Interactions Between Black People and the Police
by Mike Kimel
Interactions Between Black People and the Police
A lot of Americans want the police reigned in, particularly when it comes to their interactions with Black people. Black people are more likely to be stopped by police than people of other ethnicities, and sometimes those stops end badly.
My take on this issue may be a bit different, since Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill came along when I had reached an age where I could follow and make sense out of politics. It was probably the first major law to which I paid a lot of attention. I remember folks like Kweise Mufume, then the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, pushing for things which today are derided because nobody likes the consequences. And yet, it seems to me that those very consequences are what everyone wanted at the time.
So let’s do an exercise. Below I’ve posted an FBI table showing homicide data by race, ethnicity, and gender. (Homicides in which the data on the perpetrator of the homicide rate is unknown are not included.)
(Dan here-please excuse the look of the graph…I had trouble fitting it in)
*See correction below
When looking at the table, keep in mind that Black people represent about 13% of the US population, Hispanics are about 18%, Asians are about 2%, Native Americans are about 1%, and Whites are about 62%. (The small balance is classified as “two or more.”)
Now, assume that we as a society find a way to make the police interactions with Black people to be, proportionately, no different than the police interactions with non-Black people. Presumably this is accomplished by fewer interactions between police and Black people, not more interactions between police and non-Black people. Given the table above, will the number and proportion of homicide victims who are Black increase or decrease? Will it make the law abiding majority of Black people more safe, or less safe? What else does the table (or other data you may choose to bring in) tell us we should expect to see happen?
*Update correction:
Mike says:
A breakdown more akin to what the FBI used, from the Census (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00):
White Alone: 77%
Black Alone: 13%
Hispanic or Latino: 17%
White Alone, not Hispanic: 62%
Other groups are primarily
Native American Alone: 1.2%
Asian Alone: 5.6%
Looking at this post, I was a bit sloppy. I mixed and matched ethnicities. The percentages I provided are when Hispanics are broken out separately from White and Black. Looking at the FBI table again, it is clear they did not use that breakdown (i.e., there are Hispanics and non-Hispanics among Black, White, and Other racial groups). Apologies.
A breakdown more akin to what the FBI used, from the Census (https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/table/PST045215/00):
White Alone: 77%
Black Alone: 13%
Hispanic or Latino: 17%
White Alone, not Hispanic: 62%
Other groups are primarily
Native American Alone: 1.2%
Asian Alone: 5.6%
“Given the table above, will the number and proportion of homicide victims who are Black increase or decrease? Will it make the law abiding majority of Black people more safe, or less safe?”
“Given the table above,” the answers to those questions are “who TF knows?” The table does not provide definitive information on what will happen in an alternative universe.
The proportion of interactions resulting in homicide is positively correlated with the races of those interacting in the first place. Thus the overall stats have no bearing on what will or won’t happen if there is a change in anything. It would perhaps be more enlightening to know the stats in regions relative to racial proportions… say by county across the US.
Even as is, the table data say 83% are white-on-white homicides and 90% are black-on-black, strongly supporting an hypothesis that homicide rates are a primary function of the racial make-up of communities with perhaps a systematic reason for the difference… poverty? joblessness? educational attainment?
Longtooth:
You forgot lead.
Re Longtooths post, it does suggest that most homicides involve at least folks that are at least acquainted with each other (i.e. the folk recognize each others face but may not know names) So that it is a function of who folks associate with. The question becomes how does one define communities, as the size defined of the community could make a difference.
Now one source of homicides is that there is a large business segment where the courts are not available to referee disputes the drug business, just as during prohibition the booze dealers had to solve disputes with a gun, today the drug dealers having no alternative dispute resolution mechanisms, use guns. How many homicides are drug deals gone bad, or attempts to collect drug debts?
Sandwichman,
Assume there are several groups of cheese makers who each make the same amount of cheese. 13% of cheese makers are members of a particular group. Call that Group A. 47% of cases of food poisoning involving cheese comes from members of Group A though most members of Group A produce safe cheese. Also, statistics show this pattern (some Group A members are bad actors leading to Group A generating a disproportionate number of food poisoning cases) has persisted for several decades if not longer.
