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I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone so it's important to get at the root cause. Whether real or perceived, the p

I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone so it's important to get at the root cause. Whether real or perceived, the police seem to be much more fearful of black males than other racial groups. If perceived, then I might expect black officers to have a lower incident rate as they may be less likely to feel threatened in a situation. If there is a real statistical threat (also very difficult to tease out and to avoid confounding variables) then this could be more difficult to address and ultimately this would come back to a cycle of institutionalized poverty and incarceration that breaks up families and sends people who have been hardened by jail back into the black community thereby introducing a culture of violence. Either way you cut it a history of racism is to blame. Officers clearly are fearing for their lives and view potential encounters with black males through a lense of negative intent, which is causing them to react more aggressively. Greater accountability and training will be critical but only if the culture of the police force changes. This could be very difficult as a lot of police officers may take these jobs exactly because they're attracted to the danger and violence (In Canada many of the bouncers I knew were on steroids only had high school educations and many wanted to be cops...).

Cenk 10y ago
>Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141854 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
- Unklejoe 10y ago
  [ Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents ... ] That's a lot to go through this early in the morning, so forgive me if this has been covered already, but did they analyze the risk of police officers being attacked/killed by the particular race that there's a (police shooting) bias against compared to other races in those counties? I'm curious if there's a correlation between "assault on police officers is X times more likely to occur by someone from race Y" and "police officers are Z times more likely to shoot someone of race Y". I'm not trying to imply anything (even though I know it sounds that way). I'm just curious.
  - Cenk 10y ago
    Good question! In 2015 26 police officers were killed in the line of duty. Of those, half were black (which is disproportionate, only 12% of police officers are black). I couldn’t find out what percentage of the 26 police officers were killed by black people without reading up on every case. Wikipedia has a complete list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_police_officers_killed_in_the_line_of_duty#2015_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_police_office...
    - fmdwl 10y ago
      >In 2015 26 police officers were killed in the line of duty. 126 actually, according to the list on Wikipedia. Typo? I'll make a table with the race of the officer and the assailant for all assault incidents (so no accidents, heart attacks, etc). Check back in a bit.
      - Cenk 10y ago
        I just saw that I pulled the 26 from an article that was written in September 2015, so it’s out of date. List from https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2015 https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2015 Line of Duty Deaths: 130 9/11 related illness: 8 Accidental: 2 Aircraft accident: 1 Assault: 3 Automobile accident: 27 Bomb: 6 Drowned: 1 Duty related illness: 2 Fall: 1 Gunfire: 39 Gunfire (Accidental): 2 Heart attack: 17 Motorcycle accident: 3 Struck by vehicle: 4 Vehicle pursuit: 5 Vehicular assault: 8 Weather/Natural disaster: 1 So police officers killed would be 48? (Gunfire: 39 + Assault: 3 + Bomb: 6)
        DanBC 10y ago
        You missed "struck by vehicle", and I think you've assumed all those gun deaths had non-officer shooters.
        Cenk 10y ago
        I think they categorise friendly fire under Gunfire (Accidental)?
junto 10y ago
While that threat maybe real, a man in his car with his partner and 4 year old child, is not likely to be a threat on the same scale. What is a threat is gun ownership. British police do not expect to be threatened with a firearm, or shot on a routine traffic stop. In the US, the police have to expect that as normality. Now I know there are a lot of US citizens who believe in the right to bear arms, and many more militant NRA members believe that is more about defending themselves from the state, but if you take a step back, they've already lost that fight long ago. The state already tramples over their rights, and there are no armed militias matching on Washington to overthrow the corrupt and over controlling state. I truly don't understand that argument.
- konschubert 10y ago
  Exactly. In most parts of the world, law enforcement has a power leverage because officers are armed, and the public is not. (Yes, even criminals are usually unarmed unless they are intending to commit a crime. This is because wearing a weapon outs them as criminals, which they naturally try to avoid.) If you want to deescalate the war between law enforcement and the public, you must not only change the way the law enforcement interprets its duty, you must also disarm the public.
  - a_humean 10y ago
    In the UK the vast majority (don't know the hard figure, but guessing something like 95%) of police are unarmed with the exception of maybe pepper spray or the occasional blunt stick (I think even that is less common now). Only a small minority of police in the UK are even trained in firearms, and they are meant to be the elite (physically, psychologically, and morally) with years of experience and countless hours of recurring training. UK police, in principle, try to operate via a community policing and policing by consent principle that assumes cooperation and negotiation as the norm of police work with coercive force as only a very last resort. UK police don't use the threat of force as leverage as explicitly as you are suggesting, and they very very rarely have guns. Our police force isn't perfect, and is far from having a spotless record with minority groups, but they do represent an alternative model of policing that doesn't have to be about the threat or show of force. Police are meant to be about enabling civilian self-policing; not military occupation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles
toomanythings3 10y ago
So the cops made them do it and not the devil.
moron4hire 10y ago
> I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone... I've met quite a few people that that was the explicit reason they joined the military or police. It's not enough to assume default goodness in people. Police officers, being in a position of public trust and wielding an extreme level of lawfully sanctioned violent power, must be held to a higher standard.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
