in other comparable countries. According to the Guardian data, police kill about 1,100 civilians a year. In contrast, German police kill about 8 and British police about 2. The US population is about three times as large as these countries combined, but the rate of deadly force is more than a hundred times as great.

Second, there are significant racial and ethnic disparities in exposure to deadly force. The most highly exposed groups are African Americans and Native Americans, followed by Latinos, and the least exposed are whites and Asians. In the Guardian data for example, African Americans are about two and half times as likely to be victims of lethal force relative to white civilians. But these racial and ethnic disparities vary widely by location: in the five largest cities, the ratio of black to white exposure to lethal force ranges from four in Houston to eighteen in Chicago.

Third, there are staggering differences across states in the incidence of lethal force. The deadliest states have about eight times the rate of lethal force as the safest. Police homicides occur most often in Western states and parts of the South. The eight states with the highest incidence in the Guardian data are New Mexico, Oklahoma, Alaska, Arizona, Wyoming, West Virginia, Colorado, and Nevada. Six of these are in the West, the other two in the South. By contrast, the safest states are in the Northeast.

Fourth, extremely large differences also exist among the largest cities. New York and Los Angeles are both large, diverse, coastal, and liberal cities with strict gun laws, but every demographic group is much safer in New York than in Los Angeles today. White civilians in Los Angeles are almost four times as likely to be killed by police as those in New York. Latinos in Los Angeles are more than eight times as likely to be killed as those in New York. And Houston is even deadlier for white civilians than Los Angeles. In fact, the differences in overall rates is so great that white residents of Houston are more likely to be killed by police than African Americans in New York City.

[snip]