Now, say Group A faces the most scrutiny from authorities. This is unfair to Group A members who make safe cheese, of course, leading to pressure to reduce scrutiny of Group A members to the same levels as non-group A members. Note that scrutiny is a polite way of saying invasive checks that impose large costs and can even put a cheese maker out of business.
Would you really say there isn’t enough information to know whether food poisoning cases will increase or decrease if Scrutiny of Group A decreases? The fact that there are two outcomes we find to be bad doesn’t mean there isn’t a trade-off between the two outcomes.
I am beginning to understand why you are a Trump supporter Mike. To answer your original questions I would like you to think about a couple of explanations for the data which of course indisputably show that blacks commit and are the victims of a disproportionate number of homicides just as they are a disproportionate number of shootings by police. Let’s see if this decades long trend can be traced to “war on drugs” a war that results in a disproportionate number of young black men going to prison for non violent crimes taking them out of the community for a number of years and returning them to the community much more vient and virtually unemployable. How about a social policy deliberately supported by police and prison employees because it results in job security. And let’s not forget the increasing availability of guns thanks to the NRA which of course applies to black and white equally but feeds into the justifiable apprehension felt by police whenever they interact with the public but leads to more black people being killed by police because the non black police officer has been taught that black people are more dangerous than white people by statistics like those you cite never mind that those statistics show it is unlikely a black person would murder a non black person and the number of homicides has until very recently been decreasing for many years. So in short I do not find your little thought experiment to be helpful on any level
Terry,
1. I suspect you are operating under a severe misconception. I am not enthusiastic about any of the candidates for President this time around. I find it horrifying that the party to which I have a closest affinity nominated HRC. You may extrapolate from that that I am a Trump enthusiast, but that is more on you than on me.
2. I agree with some (not all) of the reasons you mention for the crime rate, but that isn’t the point. The point is that if what BLM proposes comes to pass, it will have an effect on the homicide rate, and the biggest effect in terms of number of victims will probably be felt in the Black community. you can be self righteous about it and blame social factors but that won’t stop the increase in the carnage.
I don’t think you understand at all what Black Lives Matter proposes.
The War on Drugs Has Made Policing More Violent
By Jonathan Blanks
http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/war-drugs-has-made-policing-more-violent
This article appeared in the Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Inc. on July 19, 2016.
Great article. From CATO yet!
cactus- what you’re describing in theory is already happening according to the FBI Director. Policing records are notoriously, shall we say, nuanced, so I don’t know if anyone can quantify the so-called Ferguson effect.
Beverly- your comment implies you do understand what BLM proposes. It would be a service to all of us if you could elaborate those proposals.
Beverly,
I’m going to assume that the “about” page on the official Black Lives Matter website serves as an authority on what the movement is about. (http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/)
From that page: “Black Lives Matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of Black people by police and vigilantes…. BlackLivesMatter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”
Perhaps I am misreading, but this seems to state explicitly that “killings of Black people by police” (again, from the about page on their website) are a driver. Since the actual protests they hold seem to revolve primarily around police shootings, it seems that is, in fact, the biggest driver of the BLM movement. (If you are seeing large BLM protests against anything else they might be referring to as intentionally targeting Black people for demise – say some sort of campaign to purposely poison Black people – I am open to being corrected.)
In my post, I use a somewhat less hyperbolic set of words to restate that position, namely that : “Now, assume that we as a society find a way to make the police interactions with Black people to be, proportionately, no different than the police interactions with non-Black people. ”
So as far as I know, my little thought experiment comes down to: “assume the BLM position, the one they state on their website and which generates the biggest BLM protests, comes to pass. ” I tried to be a bit more measured in the wording, but their purpose is to create a movement and mine (which is far more limited) is to look at how cause leads to effect. If you still feel I am mis-stating the BLM movement’s position, please show me how.
