@icehorse ,
@Revoltingest ,
@columbus ,
I'm reacting to this:
"
How many times per year do you think that happens? How many times per year do you think that happens to white people?
Is it a problem? Of course. But how big a problem really?"
Isn't this implying that "it" ( killing or harming unarmed citizens ) happens to white people just as much as non-white people? At the very least it minimizes / diminishes the extent of the problem?
If my own bias is interfering with my understanding of these words, please by all means correct me.
One perspective written by an African-American:
the basic premise of Black Lives Matter—that racist cops are killing unarmed black people—is false. There was a time when I believed it... Any suggestion to the contrary struck me as at best, ignorant, and at worst, bigoted.
My opinion has slowly changed. I still believe that racism exists and must be condemned in the strongest possible terms; I still believe that, on average, police officers are
quicker to rough up a black or Hispanic suspect; and I still believe that police misconduct happens far too often and routinely goes unpunished. But I no longer believe that the cops disproportionately kill unarmed black Americans.
Two things changed my mind: stories and data.
First, the stories. Each story in this paragraph involves a police officer killing an unarmed white person. (To demonstrate how commonly this happens, I have taken all of them from a single year, 2015, chosen at random). Timothy Smith was
killed by a police officer who mistakenly thought he was reaching into his waistband to grab a gun; the shooting was ruled justified.
William Lemmon was killed after he allegedly failed to show his hands upon request; the shooting was ruled
justified. Ryan Bolinger was
shot dead by a cop who said he was moving strangely and walking toward her; the shooting was ruled
justified. Derek Cruice was
shot in the face after he opened the door for police officers serving a warrant for a drug arrest; the cops recovered
marijuana from the property, and the shooting was ruled justified.
Daniel Elrod robbed a dollar store, and, when confronted by police, allegedly failed to raise his hands upon request (though his widow, who witnessed the event, insists otherwise); he was shot dead.
No criminal charges were filed. Ralph Willis was
shot dead when officers mistakenly thought that he was reaching for a gun. David Cassick was
shot twice in the back by a police officer while lying face down on the ground. Six-year-old Jeremy Mardis was
killed by a police officer while sitting in the passenger seat of a car; the officer’s intended target was Jeremy’s father, who was sitting in the driver’s seat with
his hands raised out the window.
Autumn Steele was shot dead when a police officer, startled by her German shepherd, immediately fired his weapon at the animal, catching her in the crossfire. Shortly after he killed her, bodycam footage
revealed the officer’s despair: “I’m f------ going to prison,” he says. The officer was not disciplined.
For brevity’s sake, I will stop here. But the list goes on.
For every black person killed by the police, there is at least one white person (usually many) killed in a similar way. The day before cops in Louisville barged into Breonna Taylor’s home and killed her, cops barged into the home of a white man named
Duncan Lemp, killed him, and wounded his girlfriend (who was sleeping beside him). Even George Floyd, whose death was particularly brutal, has a white counterpart:
Tony Timpa. Timpa was killed in 2016 by a Dallas police officer who used his knee to pin Timpa to the ground (face down) for 13 minutes. In the video, you can hear Timpa whimpering and begging to be let go. After he lets out his final breaths, the officers begin
cracking jokes about him. Criminal charges initially brought against them were later
dropped.
At a gut level, it is hard for most people to feel the same level of outrage when the cops kill a white person. Perhaps that is as it should be. After all, for most of American history, it was white suffering that provoked more outrage. But I would submit that if this new “anti-racist” bias is justified—if we now have a moral obligation to care more about certain lives than others based on skin color, or based on racial-historical bloodguilt—then everything that I thought I knew about basic morality, and everything that the world’s philosophical and religious traditions have been saying about common humanity, revenge, and forgiveness since antiquity, should be thrown out the window.
You might agree that the police kill plenty of unarmed white people, but object that they are more
likely to kill unarmed black people, relative to their share of the population. That’s where the data comes in. The objection is true as far as it goes; but it’s also misleading. To demonstrate the existence of a racial bias, it’s not enough to cite the fact that black people comprise 14 percent of the population but
about 35 percent of unarmed Americans shot dead by police. (By that logic, you could prove that police shootings were extremely sexist by pointing out that men comprise 50 percent of the population but
93 percent of unarmed Americans shot by cops.)
Instead, you must do what all good social scientists do: control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable has upon another (in this case, the effect of a suspect’s race on a cop’s decision to pull the trigger). At least four careful studies have done this—
one by Harvard economist Roland Fryer,
one by a group of public-health researchers,
one by economist Sendhil Mullainathan, and
one by David Johnson, et al. None of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly shootings. Of course, that hardly settles the issue for all time; as always, more research is needed. But given the studies already done, it seems unlikely that future work will uncover anything close to the amount of racial bias that BLM protesters in America and around the world believe exists.
Stories and Data
