Examining the Magnitude of American Police Killings Beyond a Racial Lens
By: J.C. Peters
Tags: Police Brutality, Police Violence, Police Reform, Racism, Racism In America

Examining the Magnitude of American Police Killings Beyond a Racial Lens

Photo by Sean Lee on Unsplash

Left-Leaning media contend that police killings are the result of systemic racism. But however powerful the anecdotal evidence might seem, this view is not supported by empirical data.

Yes, black Americans are killed at more than twice the rate of white people. But that does not mean racism is the cause of this disparity. In fact, a thorough analysis of racial differences in police use of force by Harvard Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. found “no racial differences” in officer-involved shootings.

Explaining the disparity between the anecdotal evidence widely covered in the news and the outcome of his research, Professor Freyer, who is black, said: “The types of encounters that lead to police shootings in the videos that we have all seen are not the most common that actually occur in the data. In Houston, for instance, most of the officer-involved shootings come from calls for service resulting from burglaries or violent crimes, not from chasing down people with broken taillights.”

I don’t want to go too much into the reasons why the media have framed police killings primarily as a systemic racism issue, except to say that this narrative fits perfectly with the overarching theme of identity politics many on the left have so wholeheartedly adopted in recent years.

But no amount of activist journalism can completely obscure the most compelling evidence against the narrative that racism is the driving force behind police killings in America: data.

The data

According to The Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings, the U.S. police killed 4,930 people between 2015–2019 (around 2 percent of which were unarmed black people). During the same period, the German police killed 60 people. Corrected for Germany’s smaller population size (1/4 of US), that means the rate of U.S. police killings was more than 20 times higher than that of Germany.

Even when only looking at the 2,289 white people killed by the police during this period—to completely eliminate racism as a factor—the number is still 10 times higher than in Germany. And the disparities are just as or even more pronounced compared to other Western countries.

Clearly, then, racism is not the main cause for the vast majority of police killings in the U.S.

So what are the main causes?

The long and short of it : too many guns, lack of everything else.

Too many guns

There are now 400 million guns in the hands of civilians in the United States, which comes to about 120 firearms per 100 persons. In Germany, there are less than 20 firearms per 100 persons, same as in France. in England it’s less than 5; in the Netherlands less than 3.

According to a large study published in the American Journal of Medicine in 2010, U.S. homicide rates are 7 times higher than those in other high-income countries, driven by a gun homicide rate that is more than 25 times higher.

Violent Death Rates: The US Compared with Other High-income OECD Countries, 2010, author: RCraig09, source of data: The American Journal of Medicine 129 (3): 266–273. DOI:10.1016/j.amjmed.2015.10.025

There are also far more law enforcement officers killed and assaulted in the U.S than in European countries. In 2019, for instance, 99 law enforcement officers were killed in the line of duty (of which 48 feloniously). In Germany, it’s about 6 per year. In France, 5.

This leads to American police officers being more heavily armed than their European counterparts, which in turn leads to more police violence. A 2017 study of a Department of Defense program making excess military equipment available to local law enforcement agencies, showed that law enforcement agencies that went from receiving no military equipment to the maximum amount saw an increase in civilian deaths by roughly 129% relative to the previous year.

It’s not just an excess of weapons that causes American police officers to be far more violent than their European colleagues, though. It’s also lack of training.

Lack of proper training

The average length of a basic law enforcement training program in the U.S. is 840 hours, or 21 weeks. Of those 840 hours, more than 130 hours are spent on firearm practice and defensive tactics, but only 8 hours on de-escalation tactics (see page 11 of study).

Many European countries have national police academies where recruits are trained for three or four years. Police officers in Europe also spend much more time training in de-escalation tactics. They are taught how to calm a situation through talking and remain calm themselves, use verbal warnings, warning shots, retreat if necessary, and only shoot at a civilian as a last resort. And even then they will attempt to only wound the assailant if at all possible.

American Police officers, by contrast, are taught to view civilians as the enemy, narrow down their threat assessment to shoot/don’t shoot type of situations. And they are told to never wound an assailant but “shoot center mass.” In other words, shoot to kill.

How this plays out?

In 2017, the entire German police force, roughly 250,000 officers, fired a total of 75 rounds, killing 14 people and injuring 39. In a whole year. That’s less than the number of rounds two California police officers fired at one suspect while driving through a residential neighborhood (76 rounds). And that’s just one example.

Willie McCoy, for instance, who had appeared to be sleeping in his car, was shot 55 times the moment he moved. A retired police officer who reviewed the case said officers were “generally trained to fire until the threat has been neutralized,” speculating that they probably continued to fire partly because of “acute stress” and “chaos caused by the sounds of gunfire, debris, and weapons mounted lights reflecting off the shattered windshield.”

Lack of accountability

Many police departments also lack civilian oversight. Only about half of the 50 largest police departments in the US were monitored by a civilian review board in 2016. And only nine of those boards could be considered independent of the mayor and the police.

When police departments lack civilian oversight, the risk increases that complaints are buried rather than investigated; that guilty police officers only get a slap on the wrist or no punishment at all; and that nothing changes, because change requires admitting there is something wrong, which would mean admitting some of the higher-ups weren’t doing their job.

