An interesting juxtaposition of 45 years for these two songs:
The number six single today in 1948:
Then, the number 17 song today in 1993 by Green Jellÿ (which began life as Green Jellö — and we have the CD to prove it — until the makers of Jell-O objected):
Social media has passed on what the phrase “Defund the Police” supposedly means:
Whoever wrote this (and its legitimacy is immediately in question due to its lack of authorship) is in fact being “intentionally misleading and manipulative,” first because the assumption here is that government money solves all problems. We know that is false.
Others do in fact want to get rid of the police. What happens then? Sam Ashworth-Hayes:
One of the best rules of thumb to emerge from systems theory is Stafford Beer’s famous statement: the purpose of a system is what it does. It doesn’t matter what the designer intended, or what the individual participants think they’re doing; the end result is all that matters. It’s a useful thing to bear in mind when we consider the objectives of the Black Lives Matter protesters, because right now the movement is beginning to look an awful lot like a machine for the abolition of police departments.
It is frankly dizzying how rapidly the aims of the movement seem to have shifted from reform to destruction. Democratic politicians including Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are calling for the defunding and abolition of police departments, while Minneapolis — following the ritual shaming of a mayor who had the temerity to support the idea that enforcing laws is useful — has gone a step further in announcing the impending destruction of the force that killed George Floyd. In the online activist ecosystem, left-wing websites make the case for ‘a world without cops’, while tweets demanding the same rack up tens of thousands of shares.
Quite what happens after the police are abolished, however, is less clear. Some activists employ a curious motte-and-bailey argument, telling us that ‘abolish the police doesn’t mean abolish the police’, and maybe to them it doesn’t; that doesn’t change the fact that it certainly does to some of their comrades-in-arms and the people making decisions, and generally when people tell us what they are it’s best to take them at face value.
Arguments for abolition seem to rest on two arguments. The first is that the police are not particularly effective; nice neighborhoods enjoy low crime rates with low police presences, and anyway crime still exists so the police aren’t preventing it. Q.E.D. The second is that crime is the result of unmet needs; remove funding from police forces and put them into community facilities — treatment for drug users, provision of social workers, cash payments, and jobs to keep people fed, housed, and off the street — and there would be no crime left for police to prevent. If we could just get rid of cops, crime will naturally follow.
But what if we actually did it? What if we achieved the impossible and abolished the police for good? What would happen? Well, it’s simple: the end result would be the further immiseration of the minority communities these protesters claim to value.
The idea that policing offers nothing in the way of crime prevention is based on a set of statistical misunderstandings; areas with high crime tend to have more police precisely because they are areas with high crime. The intuition is laid out nicely in the joke about Russian czar and the plague doctors. The ruler is looking at a map of his country, marked for plague outbreaks, and at the number of doctors in each province when suddenly the great man thumps his fist on the table. ‘God damn them!’ he says, ‘these doctors are worse than useless — wherever they show up, the people are sicker!’
To show the actual relationship between policing — and in particular cops on the beat — and crime we need to be a bit subtler. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame) used variation in the number of police officers caused by electoral cycles — if you’re up for re-election, you want to be able to brag about your new hires — to show that each new officer hired would eliminate ~8-10 serious crimes per year. In the UK, academics showed that higher numbers of officers don’t just reduce crime, they also increase the share of crimes reported to the police — a confounding effect that would make a simple comparison across regions inaccurate. On a neighborhood level, papers using the reallocation of police across areas in response to perceived terror threats to look at what happens when more cops are on the beat — and unsurprisingly, they find that crime falls.
But this, of course, is under the present theory of policing, where people have unmet needs. If we simply met them, the argument goes, the relationship between police numbers and crime would fall apart. Well, maybe. But I suspect anyone with some basic understanding of human nature can spot the difference between unmet needs and unmet wants, and knows that for some members of the population the point of theft, violence, or rape is not so much what is obtained as the sense of power over a victim; the idea that some people are simply bad may be out of fashion, but that doesn’t make it untrue.
And none of this, of course, has considered the likely responses of the victims of crime. We already know that private individuals and groups are willing to spend substantial sums of money on private security. In a world without police — and with higher crime rates — these sums are likely to increase. It is not inconceivable that the end result of abolishing police forces would be a network of private security firms, accountable only to their employers, and protecting only those areas they are hired to protect.