morgante 10y ago
> I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone so it's important to get at the root cause. I don't. Most of the cops I know were bullies in high school. They enjoy violence and commanding physical authority over other people. The ability to carry and potentially use a gun is a big draw of the profession for them. Police violence won't be fixed until we stop giving thugs a badge and gun.
- explorigin 10y ago
  All the police officers I know are nice, level-headed guys, but that speaks more about my friends than it does police officers. That said, I talked to a psychiatrist about a relative in the service. She has a term "shiny-shoe syndrome" where people with personality disorders gravitate toward jobs that give them power over others. What were missing is a good psych eval as a requirement for a badge.
  - jiiam 10y ago
    I'm not familiar with the US system, so I have to ask: are you saying that nowhere during his training a cop is evaluated by a psychiatrist before receiving his badge?
    - gnoway 10y ago
      I don't know if it's universal, but it's at least extremely common for there to be a psych eval prior to receiving a badge. Not sure why the parent thinks otherwise.
      - explorigin 10y ago
        The operative word there is _good_. Remember that we're talking about multiple systems that are run differently all across the country. Some systems are better than others. It's not a one-size fits all comparison.
    - pc86 10y ago
      I've served on multiple commissions whose sole purpose was to interview police applicants (and serve on one currently). In every instance there was an in depth background check including interviews (former significant others, neighbors, teachers, etc), financial background check and credit reports, and a psychological evaluation. At many instances the candidate could be removed from the process. The flip side is that it's Civil Service, meaning everything is scored and at the end of the day the hireable pool of applicants is typically 2-5 vetted and certified applicants for a given position, so the official hiring body (typically the township supervisors or council) has very little decision-making power. In my state they're legally required to hire one of the top 3. If a veteran is #1, the hiring body must hire them unless they can find a disqualifying feature in the interview. These requirements vary a lot by state, this is just my anecdotal experience. Even in the smallest local police forces - the smallest I worked with was 8 officers, mostly part-time, in a borough of ~1,000 households - it would be unheard of not to get some sort of psychiatric or psychological opinion on the candidate.
jiiam 10y ago
> I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone so it's important to get at the root cause. I fail to see any evidence to justify (or at least motivate) that assumption.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
That's a big assumption. There are a couple things at play here. One is the demonization of blacks through the way the war on drugs has been prosecuted. Blacks are far more likely to be arrested or incarcerated for drug crimes, despite an equivalent or in some cases lower incidence of drug use than whites. Blacks are more likely to be disciplined in school, regardless of behavior. This leads to an adversarial relationship and it creates what seems to be a trend of blacks always having run ins with the law (significantly because of unequal application of the law and policing towards them). Another is the aggressiveness, militarization, and tendency to escalate in the police, much of it brought about by the war on drugs. No knock raids and a propensity to look at every encounter between law enforcement and a civilian, especially a black civilian, as a hostile situation always on the tipping point of violence, and the training to match, has created an epidemic of police encounters that are far more violent than they ever should have been. Police go through training to dominate, to shoot at a twitch if they feel the situation warrants it, and we see the bloody results. But there's something even darker. And that's the increasing willingness of police forces to commit summary executions on the street of people they feel are, or should be, outside of the protections of the law. Many police have very little qualms about deploying lethal force against "the bad guys", and the public too has been quick to defend the use of lethal force against "bad guys". Rapists, murderers, violent thieves, "scum". And the line on what sort of behavior is allowed has shifted significantly. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 there have been a total of around 1400 legally sanctioned executions in the entire US, for an average of about 35 a year. Police fatally shot nearly a thousand people in 2015 alone. An execution rate nearly 30 times the legally sanctioned rate, and increasing since a low in around the year 2000. This while the rates of both violent crime and of shootings of police officers have been falling. Today the rate of fatal shootings by police is as high as it was during the height of the crack epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period when violent crime and street murder (by civilians) were at record highs, several times higher than they are today. Unquestionably the police have shifted toward a stance of committing summary executions during arrests. Sometimes this happens by accident, where the aggressiveness of the police put them closer to suspects and more likely to be in danger, and thus more likely to provoke a situation requiring deadly use of force. The problem here is that for too long we as a society have been willing to look away (as we were willing to look away when our nation began to adopt torture) from these horrors because we thought that only "bad guys" were being affected. But as we've seen, these patterns of behavior easily bleed over and pretty quickly you start seeing routine traffic stops pushed up against the knife edge of life or death circumstance for no good reason, and good, honest citizens are dying as a result. This last one is very hard to solve, because, as we've seen, it requires a very stunning reversal of perspective for those in law enforcement. It's difficult to come to terms with the concept that you might be a bad guy yourself, that your actions and your training may be horrifically dangerous to civilized life. So people will naturally shy away from questioning their own training, motives, and actions.

