A couple of weeks ago, having just read about yet another killing by the police, I wanted to know whether the police were indeed becoming more violent, or did it just seem that way? And I wondered the same thing when I read about the stop-and-frisk by white police officers that left Darrin Manning, an unarmed black boy, with a ruptured testicle.
It'd make sense if the police were becoming more violent, given the rampant militarization of police departments, spawn of both the war on drugs and the war on terrorism, which affects not only police officer's weapons but also their mentality. But I wanted stats to confirm the sense of a growing national problem.
To be clear, the fact of police violence, not the trend-line, is the most important thing. That is, police violence is a serious problem whether it or not it's increasing. But numbers can loom large in public policy debates, an important tool for activists.
And numbers are what's missing from the debate over police violence. While the government shared detailed statistics on violence by non-police, there are no reliable national statistics on -- to use the euphemism -- use of force, justified or otherwise.
In other words, at this point there's no way to know whether this problem is getting worse on a national level, and this -- the by-design secrecy -- contributes to the problem. There's been an effort in Congress to uncover info about people shot by the U.S. military -- and rightly so -- but where's the effort to uncover info about people shot by the police?
I wrote about the lack of transparency on police violence for Salon. As an ex-cop criminologist said to me: "I can’t think of a more important priority in a republic than knowing the facts about when agents of the state put bullets in people."
Here's the nut of it but please read the whole thing if you're interested.
If it seems to you that the police are becoming more violent, you may be right. In 2011, Los Angeles County police shot to death 54 people, some 70 percent more than in 2010. Between 2008 and 2013, the number of people shot by Massachusetts police increased every year. In 2012, police in New York City shot and killed 16 people, nine more the previous year and the most in 12 years. In 2012, Philadelphia police shot 52 people—the highest number in 10 years.
But whether these statistics reflect a national trend is, at this point, an unanswerable question.
That’s because many of the country’s 17,000 police departments don’t release information on use of force by police, and the federal government makes no serious effort to collect it. While the government gathers and releases extensive information about violence by citizens, it conceals information about violence by police.
“Excessive force by police is one of the big problems,” says Brigitt Keller, executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, who cites as causes the militarization of the police, persistent impunity, and a mythology that exaggerates the dangers police face and deters public officials from challenging them. “I believe the problem is getting worse,” Keller says, “but it’s hard to say for sure without comprehensive information.”
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