I think I need to be a bit more precise here. The BLM is not advocating for more dead Black people. In fact, they are advocating for fewer dead Black people. However, the specific policy prescriptions which they are advocating will not achieve their goals, but rather the opposite. This is not out of malice. It seems to be due to an inability or unwillingness of the BLM participants to consider basic facts and the consequences of what they are advocating.
This is no different from GW’s economic platform in the year 2001. He wasn’t calling for massively increasing the national debt. In fact, he specifically stated he was for paying down the debt. However, his chosen prescription for doing so: tax cuts combined with increases in military spending (this was before Afghanistan and Iraq, mind you – this was his Economic Blueprint) could not achieve his goals. In fact, if someone wanted to massively increase the debt, cutting taxes and simultaneously boosting military spending is a fine way to do just that. And it’s not like we didn’t see it before (think Reagan). So his goal of paying down the debt – however noble – was irrelevant. All that was relevant was the steps he took, and their inevitable results.
Wishful thinking is not a prescription for achieving specific goals. Its bad enough that crazy wishful thinking became the MO of one of the major parties in the late 1990s, and they’ve stuck to it ever since. That was a very bad thing. But the other major party is now in the final stages of converting into a crazy-wishful-thinking-all-the-time platform too. This is not good at all.
My guess is that the number of blacks killed will be about the same, maybe less. Right now blacks are much more likely to be pulled over when driving, stopped and frisked on the street and so on. How many white murderers are caught with this kind of general dragnet? Most murderers are arrested after witnesses are interviewed and evidence is collected and analyzed. The police usually have some idea of where they are living, where they work and where they are likely to go on the lam. They aren’t caught because they have a broken tail light or an out of date registration tag. NYC’s stop and frisk policy to harass blacks and latinos on the street came AFTER the big drop in crime, not before it.
Historically, police forces have ignored black on black crime. In the 1930s, Harlem, like many black neighborhoods, was declared a free fire zone for blacks killing blacks, though whites killed in Harlem were another matter. It wasn’t a matter of blacks doing illegal things, just that the cops didn’t consider black on black crime their problem. Besides, a free fire zone was good for certain kinds of business. NYC was one of the more racially enlightened cities at the time, but even there blacks knew that the police were at best useless with regards to crime and quite often dangerous.
I remember Isaac Bashevis Singer’s speech at West Point marveling that a Jew could address members of the army, and that the army was on his side in the world. In the world he recounted in his stories, Jews learned to stay away from the civil authorities. Encounters were at best useless and could be quite dangerous. This kind of attitude is not just about blacks. It is about the relationship of the police to citizens.
BLM is trying to make black interactions with the police safer. There have been a ridiculous number of killings. An impressive number of them have involved ordinary citizens shot in cold blood while going about their ordinary, quite legal business. This actually works against good law enforcement. There are too many cops who don’t have the nerves or brains to be cops, and there is no way to punish them and keep them from being cops. If we are serious about cutting black on black crime, it might help if blacks and cops were on the same side.
Yes. Exactly, Kaleberg. And your points aren’t exactly hard to discern.
This post and Mike Kimel’s pretense of cluelessness-via-claiming-that-it’s-the-rest-of-us-who-are-clueless is … head-scratching. To be polite here.
“Presumably this is accomplished by fewer interactions between police and Black people”
As Kaleberg alludes to (and most of the rest missed), homicide data and police interactions have little to do with each other. Your presumption is not meaningful.
EXACTLY. Nor do other facets of ordinary policing, such as the ones I just mentioned in response to Mike Kimel’s last comment.
This post and his comments are off-the-rails.
Kaleberg & ARne,
You cannot simultaneously state that crime was an epidemic in Harlem in the 1930s because the cops weren’t willing to do anything about it, and that interactions between the police and the public doesn’t affect the crime rate in that same community. Well,I take that back. Demonstrably, one make those two contradictory claims at once, but that’s exactly what I was referring to when I mentioned crazy wishful thinking. I am very sorry, but I have no other way to describe that.
All that said, no question, there are cops who should not be cops because they are lazy or stupid or violent. (This is true of every profession.) But it should be clear that reducing the number of interactions between cops and Black people is not going to reduce the crime rate in the Black community.
