Statistics lacking in debate over police behavior
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| FILE- In this July 23, 2014 file photo, mourners gather during a funeral service for Eric Garner at Bethel Baptist Church in the Brooklyn borough of New York. A grand jury ruled not to indict the police officer involved in the death of Garner. No firm statistics can say whether a spate of officer-involved deaths is a growing trend or simply a series of coincidences generating a deafening buzz in news reports and social media. |
Ferguson, Missouri. Cleveland, Ohio. Staten Island, New York. Eutawville, South Carolina.
In
each place, individuals - all unarmed except for a child carrying a
pellet gun - died at the hands of police officers. All of the dead were
black. The officers involved, white.
To many
Americans, it feels like a national tidal wave. And yet, no firm
statistics can say whether this spate of officer-involved deaths is a
growing trend or simply a series of coincidences generating a deafening
buzz in news reports and social media.
"We
have a huge scandal in that we don't have an accurate count of the
number of people who die in police custody," says Samuel Walker,
emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at
Omaha and a leading scholar on policing and civil liberties. "That's
outrageous."
There are some raw numbers, but they're of limited value.
The
FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, for instance, track justifiable police
homicides - there were 1,688 between 2010 and 2013 - but the statistics
rely on voluntary reporting by local law enforcement agencies and are
incomplete. Circumstances of the deaths, and other information such as
age and race, also aren't required.
The Wall
Street Journal, detailing its own examination of officer-involved deaths
at 105 of the nation's 110 largest police departments, reported last
week that federal data failed to include or mislabeled hundreds of fatal
police encounters.
Put simply: It's hard to know for certain what is happening on the ground.
"We
want a comprehensive picture ... so people can be aware of what really
goes on, and not the claptrap put out by people with agendas," says
David Klinger, a professor of criminology at the University of
Missouri-St. Louis who has studied use of deadly force and hopes to get
funding for a pilot project that could provide better national
statistics.
To those who have taken to the streets to protest in recent weeks, that lack of context is almost beside the point.
"These
are communities that have been living for generations under the yoke of
what has felt like an occupying force," says Phillip Atiba Goff,
co-founder of UCLA's Center for Policing Equity. "And regardless of what
any of the stats are ever going to say, if we don't address the reality
of that experience, then we're shooting ourselves in the foot in our
attempts to make good on our promise of democratic principles."
The high-profile cases have erupted one after the other.
On
July 17, 43-year-old Eric Garner died after officers tried to arrest
him on suspicion of selling untaxed cigarettes on a New York City
street. Cellphone video captured the scene as one officer wrapped his
arm around Garner's neck, and the black man repeatedly pleaded, "I can't
breathe."
Tensions escalated on Aug. 9, when
Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot unarmed, 18-year-old Michael Brown in
the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.
On Nov. 22,
a Cleveland officer shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice after
responding to reports of an armed man at a city park. Rice had been
holding a pellet gun.
Two days later,
officials announced that a grand jury had declined to return an
indictment in the Brown case. Fires from the resulting protests in
Ferguson had barely stopped smoldering when word came there would be no
charges against the officer in New York City. Again, angry protesters
marched.
Then a grand jury in Orangeburg
County, South Carolina, returned a murder indictment Wednesday against a
former small-town police chief in the May 2011 shooting death of an
unarmed black man.
Richard Combs, who was the
sole officer for the town of Eutawville, had been charged with official
misconduct for shooting Bernard Bailey, who had come to the town hall to
argue about a ticket his daughter had received. Combs' attorney
questioned prosecutor David Pascoe's motives in seeking the murder
charge.
"He's trying to make it racial,
because his timing is perfect," John O'Leary said. "He's got all the
national issues going on, so they want to drag him (Combs) in and say,
`Look what a great community we are here, because we're going to put a
police officer who was doing his job in jail for 30 years.' That's
wrong."
Walker, co-author of the book "The
Color of Justice: Race, Ethnicity, and Crime in America," says much of
the anger out there comes from years of conflict between the black
community and law enforcement.
"Within the
African-American community, there has been an experience of disrespect,
offensive language, mistreatment in terms of stops and so on," he says.
"And there's a sense that the police are out to get them."
It's
not just the killings that have minority communities "fed up," says
Inimai Chettiar of the New York University law school's Brennan Center
for Justice.
"African-American communities are
tired of being over-policed, over-prosecuted, sent to prison, having
men taken away from their communities, having families broken," says
Chettiar, director of the center's Justice Program. "I think there's
much more than just an instinctual sense that there is something amiss
in these communities. I think people are tired of `tough on crime.'"
Whether
such incidents are on the rise, says Walker, "we're certainly more
aware. And, certainly, the digital revolution has had a huge impact."
Goff
compares it to the ice bucket challenge phenomenon of this past summer -
in which a series of viral videos raised millions of dollars for
research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's Disease.
"Once
something is trending, so that it's in the American consciousness,
people become aware of it," he says.
"The reason we're hearing about
this is because we're hearing about it. It has its own momentum."
Goff
has begun work on creating a policing database, with funding from the
Department of Justice, the National Science Foundation and private
groups. He says it would include not just deaths but all police stops
and uses of force.
"Is it getting better? Is
it getting worse? What are the actual numbers?" asks Goff. "You know,
when a plane crashes, it feels all of a sudden like it's not safe to
fly. But if you look at the statistics, it's way safer to fly - and
always has been - than to drive a car."
The
Department of Justice is investigating possible federal civil rights
violations in the Ferguson case and has opened an investigation into
Garner's death in New York. On Thursday, the agency reached an agreement
to reform the Cleveland Police Department after concluding that
officers there use excessive and unnecessary force far too often - an
investigation prompted in part by the deaths of the two black occupants
of a car involved in a high-speed chase. In that case, 13 officers fired
137 shots at the unarmed suspects.
Chettiar is hopeful that recent events will create the "political and public will" to begin gathering and analyzing the facts.
"In addition to personal stories," she says, "statistics help people change their minds."
