From The Cops Shoot People of Different Races for the Same Reasons by Rich Lowry. An alternate headline might be - If You Do These Six Things, The Police Will Shoot You.
Lowry is reading the Washington Post database of police involved killings which WP created after the Ferguson, MO shooting of Michael Brown in 2014. It was at that time that journalists discovered there were some significant gaps in national crime reporting and they filled it by creating this WP database that registers every known police involved killing in each year. It has been an invaluable resource even though it has undermined the narrative the Washington Post wishes to be true.
Every time a Washington Post editorial makes some claim of systemic racism in police killings, you can go straight to the database only to discover that the claim is not true. Kind of an ironic dynamic that the same paper both makes spurious claims and publishes the data which debunks those spurious claim.
Circa 2016 or 2017, I did just as Lowry has done and looked at all the killings in a year. Yes, racial groups are killed in proportion to which they attack the police. There is no apparent racism. Outcomes are driven by suspect's behaviors and choices, regardless of race. Cases of inappropriate police respionse exist, but they are mercifully rare.
On April 18, two remarkably similar incidents played out in different parts of the country.
In Burnsville, Minn., police got a report that a man, 30-year-old Bradley Olsen, had been involved in a carjacking. They pursued the vehicle Olsen was driving, he fired at them, and they returned fire, hitting and killing him.
In Fort Worth on the same day, police also responded to reports of a man trying to steal cars. The armed man fled on foot, and an officer told him to drop his weapon. As the officer pursued, 31-year-old Ryan Williams pointed his gun at the cop and fired a shot. The officer returned fire and killed him.
The difference between these two incidents was that Bradley Olsen was white, and Ryan Williams was black. Otherwise, the cases are largely indistinguishable — how they started, how they played out, and, emphatically, how they ended.
This is the overall sense that one gets from the Washington Post’s famous database of police-involved shootings. Reading through it, there is no stark racial difference that jumps out, rather a dreary sameness. The fact patterns that get people shot by the cops, whether they are white, black, or Hispanic, are largely the same.
There are the most extreme cases, when suspects engage in gun battles with cops. But pointing a gun, including a fake gun, at an officer also is likely to end badly. So is approaching a cop with a knife or even a metal pipe and refusing, despite repeated orders, to put it down. Resisting arrest is a common theme and, quite often, the people killed by the police were obviously mentally disturbed.
The Washington Post database suggests we have a violence problem in America and certainly a mental-health problem, but not — at least not on the face of it — a race problem.
Lowry then looks at all the individual cases of the past month, seeking some pattern of race. There isn't any. What he does find is:
One of the starkest disparities in police-involved shootings concerns how much attention is devoted to cases depending on the race of the person shot. Of course, police sometimes get it wrong in how they handle cases involving white people, too, but there is no activist and media apparatus devoted to finding and blowing up such cases, in part because it would run counter to the narrative of systemically racist police preying on black people.
Police officers are not shooting people by race but by behaviors and actions but the media is reporting by race and creating a lie by omitting the whole data set and focus on rare outliers.
What are the common elements behind the 1,000 of police involved killings per year?
Do not resist arrest.
Do not point guns at police.
If you encounter the police, distance yourself from any replica guns near you.
Do not approach police with any other weapon (knife, pipe, baseball bat, etc.),
Obey lawful orders.
If you are mentally ill, prepare in advance to have a way to communicate that in situation beyond your control.
The latter is the most tragic, the least useful advice, and the least amenable to policy solution. Mentally disturbed people acting out are a danger to themselves, the public and to the police but the visible distinction between someone behaving as a result of mental illness versus either drug fueled behavior or simple aggressive behavior is vastly difficult to distinguish, especially under split second decision-making cases, which the majority of these are.
All of which invokes the obligatory Chris Rock PSA - How not to get your ass kicked by the police! It is his list of eight non-data based but eminently practical vernacular (language alert) recommendations on behaving with the police.
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