And even if police departments do fire a police officer because of misconduct, labor arbitrators frequently force police departments to rehire fired officers because of procedural errors, insufficient evidence, etc. An investigation by The Washington Post in 2017 found that between 2006–2017, the largest police departments had fired at least 1,881 officers for various forms of misconduct, only to be forced to reinstate more than 450 of them after intervention from labor arbitrators.

Holding police officers legally accountable is also extremely difficult. In Graham v. Connor (1989) the Supreme Court set a standard of “reasonableness” based on what the officer on the scene could know.

“The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”

Answering the question whether a police officer used excessive force, the Court said:

“requires careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”

Based on this standard, it has proven very difficult to convict police officers for any kind of misconduct. Even with video evidence.

Between 2005–2014, around 10,000 people were likely killed by the police, deducing from a database maintained by The Washington Post. But only 110 law enforcement officers were charged with murder or manslaughter in an on-duty shooting during that period, and only 5 of those resulted in a murder conviction.

Filing a civil lawsuit against police misconduct is easier and has in recent years resulted in many large settlements, but the cost of these settlements are shouldered by the taxpayers, not the responsible police officer(s).

Lack of mental health care / mental health care training & workers

This is not a direct cause of police killings, but it deserves mentioning because the number of police victims suffering from a mental illness is so high. Of the 4,930 people killed by the police between 2015–2019, a staggering 1,176, almost 1 in 4, were suffering from a mental illness.

Over the last 60 years, mental health care in the U.S. has moved away from state-run psychiatric hospitals to a more decentralized mental health care system and community integration. But although the current system seems to work for middle-class individuals with less severe disorders, poor people who suffer from serious mental illness — and therefore need care the most — are worse off.

When the police kill someone suffering from mental illness, there is almost never a social worker or other kind of mental health professional at the scene who could have talked to the individual, tried to calm them down, advised the officers on how to approach the situation.

And so, Nicholas Bils, a 36-year-old unarmed white man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, was shot in the back by the police earlier this year while running away.

Jose Soto, a 27-year-old unarmed Hispanic man suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder was killed by a SWAT team in his home earlier this year, even though his mother pleaded with the officers to use restraint and said he didn’t have gun.

And late October, Walter Wallace Jr., a young black man with mental health issues, was shot fourteen times after threatening two police officers with a knife.

Why were the cops the only ones who showed up in these situations? Where were the mental health professionals who might very well have been able to diffuse the situation?

And why didn’t they use non-lethal weapons? “Why didn’t they use a Taser?” Mr. Wallace’s father asked. Because the police officers that shot Mr. Wallace didn’t carry them. They only carried guns.

And as psychologist Abraham Maslow famously said:

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

So what can we do?

Abolishing” or “defunding” the police as a solution to end police violence is, frankly, a ridiculous idea, the equivalent of abolishing criminal courts to stop wrongful convictions.

But we do need to do more than just piecemeal reform of the police. We need to rethink policing itself. In effect, we need a different kind of police force, one that is more focused on serving and less on protecting.

In 2015, a delegation of top American police officials traveled to Glasgow for lessons on firearm-free policing from the Scottish police, 98 percent of which does not carry guns.

The Americans listened intently to the Scots, but in the end pivoted back to the same elephant in the room: “The guns make the difference, right?” Boston police commissioner, William B. Evans, said. “We have so many guns that deadly force, to us, is always there, right?”

Unfortunately, those 400 million guns aren’t going away any time soon. But we can change a lot of other things to improve policing.

Better training . This is an easy one. American police officers need to be far better trained in de-escalation techniques and the use of non-lethal weapons.

. This is an easy one. American police officers need to be far better trained in de-escalation techniques and the use of non-lethal weapons. More accountability . Civilian oversight of police departments should become mandatory and firing of police officers using excessive force should be made easier.

. Civilian oversight of police departments should become mandatory and firing of police officers using excessive force should be made easier. Change use-of-force instructions . Stop reducing officers’ decisions to shoot/don’t shoot situations, stop advocating shooting “center-mass” at all times, and increase the availability of non-lethal weapon equipment.

. Stop reducing officers’ decisions to shoot/don’t shoot situations, stop advocating shooting “center-mass” at all times, and increase the availability of non-lethal weapon equipment. Increase community policing . More beat cops walking the streets deters crime and decreases the chance of excessive violence, because police officers are more tuned into the neighborhood. Camden, NJ, is a successful example of how community-oriented policing can reduce crime. Violent crimes dropped 42 percent in the seven years after community policing was introduced there.

. More beat cops walking the streets deters crime and decreases the chance of excessive violence, because police officers are more tuned into the neighborhood. Camden, NJ, is a successful example of how community-oriented policing can reduce crime. Violent crimes dropped 42 percent in the seven years after community policing was introduced there. Experiment with unarmed cops. Several (parts of ) European police forces are unarmed, which makes the police seen as less threatening and more as a part of the community. Of course, European citizens also own far fewer guns. But fact is that the vast majority of police interactions does not require the threat of deadly force.

None of these measures will reduce the number of police killings to zero. Nothing can. But they will contribute far more to the reduction of police violence than sending every cop in America on another racial sensitivity training. It’s time we stop pretending everything is about race and start solving the problem.

Join my email list Reality Check for more political insights.