queridiculo wrote:This piece was published on September 28th, 2014.
I suggest anyone trying to frame an argument about misplaced aggression in light of a "few isolated incidents" to read it, and to bow their head in shame.
Over the past four years, more than 100 people have won court judgments or settlements related to allegations of brutality and civil rights violations. Victims include a 15-year-old boy riding a dirt bike, a 26-year-old pregnant accountant who had witnessed a beating, a 50-year-old woman selling church raffle tickets, a 65-year-old church deacon rolling a cigarette and an 87-year-old grandmother aiding her wounded grandson.
Those cases detail a frightful human toll. Officers have battered dozens of residents who suffered broken bones — jaws, noses, arms, legs, ankles — head trauma, organ failure, and even death, coming during questionable arrests. Some residents were beaten while handcuffed; others were thrown to the pavement.
And in almost every case, prosecutors or judges dismissed the charges against the victims — if charges were filed at all. In an incident that drew headlines recently, charges against a South Baltimore man were dropped after a video showed an officer repeatedly punching him — a beating that led the police commissioner to say he was “shocked.”
Such beatings, in which the victims are most often African-Americans, carry a hefty cost. They can poison relationships between police and the community, limiting cooperation in the fight against crime, the mayor and police officials say. They also divert money in the city budget — the $5.7 million in taxpayer funds paid out since January 2011 would cover the price of a state-of-the-art rec center or renovations at more than 30 playgrounds. And that doesn’t count the $5.8 million spent by the city on legal fees to defend these claims brought against police.
Keep in mind that local statutes limit award against municipalities to $200,000.
http://data.baltimoresun.com/news/police-settlements/
On the subject of police brutality, I think we are all forming opinions based on anecdotal evidence and sensationalism instead of facts and statistics.
Yes, there are certainly instances of unjustified police brutality, and in all cases, they are wrong and should be condemned. But at the same time, we have to realize that police work is a tough business and the vetting of potential police officers is an inexact process. There will always be
some evil, corrupt, or mentally unstable employees in any organization. What I would like to know is whether the American system of law enforcement produces a higher percentage of police brutality incidents relative to other nations, and whether or not the brutality in America exhibits a racial pattern.
I don't know how to answer my first question because chances are different nations maintain statistics in a different manner and they may be difficult to compare. In general, American is understood to be a relatively low corruption society, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it has a police force that is proportionately lower in brutality incidents.
On the second question, of whether or not our police are systematically racist, we have at least some data. Each year, the FBI produces the Supplementary Homicide Report which provides some data on who was killed by police. The report isn't all encompassing because not every police department participates, but over 18,000 police departments are included. According to the SHR report of 2012, there were 426 "justifiable homicide" incidents where a policeman killed a suspect/felon. Of those 426 killed, 52% were white, 31% were black, and 12% were Hispanic.
At first glance, it appears that there is indeed a bias toward proportionally killing blacks, since blacks represent 13% of the population, Hispanics are 17%, and whites are 63%. But that doesn't seem to me to be the appropriate way to look at it. Obviously, police should only be in a position of using deadly force when they are dealing with violent suspects. So the appropriate way to judge the numbers is to compare the cop killings to the percentage of violent criminals. Using FBI murder statistics as a proxy for violent crime, we see that blacks commit 52.4% of murders and whites and Hispanics combined commit 45.2% of murders. (It is more difficult to separate white and Hispanic murderers because the FBI data stopped differentiating between the two. They do differentiate between the two when it classifying victims, curiously. Using victimization rate as a proxy for murder rate since most murders are within one's own racial community, Hispanics commit about 23% of murders and whites commit 22%.)
So to review, in police shooting incidents, 52% of the victims are white, 31% are black, and 12% are Hispanic. This compares to murder statistics where 52% of the perpetrators are black, 23% are Hispanic, and 22% are white. Statistically, one would have to conclude that the police force are manifestly not racist and are using significant restraint in avoiding shooting violent black suspects relative to violent white and Hispanics suspects.
