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From the Police Blotter: Myth Busting
This story will be ignored and spiked to preserve and protect fundraising for the Democrat Party, advocacy groups, and race hustlers.
Reports of racially motivated, fatal shootings by police officers have garnered extensive public attention and sparked activism across the nation. New research from Michigan State University and University of Maryland reveals findings that flip many of these reports on their heads—white police officers are not more likely to shoot minorities citizens than non-white officers.
The findings—published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS – are based on an independent database Cesario and his team created that catalogued each police shooting from 2015. The team—led also by co-author David Johnson from University of Maryland—contacted every police department that had a fatal police shooting to get the race, sex and years of experience for every officer involved in each incident. The team also leveraged data from police shooting databases by The Washington Post and The Guardian.
“We found that the race of the officer doesn’t matter when it comes to predicting whether black or white citizens are shot,” Cesario said. “If anything, black officers are more likely to shoot black citizens, but this is because black officers are drawn from the same population that they police. So, the more black citizens in a community, the more black police officers there are.”
The vast majority—between 90% and 95% – of the civilians shot by officers were actively attacking police or other citizens when they were shot. Ninety percent also were armed with a weapon when they were shot. The horrific cases of accidental shootings, like mistaking a cell phone for a gun, are rare, Cesario said.
“We hear about the really horrendous and tragic cases of police shootings for a reason: they’re awful cases, they have major implications for police-community relations and so they should get attention,” Cesario said. “But, this ends up skewing perceptions about police shootings and leads people to believe that all fatal shootings are similar to the ones we hear about. That’s just not the case.”
Click on the link for the entire article.
Published in Policing
Black police officers absorbing the attitudes of their white colleagues blah blah blah white racism blah blah blah Trump’s fault. QED.
Good post and thanks for the info, Doug.
Hasn’t this also been part of Heather MacDonald’s argument since her “War on Cops” book in 2016?
“We found that the race of the officer doesn’t matter when it comes to predicting whether black or white citizens are shot,” Cesario said. “If anything, black officers are more likely to shoot black citizens, but this is because black officers are drawn from the same population that they police. So, the more black citizens in a community, the more black police officers there are.”
Now, Doug, don’t go confusing us with the facts; they don’t fit the Narrative.
Great information.
And.
Police should not have immunity from lawsuits when they do screw up.
It has, and I highly recommend her book.
I’ll provide a counter-narrative. The criticisms of police use distortions of killings to as dramatic examples of bad policing, but only because the real criticism is too subtle to move public opinion. The real problem is that sometimes the black community feels like the police are an occupying force in their neighborhoods. Cops are always watching and hassling and writing tickets to boost department revenue. After Ferguson, the state of Missouri passed laws to prevent municipalities from using policing as a revenue stream. That’s a good start. It will help, when as a society, we realize that we need to work on the root cause (broken culture) of the bad relationship with police. We need to move past the hyperbolic claims to start.
They are”shooting white”?
Typically the city is sued. I believe there is a legal doctrine of suing the organization for the acts of an employee carrying out official duties.
If you move responsibility on to the individual officer, you will see the equivalent of malpractice insurance for doctors.
I think it would help to develop better training for police. Ways to de-escalate situations and such. Any training method needs to be aggressively tested and evaluated – either it works or it does not. Get experienced officers to work with hostage negotiators, and the occasional hard-nosed academic.
If you want to select a firearm to arm a police or security force, you are not going to use an untested weapon, and you are going to modify the weapon if it needs improvement. Same with police tactics.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicksibilla/2019/07/18/cop-who-accidentally-shot-10-year-old-when-aiming-for-family-dog-cant-be-sued-federal-court-rules/#2d8266323987
What happened? As we read:
In this case, the police, who were busy terrorizing an innocent family, acted poorly, shooting at a dog that was not a threat and hitting a child.
One, the police should have to pay heavily for putting this family through this in the first place. There is no excuse for this sort of behavior. Two, a child was shot by a police while he lay there being complaint with the police orders. In what world is this OK? In what world should this police officer not be made to pay? He should pay and pay. There is no amount of money that would every make me happy if it were my child, but I would want the man who shot my child to hurt until he died.
Realistically, you are not going to squeeze that much money out of an individual officer. They do not have much money, generally. I suppose you could try to repeal the 13th amendment or something, but the realistic case is that the officers create a shooting insurance fund that provides lawyers to argue cases and pays settlements.
The case in question looks like a better candidate for a criminal trial for manslaughter or a similar felony rather than a civil suit. That shooting sounds like a solid case of a bad shoot if I ever heard of one. If that met the reasonable police officer standard, it is a joke.
Well, it did.
I don’t care if you cannot get a lot of money out of the officer, I want him punished. That is the goal. And the other cops treating that family that would should also be punished. It was wrong.
But, mere citizens, living in a trailer park, they don’t get treated well. Nope. They get abused and nothing happens to the police.
Well if you really want him punished, I guess you could go for mob justice or just kill him yourself.
Seriously, though – this is not a civil court failure, this is a criminal court failure. The reckless cop should be in jail, unless the story is completely off base.
That is an unworthy statement.
If the police have a monopoly on voilence. then they need to be held accountable. They are not. They never have been. They make a mistake, people get hurt or die and the “civillians” have no recourse at all.
This family deserves justice, and the system is not giving it to them, it is protecting the police. That is wrong.
Just, I guess, not in your eyes.