Two days ago, I spent my bus ride home furiously scrolling through the tweets coming out of Ferguson, Missouri, where the death of yet another young black man at the hands of police has sparked some serious unrest – and some horrifyingly militaristic response from the police.
I kept thinking about something my Irish Government professor said when I was on study abroad. She was explaining social contracts, and she gave the example of police force to ensure safety, and then she paused. “Well, it’s different in America,” she said, seemingly out of nowhere – we’d been talking about Ireland. “The police there have guns.” And, apparently, no social trust.
Here’s some facts on police violence:
1) We don’t know how often it happens. Every local police force in the country keeps its data on police brutality differently, and no national record is kept. (Here’s a Human Rights Watch report from the mid-90s that found persistent police abuse and little accountability in several major cities over two years, if you want an example of the kind of data we do have.)
2) Police are rarely held accountable for using excessive force. Again, there’s very little data, but here’s an example: Between 1977 and 1995 there were “scores of fatal shootings” in New York City, but not a single homicide conviction. Think Progress has more examples.
3) Black men are disproportionately the victims of police violence. A post on Tumblr this week observed that the shooter at the Aurora movie theater, a white man, wasn’t shot by police – he was arrested. On the other hand, a black man holding a BB gun in Walmart’s toy aisle was shot and killed by police last week while trying to comply with police orders and explain that the gun wasn’t real. Psychological studies have shown that police officers perceive black people to be more criminal and threatening and are quicker to shoot black men with guns than white men with guns, and to shoot black men if they’re in doubt about the presence of a gun. Of course, we didn’t need a psych study in a lab to prove that – we see it on the news all the time.
4) Police officers leave training with a bias in favor of using force. They’re also under no obligation to try to use less deadly force (for example tasers), and often aren’t even equipped with them. This is well-meaning – trying to prevent unnecessary use of tasers by simply not providing them – but it means police can escalate to lethal force more quickly.
These links all come from ThinkProgress, which has a lot more data and studies than the ones I linked here. I also could have gone to found other studies and stories that I’ve seen over the past few days – for example, about how police departments are increasingly sold military equipment, how black men are disproportionately targeted in traffic stops and stop-and-frisk policies, and the horrible, racist comments made by the Ferguson police department in response to protestors.
But I’m going to leave it at this because if I linked every reason I don’t trust cops, I literally would never get anything else done.