This might work out quite nicely for the well-heeled; a private force with no obligation towards outsiders; just like policing, private security reduces crime. But when poorer communities are unable to match this provision, criminal activity is likely to be diverted towards these softer targets, with a consequential effect on local behavior: if the state won’t uphold your rights as a victim, and you can’t afford for a private contractor to do it, then you must take it into your own hands. Vigilante ‘justice’ has historically tended to pop up where central law enforcement is weak. And in America, of course, the cheapest form of self-protection is the firearm. When crime-rates go up, so do gun sales; what do we think will happen when the police are removed from the picture entirely?
The short answer is that we don’t know. We don’t know how any of this would work in practice, because all of our evidence has been gathered in a world where the police do exist, flawed as they are, and where they do work to solve and fight crime. The economist Robert Lucas won the Nobel Prize for his observation that empirical evidence gathered under one set of policies can’t necessarily be used to predict what happens when we change the rules of the game: just because no one has tried to rob a bank doesn’t mean we can get rid of the guards.
But what we can say is that in a society where black people consistently earn less than others, are subjected to higher crime rates, and where prejudice is rampant, putting law enforcement into the hands of private individuals without public oversight is a recipe for further entrenching inequality rather than solving it.
The Wall Street Journal:
‘We’re the Wild West.” That’s what Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers said on May 13, after the state Supreme Court threw out a stay-at-home order issued by his administration. The result, Mr. Evers added, would be “chaos” during a pandemic: “We’re going to have more deaths, and it’s a sad occasion for the state.”
That isn’t what happened, at least according to a study published this week by the National Bureau of Economic Research. After some statistical analysis, five academic researchers find “no evidence” that the sudden lifting of Wisconsin’s order “impacted social distancing, COVID-19 cases, or COVID-19-related mortality” during the 14 days that followed.
The authors first looked at anonymized smartphone data from May 3 to May 24, which shows little change in Wisconsin residents’ behavior. Then they crunched the numbers on Covid-19 cases and deaths, as tracked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These analyses “fail to detect any evidence that the Wisconsin Supreme Court order affected COVID-19 health.”
Why the null result? It isn’t that Wisconsin’s initial stay-at-home order was ineffective. The authors say the state’s action came “relatively early during its outbreak cycle” and “significantly flattened the growth curve.” Once the Supreme Court invalidated it, five counties put in place extended local lockdowns. But “accounting for these county policies does not change our main finding.”
So what gives? The authors suggest that perhaps most of Wisconsin’s 5.8 million people simply decided to act responsibly of their own accord. Stay-at-home orders might be first enacted “during a time where people perceived little risk and knew little about proper protective behavior.” But by the time such orders are rescinded, residents “have had a chance to adjust.”
The authors conclude that their results “cast doubt on the assertion that reopening states” will “necessarily cause substantial erosion in the containment of the virus.” Restoring the people’s right to go to the local garden store or salon “does not mean that individuals will exercise that right, and does not mean that if they do, that they will not do so responsibly.”
Hear, hear. In April, when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp eased his lockdown order, a headline writer at the Atlantic dubbed it an “Experiment in Human Sacrifice.” By that logic, nobody would leave the house until assured that a coronavirus vaccine with millions of doses was already being distributed. Political leaders need to trust Americans to follow health guidelines and get on with their lives.
Today in 1964, one day after the Rolling Stones recorded their “12×5” album in Chicago, Chicago police broke up their news conference. (Perhaps foreshadowing four years later when the Democratic Party came to town?)
The Stones could look back at that and laugh two years later when “Paint It Black” hit number one:
One year later, David Bowie released “Space Oddity” …
… on the same day that this reached number one in Great Britain:
The Wall Street Journal:
One feature of our current politics is how quickly bad events trigger a rush to bad policies. So it is that the response to the killing of George Floyd has sprinted past police reform to “defund the police.” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti wants to redirect $150 million from public safety to social programs, and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was hooted from a protest on the weekend because he admitted he didn’t want to defund the police. City Council members now pledge to dismantle the force whether he wants to or not.
There’s a case for police reforms, in particular more public transparency about offenses by individual officers. Union rules negotiated under collective bargaining make it hard to punish offending officers, much as unions do for bad public school teachers. By all means let’s debate other policies and accountability in using force.
But a political drive to defund police risks a return to the high-crime era of the 1960s and 1970s that damaged so many American cities. Millennials and minorities in big cities have benefited tremendously from the hard work of Democratic mayors and police chiefs 20-30 years ago to reduce crime. Yet the progressives who now run most big cities have pushed relaxed enforcement of “victimless” crimes, and now they want to go further.