Wow. Seriously, Mike? Seriously? It doesn’t matter the type of interaction between police and a community, black, Hispanic, white, whatever?
Please understand this: Black Lives Matter makes the distinction between normal policing—investigating felonies (murder, assault, robberies, burglaries, and such) and responding to calls of a felony in progress, and routinely harassing black motorists, black pedestrians, black bystanders, and verbally and physically abusing them, including tackling them, throwing them to the ground, yanking them out of their cars, arresting them for failing to comply with an improper police demand or (falsely) for interfering with an arrest—or shooting them FOR complying with a police demand (the gentleman in St. Paul); or shooting them in the back and claiming falsely that it was done in self-defense; or shooting them in the back several times while kneeling on him while they’re lying handcuffed and on his stomach (the gentleman in Baton Rouge); or choking them while arresting them for selling single cigarettes; or giving them a “rough ride” to the station while handcuffed.
I and many other people make that distinction, too. Not sure why you don’t or can’t.
Your position is downright bizarre.
Beverly,
As noted up thread, their website says Black people are intentionally targeted for demise. Do you believe that to be correct?
What I did not find on their website is a statement that supports what you wrote, namely that they see a distinction between normal policing and harassment of Black people. I am not saying it isn’t there, merely that I didn’t see it when I peruse their about page or their guiding principles page. Maybe I missed it. I am always open to being corrected so please provide a link and a quote.
What does a stated belief that blacks are intentionally targeted by police have to do with wanting the police to do normal police work like investigating murders and other felonies and responding to calls of a crime in progress or someone in danger? I have no idea.
Apparently there are specific words you think must be said in order to say explicitly that this distinction is being made. I assume, though, that they, like I, presume that a statement about one thing will be understood as a statement about that thing and not something else, without their having to explicitly state that.
I doubt that it even occurred to them that a statement that they believe that blacks are being targeted by some police for demise means anything at all about wanting or not wanting police to investigate actual crime in black neighborhoods or respond to an emergency call. I don’t even understand your argument here.
I was going to say this before i saw that others had addressed it with more detail, but i’ll try to say it more clearly:
i think you are missing the point. The point is NOT that black people are more likely to be investigated or arrested, the point is that unarmed black men are being killed by police in numbers that suggest more is going on than random chance.
and if it were only random chance (due to more interactions?) we would still need to do something about it.
i grew up in a city where there were enough police shootings of people who were not only unarmed, but not even remotely connected with a crime… reaching for identification, for example.
i don’t remember that these were “black people,” but only that they were “people.” but i don’t discount “racism” as a factor. Nor, pardon me my liberal friends, is “racism” an exclusively white disease. It is practically a biological constant… one that can be cured, or controlled with something like education. not, i am afraid, the phony educational propaganda that fails utterly to convince, but some real heart-felt programs to get people to face their own racism and understand it for what it is. i think we had that for a while in the sixties… that’s how the civil rights movement succeeded and why there is a good deal less overt racism now than there was, and as far as i know, no “legal” racism.
there are police departments which sound to me like they are working on the problem, but it’s not going to be cured by counter racism, or slightly askew “studies” that explain away the problem and end up sounding like they are blaming the victims, or the protesters
or by the protesters, who have no choice, but end up sounding exactly like the people white bigots are afraid of.
enough from me.
OK. Let’s recap. I wrote a post that included the following:
1. A statement that a lot of people want the police reigned in when it comes to how they interact with Black people
2. A comment that sometimes actions have undesirable outcomes
3. Homicide statistics
4. A question: if the police are reigned in when it comes to how they interact with Black people, will that result in more or less crime or homicides in the Black community?
I would hope the fourth item is a non-trivial, and something people would care enough about to want to avoid undesirable outcomes.
However, the vast majority of the answers to my question amounted to statements that I don’t get it. Most of those comments amount to a much more wordy restatement of the second statement of the post: “Black people are more likely to be stopped by police than people of other ethnicities, and sometimes those stops end badly.”
