On race and policing in America

Having just been at a conference where I was lucky enough to engage in a lot of difficult, but enlightening, conversations about race and policing in post-Ferguson America, I’m feeling fired up and ready to take my first stab at blogging about something that I’ve been thinking about for years: Race and policing in America, as understood by a progressive white cop. I hope you have some time on your hands, and whether you’re on the pro- or anti-law enforcement side of some of these debates, I’ll ask you keep reading past the parts where you disagree with me.

At the conference, the final night’s speaker was a Black Lives Matter activist (with many other titles and hats, who I was glad for the opportunity to hear speak). In her talk, she included a laundry list of highly publicized police shootings and in-custody deaths: Tamir Rice, Michael Brown, Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott, off the top of my head. This was in the context of an indictment on the injustices in our society. She used the word “innocent” to, in my interpretation, describe the entire list, and I’m not sure whether she said it outright, but a listener could certainly walk away with the impression that there were no consequences for any of the police officers involved.

First: I want to recognize that this was a powerful message, spoken from a place of profound truth for the speaker (hell, for our nation). And I am keenly aware that it is problematic for me, with all the positions of privilege I occupy, to critique the tone of someone who is speaking boldly from a position of marginalization. But I also have to say that if there are ways you would seek to change law enforcement and the criminal justice system, you’re going to need some cops on your side to do it. As a cop, listening to this talk, the message I heard was that while everyone else is welcome to join in this movement and to seek harmony, there is no place for me. Police were clearly the “other” in this conversation. I’m not protesting this for the sake of our feelings; we’re tough. But if the picture is going to be painted this way, I just don’t understand how we’re going to get anywhere.

Second: We need to be careful about lists like this, because in their very creation they create a narrative that may or may not be true. In this case, the narrative is the now-familiar one that there is an epidemic of police officers killing unarmed black people; such an epidemic that we are to be angry, but not surprised, with each new story.

Any such list is, by its nature, selective. It leaves out all the white people killed by police. It leaves out all the black people not killed by police. It offers no numbers or solid data to tell us what we should make of these stories, taken together. And in this particular case, it leaves out some pretty important information: for example, that Michael Brown attempted to take Darren Wilson’s gun, or that many of the officers involved in these incidents have been fired, forced to resign, and/or charged with crimes up to and including murder.

To be sure, there is racial bias in policing. Any number of studies and tests have been done to show that; I don’t have a link for you, but I recall one experiment in which a group of white youths, and a group of black youths, were sent driving around in the same expensive car, outfitted with hidden cameras. The white kids were never stopped by the police; the black kids were. Black Americans are more likely to be stopped, questioned, frisked, arrested, charged, convicted, given harsh jail sentences, even given the death penalty; at every step of the way, the criminal justice system is unfairly biased against African Americans.

But this isn’t just about law enforcement: There’s racial bias in policing because there’s racial bias in America. Project Implicit, a collaboration between Harvard, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia, has a quick online test that attempts to measure racial bias (click the link!); the results show that 70% of Americans have an automatic preference for white faces. All such studies have their flaws, but in this case I bet the real number is higher.

In fact, there are some data to suggest law enforcement might come out ahead: African Americans make up only 13 percent of the US population, but account for 32 percent of those killed by the police (source) – clearly there’s a disproportion there. However, African Americans make up 44 percent of total murder victims and a whopping 59 percent of people killed in justifiable homicides. All this is bad, but the police number is the lowest.*

African Americans have also made up a disproportionately high number of those who kill cops (39 percent in 2013, 22 percent in 2014). WAIT. Before you go running off to (A) say I’m slinging racist statistics or (B) that black people are somehow more violent, remember that black people are more likely to have contact with the police in the first place, which grants more opportunities for something to escalate into a violent encounter. All I’m claiming is that these numbers suggest it’s not at the point of a shoot/don’t shoot decision that racial disparity enters the equation, and that there’s more to the story than the “cops killing black people” narrative.

But you’re reading this blog to hear from a cop, not from a bunch of numbers, right? So let’s leave all that aside and I’ll just say this: In my opinion, based on my own experience as a police officer, I do think there is racial bias in law enforcement. I just think that it’s not a problem that exists in isolation, but a symptom of the wider problems of race in America.

Nobody wants to be called a racist; we all learned as little kids that racism is bad. So bad, we’re embarrassed that it even exists. So bad, that until very recently, very few people even wanted to talk about it. When a newsworthy event happens that sheds light on the reality that there is racism in America, we are quick to want to project all of it onto a scapegoat–in these cases, the police. Police have become America’s blood sacrifices, taken to the altar in hopes that it will atone for the collective sin in which we are all complicit.

I’m not letting myself off the hook. I want the police to represent the very best of our society, so I’m not willing to wait for all of America to change. I’ll work every day to better myself as a police officer, to combat my own racial bias. But please, before you lend your voice to the claims that the police are the bad guys, that we are the ones responsible for racial injustice; before you re-post that anti-cop message; please ask if it’s the root cause or the symptom that you’re addressing. And ask how, instead of ostracizing the police, you can make us your allies in the fight against racism.

I’m ready. And I’m not the only one.

Also see “Policing Killings of Blacks: Here is What the Data Say,” New York Times, 10/16/2015.

*Because the numbers from this paragraph were pulled from different sources, and due to the varying availability of data on these subjects, these statistics are not all from the same year, and as such there is some statistical fallacy in comparing them to each other. However, I do not think this invalidates the picture they paint.