Even before the recent riots, crime had been surging this year in many of America’s big cities. In Minneapolis, car-jackings were up 45%, homicides 60%, arson 58% and burglaries 28% from January through May 30 compared to the same period last year. Violent crime overall was 16% higher and property crime 20% higher than recent low points in 2018.
In New York City, shootings had increased 18%, burglaries 31% and car-jackings 64%. There were about 1,279 more burglaries, 1,078 more cars stolen and 57 more shooting victims during the first five months of this year than during the same period last year. Almost all of these were outside of Manhattan’s business district.
In San Francisco, homicides before the riots this year had increased by 19%, burglaries by 23% and arson by 39% over last. Philadelphia reported a 28% increase in commercial burglaries, 51% in shootings, 22% in auto theft and 28% in retail theft from last year. Residential burglaries and larceny have fallen in many places, but that’s no doubt because people were at home.
Some of the increase in lawlessness may be due to states and counties releasing criminals from jails to stem coronavirus infections, but the surge in most places preceded the pandemic releases. In Minneapolis, property and violent crime had increased by 33% and 29%, respectively, through mid-March when Hennepin County reduced its jail population by 40%.
It’s impossible to prove cause and effect, but the line between liberal law enforcement policies and the crime spike is hard to ignore. Take New York City’s new bail law that gives nonviolent offenders a get-out-of-jail-free card. In January a man who stuck up six banks in two weeks was repeatedly released after each arrest. “I can’t believe they let me out,” he told a detective.
An arsonist who set a fire in front of the Columbia University Computer Music Center in March had 39 prior arrests dating to 1987. Democratic lawmakers gave judges more discretion to set cash bail for some offenders who present a public-safety risk. Yet Chief Terence Monahan said last week that, while police made 650 arrests, almost all will be released without bail.
“We had some arrests in Brooklyn where they had guns, [and] hopefully [Brooklyn district attorney] Eric Gonzalez will keep them in, [but] I can’t guarantee that’ll happen,” Mr. Monahan told the New York Post. “But when it comes to a burglary [at] a commercial store, which is looting, they’re back out. . . . Because of bail reform, you’re back out on the street the next day.”
San Francisco’s new District Attorney Chesa Boudin this year eliminated cash bail, stopped prosecuting “victimless” crimes and suspended the city’s practice of upgrading charges against repeat offenders. Crime in Minneapolis has been climbing since Mayor Frey entered office in 2018 and started pushing more relaxed law enforcement.
As police have eased up, violent crime has increased nearly twice as much in the minority third precinct in Minneapolis as city-wide since 2018. In New York’s Harlem neighborhood, which benefitted enormously from anti-crime mayors, murders have soared 160% this year over last while burglaries are up 56% and car-jackings have more than doubled.
Joe Biden said Monday he opposes defunding the police, and good for him. But law enforcement is mainly a state and local obligation, and in many cities now the defunders have power. Poor communities will be the victims if they succeed.
Thanks to the nature of digital media, the last 10 days can be seen in entirely different ways. On one feed rioters turn urban centers into scenes from a Purge movie, indiscriminately attacking people and property, advancing the cause of racial justice by burning down immigrant-run businesses and murdering a retired black police captain.
On another feed, it is the cops who are running amok. Festooned with tactical gear and high-tech weaponry (or old-fashioned clubs), the police appear to attack people indiscriminately — from old men to young women out buying groceries to homeless guys in wheelchairs— apparently for the crime of being in their way.
If the protests have a message besides ‘Black Lives Matter’, one that is heard by everyone, regardless of how they interact with the media, it is that the police must be defunded or abolished entirely.
Abolishing the police has become a rallying cry for protesters in the street and their backers online. The instinct of many conservatives has been to scoff at the notion, or laugh at its preposterousness, as Megyn Kelly did when she was confronted with the idea at a Fox News town hall four years ago.
Many Americans, let alone conservatives, would probably have scoffed at Mariame Kaba until a few weeks ago. An activist and organizer, Kaba is representative of the theorists who have been laying the groundwork for police abolition for years. In Chicago, where she arrived for graduate school in 1995, Kaba was the leading voice of the abolition movement there for over two decades. She told an interviewer that when she first arrived ‘there were no abolitionist organizations in the city’. By the early 2000s, Incite! an activist group founded by Kaba, began to host national conferences that brought together intellectuals and organizers — including Angela Davis — to work out what abolitionist ideas would mean in practice. Kaba wants both police and prisons abolished. ‘Abolition is not about changing one thing,’ she says. ‘It’s about changing everything, together.’
