Since the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the issue of the unjustified shooting of unarmed persons of color has become a heated topic. Most often it’s argued that these shootings are prime examples of lingering deep-seated racism in our society in general and among police, but a new study of 259 shooting cases in the city of Chicago between 2006 and 2014 seems to indicate that these incidents are not necessarily motivated by the animus of white officers against black victims. Rather, the data shows that the race of officers involved in these shootings largely matches the general demographics of the departments themselves, but the shooting victims are far more likely to be black and/or to live in neighborhoods that are far less diverse and affluent.
As a result, many of the most often-suggested solutions to help reduce these shootings (such as focusing on the expansion of diversity within the departments) would likely do little to change the ultimately tragic results of these deadly encounters.
Penned By Nirej Sekhon, assistant professor of law at Georgia State University, this study offers many new insights into exactly what is and has been occurring in our cities and has contributed to the high rate of police killings, particularly of unarmed suspects.
One of the key tropes dismantled by the study, which was compiled using reports by Chicago’s Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), is that it’s very rarely the case that officers who resort to deadly force do so to prevent and intervene in an ongoing act of violence. Far more often these incidents happen when no crime (other than persons attempting to get away from officers) has occurred.
Sekhon writes…
There is no such thing as a “typical” police shooting, but many share common features. For example, in nearly 50 percent of the 259 incidents I reviewed, police officers shot during or immediately following a foot chase.
In my view, not all of these chases were necessary. We expect officers to chase and subdue a murder suspect who fires shots at officers as was described in one of the reports I read. But we ought to feel differently when officers chase and shoot a young black man whose only offense was “looking in the officers’ direction” or “grabbing his…waistband and turning away.”
The most common justification for these shootings remains the perception by the officers of a “gun threat” initiated—they claim—by the victim.
Studies have consistently reported that officer-perceived gun threats are the most common proximate cause for officer-involved shootings. Officers reported a perceived gun threat in more than 80% of cases and recovered a firearm attributable to the victim in nearly 60% of incidents.
Similar was true for incidents in New York City and in Philadelphia. In nearly half of all the IPRA Reports, the gun threat occurred in conjunction with or immediately after a suspect fled on foot from police officers. In roughly three quarters of those cases, the involved officers reported that the suspect pointed a firearm directly at them during the chase. More than a third of the shootings that occurred during or immediately after a foot chase began as proactive encounters.
Just to reiterate, officers perceive a gun threat at a rate that is 20 percent higher than when guns are actually present. In 40 percent of these incidents—nearly half—there. was. no. gun.
Also, it’s not the case that only white officers are likely to perceive this threat. Other officers are just as likely to react with deadly force, regardless of their own race and ethnicity.
My review of the available cases reveals that it’s not just racist cops who shoot. In the shootings I examined, the demographic profile of officer-shooters looks much like the demographic profile of the department as a whole. Police shootings cannot be reduced to a simple story about white-on-black racism because many of the police officers doing the shooting are black.
As you can see from the Freddie Gray case, half of the officers ultimately charged in his death were not only black, but one was black and female. Thus the problem may not be lingering latent racism that is inherent to white officers themselves: It may instead stem from the way they are trained, managed, and overseen by additional authorities such as prosecutors.
Many of the reforms suggested to date by groups such as Black Lives Matter’s Campaign Zero have argued for greater representation among police to reflect the communities they serve. They have as of yet not given quite as much weight to the issue of severing the link between police and prosecutors [edit: Although as was pointed out to me by Sam Singyangwe of Campaign Zero, they definitely do address the issue of Independent Investigations] that may sit at the heart of our inability to implement true police accountability, as noted by The Guardian.
“Prosecutors work with police day in, day out, and typically they’re reluctant to criticise [sic] them or investigate them,” said Prof Samuel Walker of the University of Nebraska. Describing Lugod’s case as a cause for concern, Walker said: “A major change in our standard legal practice, and the structure of our criminal justice system, is required.”
In about one in three cases that were ruled justified, including Lugod’s, the criminal inquiry work was done by the officer’s own police department, meaning the evidence used to decide if an officer should be prosecuted was prepared by the officer’s co-workers. Only 12.5% of killings by police that were ruled justified in 2015 were handled completely independently.
We also may need to seriously reexamine the relationship between local prosecutors and officers. Prosecutors are naturally inclined to support claims made by officers whom they depend on to support their other criminal cases and grand juries.
The conflict of interest problem is compounded, according to critics, by grand juries. These secret panels, which vote on whether suspects should be indicted for crimes, are a medieval relic long since scrapped by all other developed countries and most others as well. Yet they have been used to decide the outcomes of dozens of killings by police this year – about a quarter of all those ruled justified.
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The power of the prosecutor is so great, however, that the reverse is also true, according to Professor Peter Joy of Washington University in Missouri jurors can easily be guided not to indict. Joy said the indefinite secrecy applied to grand jury proceedings means that claims by prosecutors that a killing by police has been thoroughly scrutinized cannot be verified.
