The
real problem is black-on-black crime. NCVS data from 2015, the most recent year
available, suggest that black men are three times as likely to commit violent
crimes as white men.
And the media narrative to the contrary is
damaging.
By Philippe Lemoine
A few days ago, former police officer Jason Stockley, who
is white, was acquitted of first-degree murder; he had fatally shot Anthony
Lamar Smith, who was black, in 2011. Protests started in St. Louis, where the
shooting took place and Stockley was judged, immediately after the verdict was
announced. Although they were initially peaceful, they soon turned violent, and
dozens of protesters were arrested while several police officers were injured.
Since the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, just outside St. Louis, in
2014, this has become a familiar pattern.
This article is not about whether Stockley should have
been acquitted. Instead, I want to talk about the underlying narrative
regarding the prevalence of police brutality against black men in the U.S.,
which is largely undisputed in the media.
According to this narrative, black men are constantly
harassed by the police and routinely brutalized with impunity, even when they
have done nothing wrong, and there is an “epidemic of police shootings of
unarmed black men.” Even high-profile black celebrities often claim to be
afraid of the police because the same thing might happen to them. Police
brutality, or at least the possibility that one might become a victim of such
violence, is supposed to be part of the experience of a typical black man in
the U.S. Events such as the death of Brown in Ferguson are presented as proof that
black men are never safe from the police.
This narrative is false. In reality, a randomly selected
black man is overwhelmingly unlikely to be victim of police violence — and
though white men experience such violence even less often, the disparity is consistent
with the racial gap in violent crime, suggesting that the role of racial bias
is small. The media’s acceptance of the false narrative poisons the relations
between law enforcement and black communities throughout the country and
results in violent protests that destroy property and sometimes even claim
lives. Perhaps even more importantly, the narrative distracts from far more
serious problems that black Americans face.
Let’s start with the question of fatal violence. Last
year, according to the Washington Post’s tally, just 16 unarmed black men, out of a population
of more than 20 million, were killed by the police. The year before, the number was 36. These figures are likely
close to the number of black men struck by lightning in a given year,
considering that happens to about
300 Americans annually and black men are 7 percent of the
population. And they include cases where the shooting was justified, even if
the person killed was unarmed.
Of course, police killings are not the result of a force
of nature, and I’m not claiming these are morally equivalent. But the
comparison illustrates that these killings are incredibly rare, and that it’s
completely misleading to talk about an “epidemic” of them. You don’t hear
people talk about an epidemic of lightning strikes and claim they are afraid to
go outside because of it. Liberals often make the same comparison when they
argue that it’s completely irrational to fear that you might become a victim of
terrorism.
One might retort that, while it may be rare for a black
man to be killed by the police, black men are still constantly stopped
and routinely brutalized by the police, even if they don’t die from it.
However, even this weaker claim is false. It just isn’t true that black men are
kicked, punched, etc., on a regular basis by the police.
In order to show that, I’m going to use data from the
Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS), which, as its name suggests, provides
detailed information about contacts between the police and the public. It’s
conducted on a regular basis by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) and is
based on a nationally representative sample of more than 70,000 U.S. residents
age 16 or older. Respondents are asked whether they had a contact with the
police during the past 12 months; if they say they did, they answer a battery
of questions about the nature of their last contact, including any use of
force. Since the respondents also provide their age, race, gender, etc., we can
use this survey to calculate the prevalence of police violence for various
demographic groups. The numbers in this piece are from my own analysis of the
data, the details and code for which I provide here,
but they are consistent with a 2015 report
compiled by the BJS itself to the extent the two overlap.
First, despite what the narrative claims, it’s not true
that black men are constantly stopped by the police for no reason. Indeed,
black men are less likely than white men to have contact with the
police in any given year, though this includes situations where the respondent
called the cops himself: 17.5 percent versus 20.7 percent. Similarly, a black
man has on average only 0.32 contacts with the police in any given year,
compared with 0.35 contacts for a white man. It’s true that black men are
overrepresented among people who have many contacts with the police, but not by
much. Only 1.5 percent of black men have more than three contacts with the
police in any given year, whereas 1.2 percent of white men do.
If we look at how often the police use physical force
against men of different races, we find that there is indeed a racial
disparity, but that this experience is rare across the board. Only 0.6 percent
of black men experience physical force by the police in any given year, while
approximately 0.2 percent of white men do. To be fair, these are probably
slight undercounts, because the survey does not allow us to identify people who
did not experience physical force during their most recent contact but did experience
such force during a previous contact in the same year.
Further, physical force as defined by the PPCS includes
relatively mild forms of violence such as pushing and grabbing. Actual injuries
by the police are so rare that one cannot estimate them very precisely even in
a survey as big as the PPCS, but the available data suggest that only 0.08
percent of black men are injured by the police each year, approximately the
same rate as for white men. A black man is about 44 times as likely to
suffer a traffic-related injury, according to the National Hospital Ambulatory
Medical Care Survey. Moreover, keep in mind that these tallies of police
violence include violence that is legally justified.
Now, it’s true that there are significant differences in
the rates at which men of different races experience police violence — 0.6
percent is triple 0.2 percent. However, although people often equate racial
disparities with bias, this inference is fallacious, as can be seen through an
analogy with gender: Men are vastly more likely to experience police violence
than women are, but while bias may explain part of this disparity,
nobody doubts that most of it has to do with the fact that men are on average
far more violent than women. Similarly, if black men commit violent crimes at
much higher rates than white men, that might have a lot to do with the
disparity in the use of force by the police.
This is evident in the National Crime Victimization
Survey, another survey of the public conducted by the BJS. Interviewers ask
respondents if they have been the victim of a crime in the past 12 months; if
they have, respondents provide information about the nature of the incidents,
including the race and ethnicity of the offenders. This makes it possible to
measure racial differences in crime rates without relying on data from the
criminal-justice system, in which racial bias could lead to higher rates of arrest
and conviction for black men even if they commit violence at the same rate.
NCVS data from 2015, the most recent year available,
suggest that black men are three times as likely to commit violent crimes as
white men. To the extent that cops are more likely to use force against people
who commit violent crimes, which they surely are, this could easily explain the
disparities we have observed in the rates at which the police use force. That’s
not to say that bias plays no role; I’m sure it does play one. But it’s
unlikely to explain a very large part of the discrepancy.
Some might say that, instead of consulting statistics
like these, we should defer to black Americans’ own perceptions of how the
police treat them. As various polls
have demonstrated, black people are much more likely than white people to think
that police violence against minorities is very common. But the issue cannot be
settled this way.
Since individuals have direct knowledge of what happened
to them personally, you can trust them about that. But when it comes to
larger social phenomena, people’s beliefs are influenced by far more than just
their personal experience, including the media. The far more compelling fact is
that, if you draw a representative sample of the population and ask each black
man in that sample whether a police officer has used physical force against him
in the past year, you find that it’s extremely rare.
On many issues, liberals have no problem recognizing this
problem. For instance, there is a cottage industry of articles
deploring the fact that, although crime has fallen spectacularly in the
U.S. since the 1990s, most Americans believe it has increased. Liberals
are absolutely right to point out this misperception, but if people of any
color can be wrong about this, there is no reason to think black people can’t
be wrong about the prevalence of police violence against minorities.