Why focus on Kaba, who appears to have walked, fully-formed, out of the pages of a Tom Wolfe novel? It’s because ideas that activists like her have been producing are the ones being picked up by the Atlantic, the New York Times, Vox and TIME magazine, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. What would Kaba’s post-prison, post-cop world look like? Kaba advocates restorative justice. She explained the idea to Chris Hayes last year:
‘It’s a very different model than the adversarial system that we currently have where harms occur and the state intervenes. In this case, the idea is that you have a community of people who will intervene and so they ask usually a set of questions… Because the idea of restorative justice is that harms engenders needs and that those needs should be met. And the issue is who’s going to meet the needs and how will people meet those needs?’
Clear now? Restorative justice draws on pre modern conceptions of conflict resolution — such as peace circles — as an alternative to police and prisons. Kaba argues that the latter are not only corrupted by systemic racism, but that they are actually unnatural, a kind of historical accident. Indigenous people didn’t need police, Kaba says, so why do we?
These ideas have been taken up rapidly during the protests. Under the headline ‘No More Money For the Police’, two writers in the Times envision the replacement of cops with ‘health care workers or emergency response teams’, ‘rapid response social workers’, ‘conflict interrupters and restorative justice teams’ and ‘community organizers’. Writing for TIME, Minneapolis City Council member Steve Fletcher believes that the police must be disbanded. ‘We can invest in cultural competency and mental health training, de-escalation and conflict resolution.’ Fellow council member Jeremiah Ellison tweeted: ‘We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. And when we’re done, we’re not simply going to glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response.’ In New York and LA, cuts to policing budgets have already been announced.
Meanwhile memes proliferate that show police abolition as the newest frontier in the struggle that rid the world of slavery, then segregation. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards peace circles.
Like Kaba, nobody writing these op-eds wonders whether a cop-less world would leave the poor with the Mafia and the rich with Blackwater, as Michael Brendan Dougherty put it. They think that without police, America will enthusiastically take up community justice along ancient indigenous lines, rather than slide back to the communal vigilantism.
Advocates of abolition, like advocates of the Green New Deal, are not interested in incremental change. Abolition is more dramatic than that. Alex Vitale, author of The End of Policing told Mother Jonesthat abolition ‘goes hand in hand with decriminalizing sex work, drugs, homelessness, mental illness. We don’t really need a vice unit, we need a system of legalized sex work that’s regulated just like any other business.’
The abolitionist focus is always on systems. Bad cops are not bad apples, they are the rotten fruit of a blight-ridden orchard. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in 2015: ‘A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.’ The abolition of the police is merely one demand on the laundry list. The Minneapolis abolition group MPD150 is typical in this respect. After abolition comes everything else:
‘Dismantling the police will require reallocating their budget and assets to support real solutions to community desperation: good, well-paying jobs, affordable housing, healthy food, empowering education, accessible health care, removal of toxins, etc. Ending the brutal police system is, by necessity, a program for a more just and resilient city.’
It is worth giving abolitionists a hearing. It is also worth asking them questions, getting them to be specific and detailed about their stated goals. Exactly how will restorative justice work in practice? How would it solve a homicide? How would it deal with gangs and human traffickers and drug dealers? Why would this be an improvement on current policing methods? Who will pay for the full suite of reforms? How could they fail? Is the system really so corrupt that it must be burned down before anything else can happen? How can you guarantee that there wouldn’t be a nationwide version of the Ferguson or Baltimore effect if the police were disbanded?
In an election year the most salient question of all is: who would vote for this? A slogan like ‘Abolish The Police’ seems guaranteed to inspire revulsion among the public, even if sections of the media push it from now until November. Most Americans want some measure of police reform — less violence, more body cameras — but they do not support reducing police budgets, let alone abolishing the police altogether. Voters who backed Obama in 2012 who then switched to Trump in 2016 want to see more police officers hired, as do African Americans.
Every top-ranking Democrat is shortly going to find themselves in the position of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey. Attending a rally yesterday, Frey gave a short speech about systemic racism. He muttered some other Obama-era talking points. Nobody was satisfied. Asked by protesters if he supported defunding the police department, Frey bravely said he did not. He walked away as a crowd of thousands booed, pursued by chants of SHAME! SHAME! SHAME!