“We don’t know what’s going on in those rooms,” said Joy. “We don’t know if the prosecution presented neutrally or put their thumb on the scale – either by failing to vigorously question witnesses who favor the police version of events, or by being very hard on witnesses who would favor the person killed.”
As a result, we have a process that suffers equally from a lack of transparency and a lack of accountability. Even the IPRA itself has not been able to avoid controversy and the appearance of coercion to support police—one of its former investigators has alleged he was pressured to exonerate officers whom he had felt where guilty of wrongdoing.
Cedrick LaMont Chatman died just feet from the bus stop where his mother caught the bus to work every day. The city's Independent Police Review Authority, which investigates all police-involved shootings, concluded the shooting was justified.
But Lorenzo Davis, the original IPRA supervising investigator on the case, came to the opposite conclusion and says he was fired in July when he refused to change his report.
The video "shows a shooting that should not have occurred," Davis says. "In my point of view, if you do not have to kill a person, then why would you?"
Davis examined the shooting for months and determined it was not justified.
IPRA assigned another investigator and in a new report called Davis "glaringly biased," saying there was a "significant discrepancy" between Davis' findings and "what the facts of the investigation actually show."
Since the IPRA was formed in 2007 investigators have examined more than 400 shootings. Yet they found just one case (the one above involving Cedrick Chatman) to be unjustified, a determination that was reversed. And Lorenzo Davis, the investigator who made that initial determination, was fired.
Without proper oversight and without proper transparency, it is virtually impossible to implement justice in these situations. Even though people of color don’t make up a majority of fatal police encounters, police-involved deaths do tend to occur more often among communities of color.
The likelihood of getting shot by the police is much higher in some Chicago neighborhoods than in others. Of the 259 police shootings that the IPRA has released information about, nearly 90 percent occurred in minority neighborhoods. That goes a long way in explaining why 80 percent of police shooting victims were black in a city that is only one-third black.
The reason may not necessarily be solely because of “higher crime” in those neighborhoods.
The connection between neighborhood violence and police shootings would make sense if shooting victims consisted exclusively of persons who were suspected of violent crime.
But in nearly a quarter of the 259 IPRA incidents, it was the police who stirred the pot. These police-civilian encounters began as traffic stops for minor violations, because someone made a “furtive movement,” or just looked suspicious (emphasis added). Many of these stops were likely of the “stop and frisk” variety that have been controversial in New York City, Chicago, and other cities. The shootings that occur in the course of these kinds of encounters follow a general pattern. One of the stopped civilians flees and the police give chase. During or immediately after the chase, officers shoot in response to a perceived gun threat.
Even if one believes the officers’ version of an encounter’s final moments when a suspect’s threatening behavior prompted the police to shoot, we should ask whether the initial stop should have occurred at all. And, even if the answer to that question is “yes,” we should ask whether a foot chase was justified, given the harmlessness of the misconduct that precipitated the initial stop.
What this study shows is that it may not be the case that adding more officers into “high crime” areas will result in dramatic crime reductions, as alleged by proponents of broken windows policing like Rudy Guiliani. This is particularly true when the clearance and arrest rate for violence crimes against person of color remains ridiculous low:
That's a lot of murderers who got away clean. Over the same period, the national average was 37 percent.
Perhaps even more depressing, 51 percent of murders where the victim was black went unsolved. When the victim was white, only 30 percent went unsolved. Over half of all unsolved homicide victims were Latino.
It seems more likely that the increased presence of police may instead lead to more encounters between officers and the public which, due to poor oversight and training as well as a tendency for hair-trigger responses rather than measured de-escalation and conflict resolution, creates more and more deadly police encounters for those communities which need not have occurred at all. It may not be about white vs. black: It’s more like Blue vs. everyone else.
This point is one that has been made quite eloquently by former Baltimore police officer Michael A. Wood Jr.
To an extent, I’m totally guilty. I should have done more. My excuse isn’t a good excuse, but it’s reality: You report that stuff, and you’re going to get fired. I mean, of course you’re going to get fired. Or they’re going to make your life miserable. I mean, look what happened to Joseph Crystal.
It all goes back to this whole us versus them thing. You suit up; you get out there; you’re with your brothers. You’re an occupying force. Your job is to fight crime, and these are the guys you do it with. So you just don’t see the abuse. It doesn’t even register, because those people are the enemy. They aren’t really even people. They’re just the enemy. This is the culture. It’s a s—– excuse. But it’s the reality.
There are a great many challenges that face us as we attempt to address this issue. This isn’t an attempt to completely exclude race as a contributor, but simply saying that these shootings are only (or even predominantly) driven by race may have us attempting to put out a gas fire with water. That approach would by ineffective and only cause the wildfire to spread (while prompting the inevitable complaints of “political correctness,” “reverse racism,” and “anti-cop hate”). Instead, we must put the fire out using the flame retardant foam of retraining and transparent, robust, and independent oversight that studies such as this suggest would be more effective.
While the results certainly suggest there is some racism at play, it’s not only about race. Far from it.