Cenk 10y ago

>Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents, especially when there is high financial inequality in that county. There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates. http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141854 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

Unklejoe 10y ago
[ Finally, analysis of police shooting data as a function of county-level predictors suggests that racial bias in police shootings is most likely to emerge in police departments in larger metropolitan counties with low median incomes and a sizable portion of black residents ... ] That's a lot to go through this early in the morning, so forgive me if this has been covered already, but did they analyze the risk of police officers being attacked/killed by the particular race that there's a (police shooting) bias against compared to other races in those counties? I'm curious if there's a correlation between "assault on police officers is X times more likely to occur by someone from race Y" and "police officers are Z times more likely to shoot someone of race Y". I'm not trying to imply anything (even though I know it sounds that way). I'm just curious.
- Cenk 10y ago
  Good question! In 2015 26 police officers were killed in the line of duty. Of those, half were black (which is disproportionate, only 12% of police officers are black). I couldn’t find out what percentage of the 26 police officers were killed by black people without reading up on every case. Wikipedia has a complete list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_police_officers_killed_in_the_line_of_duty#2015_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_police_office...
  - fmdwl 10y ago
    >In 2015 26 police officers were killed in the line of duty. 126 actually, according to the list on Wikipedia. Typo? I'll make a table with the race of the officer and the assailant for all assault incidents (so no accidents, heart attacks, etc). Check back in a bit.
    - Cenk 10y ago
      I just saw that I pulled the 26 from an article that was written in September 2015, so it’s out of date. List from https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2015 https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2015 Line of Duty Deaths: 130 9/11 related illness: 8 Accidental: 2 Aircraft accident: 1 Assault: 3 Automobile accident: 27 Bomb: 6 Drowned: 1 Duty related illness: 2 Fall: 1 Gunfire: 39 Gunfire (Accidental): 2 Heart attack: 17 Motorcycle accident: 3 Struck by vehicle: 4 Vehicle pursuit: 5 Vehicular assault: 8 Weather/Natural disaster: 1 So police officers killed would be 48? (Gunfire: 39 + Assault: 3 + Bomb: 6)
      - DanBC 10y ago
        You missed "struck by vehicle", and I think you've assumed all those gun deaths had non-officer shooters.
        Cenk 10y ago
        I think they categorise friendly fire under Gunfire (Accidental)?

junto 10y ago

While that threat maybe real, a man in his car with his partner and 4 year old child, is not likely to be a threat on the same scale. What is a threat is gun ownership. British police do not expect to be threatened with a firearm, or shot on a routine traffic stop. In the US, the police have to expect that as normality. Now I know there are a lot of US citizens who believe in the right to bear arms, and many more militant NRA members believe that is more about defending themselves from the state, but if you take a step back, they've already lost that fight long ago. The state already tramples over their rights, and there are no armed militias matching on Washington to overthrow the corrupt and over controlling state. I truly don't understand that argument.

konschubert 10y ago
Exactly. In most parts of the world, law enforcement has a power leverage because officers are armed, and the public is not. (Yes, even criminals are usually unarmed unless they are intending to commit a crime. This is because wearing a weapon outs them as criminals, which they naturally try to avoid.) If you want to deescalate the war between law enforcement and the public, you must not only change the way the law enforcement interprets its duty, you must also disarm the public.
- a_humean 10y ago
  In the UK the vast majority (don't know the hard figure, but guessing something like 95%) of police are unarmed with the exception of maybe pepper spray or the occasional blunt stick (I think even that is less common now). Only a small minority of police in the UK are even trained in firearms, and they are meant to be the elite (physically, psychologically, and morally) with years of experience and countless hours of recurring training. UK police, in principle, try to operate via a community policing and policing by consent principle that assumes cooperation and negotiation as the norm of police work with coercive force as only a very last resort. UK police don't use the threat of force as leverage as explicitly as you are suggesting, and they very very rarely have guns. Our police force isn't perfect, and is far from having a spotless record with minority groups, but they do represent an alternative model of policing that doesn't have to be about the threat or show of force. Police are meant to be about enabling civilian self-policing; not military occupation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles

toomanythings3 10y ago

So the cops made them do it and not the devil.

moron4hire 10y ago

> I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone... I've met quite a few people that that was the explicit reason they joined the military or police. It's not enough to assume default goodness in people. Police officers, being in a position of public trust and wielding an extreme level of lawfully sanctioned violent power, must be held to a higher standard.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

morgante 10y ago

> I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone so it's important to get at the root cause. I don't. Most of the cops I know were bullies in high school. They enjoy violence and commanding physical authority over other people. The ability to carry and potentially use a gun is a big draw of the profession for them. Police violence won't be fixed until we stop giving thugs a badge and gun.