Joe Biden is going to face that question sooner rather than later. If he does what Frey did he’s going to anger a lot of people he needs to turn out in November. If he says yes — defund, then abolish the police, replace them with peace circles — he’s going to hand Donald Trump far more votes than he deserves after the madness of this year.
Today in 1964, the Rolling Stones recorded their “12×5” album at Chess Studios in Chicago:
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Today in 1972, Elvis Presley recorded a live album at Madison Square Garden in New York:
The Wall Street Journal:
The purge of senior editors at progressive newspapers this weekend is no cause for cheering. Their resignations are another milestone in the march of identity politics and cancel culture through our liberal institutions, and American journalism and democracy will be worse for it.
The long-time editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who’d seen the publication through difficult times, was pushed out over a headline, “Buildings Matter, Too.” It was atop a piece by architecture critic Inga Saffron, who worried that buildings damaged by violence could “leave a gaping hole in the heart of Philadelphia.” Staff members deemed the headline an offense to Black Lives Matter. They protested, and no amount of apologizing or changes to the headline were enough. Editor Stan Wischnowski didn’t last the week.
At the New York Times, editorial page editor James Bennet resigned Sunday after a staff uproar over an op-ed by a U.S. Senator. Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton wrote that military troops should be sent to restore public order in American cities when the police are overwhelmed. A staff revolt deemed the piece fascist, unconstitutional, and too offensive for adults to read and decide for themselves.
Our editorial last week opposed deploying active-duty troops, but the idea is legal under the Insurrection Act. George H.W. Bush deployed troops in 1992 to quell riots in Los Angeles after the Rodney King verdict, and other Presidents have done it too.
Mr. Bennet defended the op-ed on Friday as part of his attempt to broaden debate in his pages, and at first so did publisher A.G. Sulzberger. But Mr. Sulzberger changed his mind the same day, suddenly declaring that the op-ed he had defended had not received proper editing and should not have been published. By Sunday Mr. Bennet, as true-blue a progressive as you can find, was out the door. James Dao, the opinion editor who had signed off on the Cotton op-ed, was reassigned.
An ostensibly independent opinion section was ransacked because the social-justice warriors in the newsroom opposed a single article espousing a view that polls show tens of millions of Americans support if the police can’t handle rioting and violence. The publisher failed to back up his editors, which means the editors no longer run the place. The struggle sessions on Twitter and Slack channels rule.
All of this shows the extent to which American journalism is now dominated by the same moral denunciation, “safe space” demands, and identity-politics dogmas that began in the universities. The agents of this politics now dominate nearly all of America’s leading cultural institutions—museums, philanthropy, Hollywood, book publishers, even late-night talk shows.
On matters deemed sacrosanct—and today that includes the view that America is root-and-branch racist—there is no room for debate. You must admit your failure to appreciate this orthodoxy and do penance, or you will not survive in the job.
Some of our friends on the right are pleased because they say all of this merely exposes what has long been true. But this takeover of the Times and other liberal bastions means that there are ever fewer institutions that will defend free inquiry and the contest of ideas that once defined American liberalism.
We are led to believe by the protesters of last week that police are violent racists.
George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”
Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.
This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.
The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.
A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.
The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.
The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.
For many, this prolonged civil unrest is shocking. It shouldn’t be. Police have been the targets of a poisonous, decades-long campaign to paint law enforcement as a violent cog in the machine of a racially oppressive criminal-justice system. As more and more serious-minded people embraced this narrative and disregarded the astonishing progress made in racial tolerance, the question ceased to be whether America would see the large-scale riots of the kind that occurred in the mid- to late 1960s—when charges of widespread racism in policing had some merit—but only a question of when.
Many protest supporters have expressed frustration with the attention being given to a relative handful of agitators driving the violence and looting—behavior, they say, that distorts the image of what is largely a peaceful movement. Their frustration is understandable but also ironic: the narrative that has driven thousands into the streets is itself a distortion. Just as the violence that has alarmed the American public does not represent the peaceful protesters exercising their right to air their grievances, the police violence depicted in viral videos does not characterize the institution of law enforcement.
This is not to say that police are perfect, or that officers never abuse their power; they are not perfect, and some do succumb to what can be an intoxicating sense of authority. This is a truth I’ve personallyexperienced. Nor is it to say that there is no room to improve policing and to make police-citizen encounters both safer and less fraught. But if there is to be any hope for peacefully bridging the gap so strikingly represented by the glass-covered asphalt separating rioters and police, destructive hyperbole needs to be recognized for what it is.