So there are proposed solutions. But refusing to even consider what the outcomes of those solutions is an example of the old saw, “the road to hell is paved good intentions.” Lecturing me on my moral failings, however many I have, does nothing to prevent these very bad, unwanted outcomes.
Now, there were a few people who did answer the question, stating that homicides and/or crimes would drop if the police interactions with Black people became the same, on average, as police interactions with non-Black people. For those who feel that way, I share your hope that things will turn out that way, but not your optimism. Perhaps I am wrong, but I am having a hard time believing that less policing will lead to less violent crimes or be a good thing for the non-criminal majority.
Mike, I’ll try again.
It could well be that if police were “reigned in” with regard to how they interact with black people, there would be more black on black crime.
On the other hand if police were reigned in with regard to shooting unarmed blacks it is doubtful that would lead to more black on black crime.
I think you have made a straw man argument . Don’t fall in love with it.
Coberly,
So which of the two options do you think it is? Perhaps you are right, and I have set up a straw man, but the issue is non-trivial so let me try again.
It’s easier to do traffic stops by the numbers than to reduce poverty, unmarried teenagers having kids, etc. Let’s assume we as society are willing to do traffic stops in a way that more people are willing to call fair, at least on a small scale. Say the the traffic stops in the most homicide-prone neighborhoods in the south side of Chicago are reduced in both number and average severity to the level seen in one of the suburbs like Barrington or Highland Park. What happens to the number of Black people murdered in the South Side? Does it decrease, stay the same, or increase?
“This is no different from GW’s economic platform in the year 2001. He wasn’t calling for massively increasing the national debt. In fact, he specifically stated he was for paying down the debt. However, his chosen prescription for doing so: tax cuts combined with increases in military spending (this was before Afghanistan and Iraq, mind you – this was his Economic Blueprint) could not achieve his goals. In fact, if someone wanted to massively increase the debt, cutting taxes and simultaneously boosting military spending is a fine way to do just that.”
After the 2003 tax cuts, the deficit fell for three straight years, from $412.73B in 2004 to $160.71B in 2007. Then the Democrats took the House and Senate. Within two years, the deficit went up eight-fold, to $1,412.69B.
Since the Republicans re-captured the House in 2011, the deficit has dropped from $1,294.37B in 2010 to $438.40B in 2015.
Warren,
1. Don’t forget that GW also cut marginal income tax rates in 20001 and 2002.
2. NIPA table 3.2 tells me that for CY 2004 total net borrowing was 470 billion, up a bit from 2003 figures. I imagine you are using OMB figures which are don’t include total spending and total revenue, and also are based on FY. In either case, the deficit didn’t begin falling until CY 2005, and then, it was a modest fall.
3. The 107th congress (2001 – 2003) was split 50 – 50, putting meaning the VP (that would be Cheney) cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate. In the House, there were 212 Dems, 221 Reps, and 2 “Others” so the big run-up in the deficit in the early part of GW’s term happened under Reps.
Anyway, I didn’t really want to get into a discussion on GW’s wishful thinking. I was just using that as an illustration, but I appreciate the demonstration nevertheless.
Mike
i really think i understand your proposition. i really think it involves unrealistic assumptions.
if killing people was just an abstract exercise in “logic” you might find a group of professors who might find it an interesting discussion.
in the real world it looks like an effort to avoid thinking about reducing homicide by cop.
Coberly,
I beg to differ. I am thinking about homicide by cop. I am also thinking about a solution – I have proposed (upthread) the most likely solution, in fact, the one that the ACLU has gotten implemented in a number of places. I am asking about what comes after that gets implemented. It isn’t theoretical.
This may be the first time I have agreed with little john on anything, but in limited ways, this we’ve seen these policies implemented policies in limited ways. So what happened? Were the outcomes those that we as a society desired? Were they not? Will we see the same outcomes if we apply these policies more broadly? These are important questions, because lives are at stake.
