Jeff Roberson/AP
The
killing of Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri, was no
anomaly: As we reported yesterday, Brown is one of at least four unarmed
black men who died at the hands of police
in the last month alone.
There are many more cases
from years past. As Jeffrey Mittman, executive director of the American
Civil Liberties Union's Missouri chapter put it in a statement of
condolence to Brown's family, "Unarmed African-American men are shot and
killed by police at an alarming rate. This pattern must stop."
But quantifying that pattern is difficult. Federal databases that
track police use of force or arrest-related deaths paint only a partial
picture. Police department data is scattered and fragmented. No agency
appears to track the number of police shootings or killings of unarmed
victims in a systematic, comprehensive way.
Here's some of what we do know:
Previous attempts to analyze racial bias in police shootings have arrived at similar conclusions. In 2007,
ColorLines and the
Chicago Reporter investigated fatal police shootings
in 10 major cities, and found that there were a disproportionately high
number of African Americans among police shooting victims in every one,
particularly in New York, San Diego, and Las Vegas.
"We need not look for individual racists to say that
we have a culture of policing that is really rubbing salt into
longstanding racial wounds," NAACP president Cornell Williams Brooks
told Mother Jones. It's a culture in which people suspected of
minor crimes are met with "overwhelmingly major, often lethal, use of
force," he says.
In Oakland, California, the NAACP
reported
that out of 45 officer-involved shootings in the city between 2004 and
2008, 37 of those shot were black. None were white. One-third of the
shootings resulted in fatalities. Although weapons were not found in 40
percent of cases, the NAACP found, no officers were charged. (These
numbers don't include 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who was shot and killed
by a transit authority officer at the Fruitvale BART station on New
Year's Day of 2009.)
The New York City Police Department has reported similar trends in its
firearms discharge report, which shows that more black people have been shot by NYPD officers between 2000 and 2011 than have Hispanics or whites.
When you look at the racial breakdown of New Yorkers,
black people are disproportionately represented among those targeted as
criminal shooting suspects, firearms arrestees, and those fired upon or
struck by police gunfire.
NYPD Firearms Discharge Report, 2011
Often, the police officers do not get convicted or sentenced.
Delores Jones-Brown, a law professor and director of the Center on
Race, Crime, and Statistics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice
in New York City, has identified dozens of black men and women who have
died at the hands of police going back as far as 1994. She notes that
while these incidents happen regularly, it often takes a high-profile
case, such as Brown's, to bring other recent incidents to national
attention.
"For whatever reason, juries are much less likely to convict" police who kill.
"Unfortunately, the patterns that we've been seeing recently are
consistent: The police don't show as much care when they are handling
incidents that involve young black men and women, and so they do shoot
and kill," says Jones-Brown, a former assistant prosecutor in Monmouth
County, New Jersey. "And then for whatever reason, juries and
prosecutor's offices are much less likely to indict or convict."
Between 2003 and 2009, the DOJ reported that 4,813 people
died while in the process of arrest or in the custody of law enforcement. These include people who died before an officer physically placed him or her under custody or arrest. This data, known as
arrest-related deaths,
doesn't reveal a significant discrepancy between whites, blacks, or
hispanics. It also doesn't specify how many victims were unarmed.
According to the FBI, which has tracked justifiable homicides up to
2012,
410 felons died at the hands of a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.
*
Bureau of Justice Statistics
But black people are more likely than whites or Hispanics to experience a police officer's threat or use of force, according to the Department of Justice's
Police Public Contact Survey in 2008,
the latest year for which data is available. Of those who felt that
police had used or threatened them with force that year, about 74
percent felt those actions were excessive. In another
DOJ survey of police behavior
during traffic and street stops in 2011, blacks and Hispanics were less
likely than whites to believe that the reason for the stop was
legitimate.
The Justice Department has investigated possible systemic abuse of power by police in at least 15 cities.
Police shootings of unarmed black people aren't limited to poor or predominantly black communities. Jones-Brown
points to examples where police officers have shot unarmed black men and women in
Hollywood,
Riverside (California),
and Prince Georges County—a Maryland suburb known as the most affluent
US county with an African-American majority. "Part of the problem is
that black people realize that you don't have to be poor, you don't have
to be in your own community...and this can happen to you," she says.
These killings occur against black people of varying socioeconomic
backgrounds: "Actors, professional football players, college students,
high school grads. They happen to black cops, too."
"You don't have to be poor, you don't have to be in your own community...and this can happen to you."
Yet, the lack of comprehensive data means that we can't know if there's been an upsurge in such cases, says
Samuel Walker, a criminal justice scholar at the University of Nebraska in Omaha and author of
The Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America.
"It's impossible to make any definitive statement on whether there were
more incidents in the last 5 to 10 years than in the past," he says.
"We just don't have that kind of data." But what is certain, Walker
says, is that the fatal shooting in Ferguson "was just the tip of the
iceberg."
UPDATE (8/15/14): USA Today reported
that on average there were 96 cases of a white police officer killing a
black person each year between 2006 and 2012, based on justifiable
homicides reported to the FBI by local police. As I reported above, the
FBI's justifiable homicides database paints only a partial
picture—accounting for cases in which an officer killed a felon. It does
not necessarily include cases involving victims like Michael Brown,
Eric Garner, and others who were unarmed when confronted by police. The
data in this post has been updated with 2012 numbers,
and the map has been updated to reflect that certain cases have been closed.