The data on police use of force predominantly reveal professionalism and restraint. Yet, as with so many aspects of America’s criminal-justice reform debate, context and nuance are regularly cast aside in favor of obfuscation and mischaracterization. Consider, for example, an op-ed in Monday’s Washington Post by columnist Catherine Rampell, in which she lamented that, “In the United States last year, police shot and killed more than 1,000 people; by comparison, across England and Wales, fewer than 100 died in police shootings over the past two decades.” While factually accurate, this observation ignores important and obvious differences between these nations. America is home to nearly 330 million people, for instance, while England and Wales have a combined population of about 59 million.
The comparison also ignores vast differences in the prevalence of criminal violence. Based on data from the year ending in March 2018, England and Wales see about 726 homicides annually. Compare that total with the prevalence of criminal homicides in four contiguous community areas on Chicago’s West Side (Humboldt Park, Austin, East and West Garfield Park), which, in 2018, saw 121 killings. That’s 16 percent of the homicide total for England and Wales; an eye-opening statistic, given that the estimated population of those areas is just 189,846—approximately 0.3 percent of the population of England and Wales. The murder rate of those four community areas (about 63.73 per 100,000) is more than 50 times higher than that of England and Wales (approximately 1.23 per 100,000). In Baltimore’s Western and Southwestern police districts—with a combined estimated population of 103,052—100 homicides occurred in 2018. In other words, just a few subsections of two U.S. cities account for 30 percent of the homicides seen in all of England and Wales—and the combined population of those American subsections (292,898) represents just 0.5 percent of England and Wales.
These numbers explain why the United States sees comparably more deadly police-citizen encounters than some other Western European democracies to which it is so often unfavorably compared. The higher rate of police use of force must also be contextualized in light of the overall volume of police activity. In 2018, police discharged their firearms an estimated 3,043 times, killing 992 people. Without more information, one can understand how these numbers might suggest that police violence is common. But consider also that, that same year, an estimated 686,665 full-time law-enforcement officers made more than 10.3 million arrests—a fraction of the more than 50 million contacts (based on 2015 data) that they have with members of the public (think traffic and pedestrian stops, investigative inquiries, and so on). As I recently argued in The Federalist Society Review: even if we attribute each of the 3,043 estimated firearm discharges by police in 2018 to a unique officer, we can infer that, at most, 0.4 percent of police officers purposely discharged a firearm in 2018. And if we assume that every shooting happened during the course of a separate arrest, we can infer that, at most, police applied deadly force with a firearm in just 0.003 percent of arrests.
This is in line with other data I highlighted in these pages two years ago—namely, a 2018 study published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery, which analyzed more than 114,000 criminal arrests made across three midsize police departments, finding that more than 99 percent of arrests were carried out without the use of physical force. In 98 percent of the cases in which those officers did use physical force, suspects “sustained no or mild injury.”
Historical context is important, too. In 1971, New York City Police discharged their firearms 810 times, wounding 221 people and killing 93. By 1990, those numbers were down to 307, 72, and 39, respectively. In 2016, police discharged their weapons just 72 times, wounding 23, killing 9. This is real progress; but it would come as news to anyone observing the mobs that have spent the last few days hurling insults, rocks, and Molotov cocktails at exhausted and demoralized members of the NYPD.
As troubling as cases like that of George Floyd are, we must remember that they are outliers. That knowledge won’t bring comfort or justice to those harmed or killed by police who use unjustifiable force, or their families; but it can help lower the temperature in an environment that is about as inhospitable to reasonable discussion as can be imagined. Grounding the debate about how to improve policing in data rather than hyperbole may help rebut the toxic narrative about policing that has become so broadly accepted. Its persistence, in minds and hearts, will only lead to more of the destruction and anarchy currently ravaging our country.
Of course, the First Amendment guarantees us the right to express ourselves, even if the speaker is incorrect or even lying.
The number one single today in 1958:
The number one album in the country today in 1971 was Paul and Linda McCartney’s “Ram”:
Today in 1972, Bruce Springsteen signed a record deal with Columbia Records. He celebrated 19 years later by marrying his backup singer, Patti Scialfa.
Birthdays today start with the Wisconsinite to whom every rock guitarist owes a debt, Les Paul:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 