By Marc Jampole
Those like Rudy Giuliani who believe that the Black Lives
Matter movement has led to an increase in violence against police officers have
not read the statistics. Killings
of American police officers are way down, from 27.88 per 100,000 to 7.16 per 100,000 since 1976. Fewer
police fatalities have occurred during the presidency of Barack Obama than
under the presidency of Bush II, which saw fewer police killed than during the
Clinton years, which experienced fewer police murders than under Reagan. During
these 40 years, there have been occasional blips up, because no trend proceeds
in a smooth fashion. Only fools and liars point to one cold winter to assert
global warming is not occurring; it would be equally foolish or mendacious to
look at any six-month period during the past four decades to deny a long-term
trend. The decline in police fatalities pretty much tracks the overall decline
in crime since the 1970s.
The math is simple: The Black Lives Matter movement can’t
lead to an increase in something that isn’t increasing.
Behind the idea that a movement to get the police to refrain
from racially based excessive violence would embolden people to start shooting
at cops is the unspoken idea that the police need to kick a little ass—or, I
should say, kill a little ass—once in a while to keep the peace. The same
people routinely defend racial profiling and the application of stop-and-frisk
policies in minority neighborhoods, two discredited policing techniques. It’s
not the first time that a false idea masks racism in American public debates.
We know that fewer police officers are being killed
nowadays, not more. What about the idea behind Black Lives Matter, that
innocent blacks suffer a disproportionately high number of fatalities at the
hands of the police? Is that also a myth?
On its surface, a
new study by a Harvard economics professor seems to prove that nationwide
police officers display no racial bias in their use of guns. Too bad, the study
has many flaws including: 1) It analyzed only incidents after the victims were
in police custody; 2) it measured the use of firearms, not deaths in custody;
3) all “non-gun related” force by police showed an extreme racial violence,
being used on blacks much more frequently than on whites; 4) researchers
studied only 4% of the population. No, this survey does not in any way disprove
the contention that blacks suffer more deaths per capita at the hands of police
than whites do. Meanwhile, other
evidence strongly demonstrates that young black men are nine
times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers.
There is very little that connects the awful killing of five
police officers in Dallas with the equally horrifying killings by police of
Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in a St. Paul, Minnesota
suburb, except that all three—like Orlando, Newtown, San Bernadino and the
deaths of Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Michel Brown, Eric Garner and thousands
more—are national tragedies.
While guns were used in all three of these recent acts of
violence, our society does want the police to carry firearms. Firearms have
never been the problem in the numerous cases of unnecessary police violence
against people of color. The problem has been how the firearms have been
used—not to protect, not to defend and not to disarm, but to aggressively kill
as if the victims were not an American citizen the police officers had sworn to
protect, but foreign soldiers on the battlefield.
The ways to stop police violence against citizens and
violence against police have virtually nothing in common and are related in no
way. Reducing one will not lead to an increase in the other, nor will reducing
one lead to a reduction of the other.
Ending racially based excessive
violence by police against innocent citizens will take a complicated combination
of training, new recruitment techniques and punishment. We have to educate
police officers to shoot to disarm, not to kill, to understand the culture of
the neighborhoods they patrol, to learn how to deescalate situations and to
analyze threats and possible perps without racial bias or cultural bias. We
have to stop gearing our police recruiting material to people who like to fight
(soldiers) and start gearing it to people who want to protect and defend.
Finally, we have to stop letting police who harm people of any color with
excessive force literally get away with murder.
By contrast to the complicated mix of training, recruitment
and punishment that will reduce the number of murders by police, to continue to
decrease murders of police is relatively easy: Pass stricter gun control laws.
Every study that has ever been done on the issue comes to
the same conclusion. The more guns there are in a society, the more people are
hurt and killed. The fewer guns there are in a society, the fewer people are
killed and hurt by guns. Ipso facto, reducing the number of guns in society
will reduce all gun violence, including against police officers.
My caveat is that the overwhelming number of gun deaths and
injuries in America (and elsewhere) are from suicides and home accidents.
Simple math tells us that you are much safer living in the worst neighborhood
in Chicago without a gun in the house than living anywhere with a gun in the
house. So police officers will represent very few of the large number of
reduced deaths we could anticipate from limiting the number of guns people can
own, outlawing automatic weapons, making gun owners take exams before getting
licenses, establishing a mandatory federal database and requiring a one-week
wait for all gun purchases. But then again, very few of the current 35,000 or
so U.S. deaths a year from firearms are currently police officers.
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