explorigin 10y ago
All the police officers I know are nice, level-headed guys, but that speaks more about my friends than it does police officers. That said, I talked to a psychiatrist about a relative in the service. She has a term "shiny-shoe syndrome" where people with personality disorders gravitate toward jobs that give them power over others. What were missing is a good psych eval as a requirement for a badge.
- jiiam 10y ago
  I'm not familiar with the US system, so I have to ask: are you saying that nowhere during his training a cop is evaluated by a psychiatrist before receiving his badge?
  - gnoway 10y ago
    I don't know if it's universal, but it's at least extremely common for there to be a psych eval prior to receiving a badge. Not sure why the parent thinks otherwise.
    - explorigin 10y ago
      The operative word there is _good_. Remember that we're talking about multiple systems that are run differently all across the country. Some systems are better than others. It's not a one-size fits all comparison.
  - pc86 10y ago
    I've served on multiple commissions whose sole purpose was to interview police applicants (and serve on one currently). In every instance there was an in depth background check including interviews (former significant others, neighbors, teachers, etc), financial background check and credit reports, and a psychological evaluation. At many instances the candidate could be removed from the process. The flip side is that it's Civil Service, meaning everything is scored and at the end of the day the hireable pool of applicants is typically 2-5 vetted and certified applicants for a given position, so the official hiring body (typically the township supervisors or council) has very little decision-making power. In my state they're legally required to hire one of the top 3. If a veteran is #1, the hiring body must hire them unless they can find a disqualifying feature in the interview. These requirements vary a lot by state, this is just my anecdotal experience. Even in the smallest local police forces - the smallest I worked with was 8 officers, mostly part-time, in a borough of ~1,000 households - it would be unheard of not to get some sort of psychiatric or psychological opinion on the candidate.

jiiam 10y ago

> I assume that police officers don't go into an encounter intending to shoot someone so it's important to get at the root cause. I fail to see any evidence to justify (or at least motivate) that assumption.

InclinedPlane 10y ago

That's a big assumption. There are a couple things at play here. One is the demonization of blacks through the way the war on drugs has been prosecuted. Blacks are far more likely to be arrested or incarcerated for drug crimes, despite an equivalent or in some cases lower incidence of drug use than whites. Blacks are more likely to be disciplined in school, regardless of behavior. This leads to an adversarial relationship and it creates what seems to be a trend of blacks always having run ins with the law (significantly because of unequal application of the law and policing towards them). Another is the aggressiveness, militarization, and tendency to escalate in the police, much of it brought about by the war on drugs. No knock raids and a propensity to look at every encounter between law enforcement and a civilian, especially a black civilian, as a hostile situation always on the tipping point of violence, and the training to match, has created an epidemic of police encounters that are far more violent than they ever should have been. Police go through training to dominate, to shoot at a twitch if they feel the situation warrants it, and we see the bloody results. But there's something even darker. And that's the increasing willingness of police forces to commit summary executions on the street of people they feel are, or should be, outside of the protections of the law. Many police have very little qualms about deploying lethal force against "the bad guys", and the public too has been quick to defend the use of lethal force against "bad guys". Rapists, murderers, violent thieves, "scum". And the line on what sort of behavior is allowed has shifted significantly. Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 there have been a total of around 1400 legally sanctioned executions in the entire US, for an average of about 35 a year. Police fatally shot nearly a thousand people in 2015 alone. An execution rate nearly 30 times the legally sanctioned rate, and increasing since a low in around the year 2000. This while the rates of both violent crime and of shootings of police officers have been falling. Today the rate of fatal shootings by police is as high as it was during the height of the crack epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period when violent crime and street murder (by civilians) were at record highs, several times higher than they are today. Unquestionably the police have shifted toward a stance of committing summary executions during arrests. Sometimes this happens by accident, where the aggressiveness of the police put them closer to suspects and more likely to be in danger, and thus more likely to provoke a situation requiring deadly use of force. The problem here is that for too long we as a society have been willing to look away (as we were willing to look away when our nation began to adopt torture) from these horrors because we thought that only "bad guys" were being affected. But as we've seen, these patterns of behavior easily bleed over and pretty quickly you start seeing routine traffic stops pushed up against the knife edge of life or death circumstance for no good reason, and good, honest citizens are dying as a result. This last one is very hard to solve, because, as we've seen, it requires a very stunning reversal of perspective for those in law enforcement. It's difficult to come to terms with the concept that you might be a bad guy yourself, that your actions and your training may be horrifically dangerous to civilized life. So people will naturally shy away from questioning their own training, motives, and actions.