His Tuesday Washington Post column is titled
What America’s police departments don’t want you to know.
HIs first paragraph sets the stage:
Michael Brown’s death was part of a tragic and unacceptable pattern: Police officers in the United States shoot and kill civilians in shockingly high numbers. How many killings are there each year? No one can say for sure, because police departments don’t want us to know.
That's because many police departments do NOT report statistics on shooting deaths to the FBI or to any central authority.
The FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting statistics for last year show 461 justifiable homicides by police, defined as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of duty.” Of the 458 were with firearms.
BUT - consider this (and go to the column for any hyperlinks):
Attempts by journalists to compile more complete data by collating local news reports have resulted in estimates as high as 1,000 police killings a year. There is no way to know how many victims, like Brown, were unarmed.
By contrast, there were no fatal police shootings in Great Britain last year. Not one. In Germany, there have been eight police killings over the past two years. In Canada — a country with its own frontier ethos and no great aversion to firearms — police shootings average about a dozen a year.
Robinson acknowledges the many decent police, most of whom NEVER fire their weapons, and reminds us that in the same year 27 law enforcement officers lost their lives in the line of duty. Here I think of Frank, a Moorestown NJ cop I knew, who the only time in his long career he even took his weapon out of its holster while on duty except on the range was when he had already been fatally wounded by bank robbers whose crime in progress he had accidentally walked into.
Please keep reading.
But in light of Ferguson, Cleveland, and other recent shootings, we need far more than gross numbers.
A few years ago, Robinson tells us, USA Today analyzed several years of the shooting reported to the FBI and found that
of roughly 400 reported police killings annually, an average of 96 involved a white police officer killing a black person.
The population of the United States, according to
Quick Facts from the Census, was, in 2013, 13.2% Black. Assuming that approximately half that is male, less than 7% of the population is Black male. Yet almost 1/4 of the REPORTED
Justifiable shootings were of Black men - BY WHITE COPS. Think that contributes to the distrust? Think that is part of the revulsion that has lead to the increasing demonstrations around the nation, and not just by African-Americans?
Robinson tells us that D. Brian Burghart, the editor and publisher of the Reno (Nev.) News & Review, has attempted to compile "crowd-sourced database of fatal police shootings." He quotes Burghart:
“You know who dies in the most population-dense areas? Black men,” he wrote on Gawker. “You know who dies in the least population-dense areas? Mentally ill men. It’s not to say there aren’t dangerous and desperate criminals killed across the line. But African-Americans and the mentally ill people make up a huge percentage of people killed by police.”
Something is wrong.
Something is terribly wrong.
The comparative data points at ways America may be exceptional compared to other nations, but not in a way that should make us proud.
I would be interested in Robinson or someone else analyzing the data for the 27 police killed in line of duty. I would be surprised if 1/4 were white cops killed by Black men. We know of one recent shooting of police, in Pennsylvania, was by a white man, whom police successfully arrested without killing him. In fact, most of the reports I have read of police being shot, whether fatally or not, have been by White men.
Methinks that points at real problems - in training, in hypervigilence by white cops towards black men, and possibly of racial bias that should have prevented at least some of those cops from being licensed and armed.
Robinson's last paragraph is blunt:
The Michael Brown case presents issues that go beyond race. An unarmed teenager was shot to death. Whatever his color, that’s just not right.
True, but the data points at something impossible to ignore - there most certainly is a racial element to the police shootings that are reported. Why and what we can do about that, besides parents trying to train their sons not to get shot, is an issue for all Americans.
That is, if Black men are still considered fully American.