Now, one can do as Mr. Bush did so many times (on the economy, on Iraq, etc.) and assume away an outcome none of us want. (Heck, nobody, least of all Mr. Bush, wanted the debt to grow so large, or for he economy to tank, or for Iraq to become a quagmire.) But assuming away undesirable outcomes doesn’t prevent them.
“The big run-up in the deficit in the early part of GW’s term happened under Reps.”
As did the tremendous declines during the Clinton years. But if you want to look deeper, we can see that receipts dropped in 2001 (before the tax cuts went into effect).
After the 2003 changes in the tax law, receipts INCREASED, and continued to do so until 2008.
mike
instead of begging to differ, why don’t you try to explain your case better?
it sounds to me like you are arguing that ignoring traffic violations in black neighborhoods will result in more black on black crime including homicide.
that could well be the case, but i don’t think anyone is suggesting that a lack of normal policing is the answer to police killing black (or white) people who are not posing a threat.
so whatever you are proposing has failed to make itself clear to me.
Yup. Just think of all the homicides that have been prevented by the incessant traffic stops of black motorists for a burned-out taillight.
In Michigan, btw, by law you get just a warning for a burned-out taillight or turn signal, since people don’t necessarily even know that the light has burned out. You get the light replaced and mail in or drop off at the courthouse a receipt for the repair within 10 days, and there is no fine.
Which makes a big difference. A huge amount of excessive policing of minor traffic violations, real or fabricated, is the result of conflict-of-interest funding of local government, including and probably principally law enforcement–the police, the courts, the local jails. And the less wealthy you are, the likelier you are to have a burned out taillight or turn signal, because you are likelier to have an older car. Michigan’s law removes this issue.
And the federal government should enact it nationwide–which, in anticipation of a states’-rights/freedom/it’s-unconstitutional push-back, I’ll just say at the outset that it would be clearly constitutional under the Commerce Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause and specific authorization in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Section 5.
Warren,
Apologies. I was hoping to keep the focus on a different example of wishful thinking. The one you keep bringing up is one I covered many times in the past, so my take on it isn’t hard to find if you really want it.
from 2005: “The recent increase in revenues follows three consecutive years (2001-2003) in which revenues declined in nominal terms, an extremely rare occurrence, and a year (2004) in which revenues were lower as a share of the economy than in any year since 1959. Even with the recent increase, revenues in 2005 will remain well below the levels at which they were projected to be when the 2001 tax cut was enacted.”
Mike,
You have a point. If the only result of BLM is to reduce all interactions between police and blacks, then it could easily result in generally reduced enforcement and an increase in crime. But my understanding of BLM is the desire to change the nature of police interactions so that non-threatening interactions don’t become threatening simply because the white officer is interacting with a black citizen.
It is rather sad if the only way we can see to make officers feel less threatened by innocent black people is to have them not interact.
“[Revenues] in 2005 will remain well below the levels at which they were projected to be when the 2001 tax cut was enacted.”
Pre-9/11 projections.
“[My] understanding of BLM is the desire to change the nature of police interactions so that non-threatening interactions don’t become threatening simply because the white officer is interacting with a black citizen.”
But that is not the case now. A police interaction with a Black citizen is LESS likely to end in that citizen’s being shot by the police than is a police interaction with a White citizen.
We probably agree on more than either of us think Mike.
Arne,
The approach the ACLU has taken is more or less a by the numbers analysis. I.e., not to reduce police interactions but to get them proportionate to the number (and severity) had by non-Black people.
So my question from the post restates as: if two populations begin with very different crime rates and police interaction rates that are roughly proportionate to their respective crime rates, what happens if police interaction rates become the same? In particular, given that homicide rates occur mostly within groups, should we expect an increase, a decrease, or no change in murders in the Black community?
Little John,
I guess it’s easier to focus on differences in opinion sometimes. Thank you for reminding me not to automatically jump to that conclusion.
mike
if that is indeed the prescription of the ACLU then your argument is appropriate.
it would not be surprising to me to see the defenders of the oppressed come up with a superficial if not self-defeating answer.
on the other hand, by provoking replies like yours they can guarantee that you will look bad to their constituents.