The present focus of the national media is on police violence directed at black men. The movement #BlackLivesMatter is very much at the center of the controversies of the protest activity. It is my view that this represents very useful progress in forcing a reluctant public to focus on the issue of police violence and accountability. Yet, there is a broader picture. Black men are not the only victims of police violence.
One of the things that quickly becomes apparent about the entire subject is that we have limited and inadequate data sources about police conduct. A congressional mandate to improve reporting has generally been ignored in practice. This will doubtless continue as long as we expect police agencies to monitor their own conduct. However we do have some data available about race and police violence. The differences that are revealed are too glaring to be dismissed as any sort of statistical anomalies.
Rate of law enforcement killings, per million population per year, 1999-2011.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics.
Who Are Police Killing?
There are news stories about protest over the killings of Latino and Native American men to be found if you go looking for them. In California there have been protest over the killings of Latino men, for example in Salinas and Los Angeles. I saw another story about a police reform group in Los Angeles that is simultaneously focusing on the cases of both a black man and a Latino man, both killed by police under suspicious circumstances. There are protests about Native American men such as this one in Utah. There are some indications that the resonance from the situations in Ferguson and NYC are is providing these local groups with energy and resolve.
The meme associated with #BlackLivesMatter in no way distorts reality. It is pretty clear that young black men are the people most at risk of death by cop. However, even if the incidence rate for Latinos is significantly lower, the swelling numbers of Latino Americans translates that rate into a significant number of men killed. At this point blacks are about 13% of the US population while Latinos are not at about 17% and growing.
One of the things that concerns me about the lack of visibility of other minority groups in the national media narrative is that the white majority can easily be encouraged to view the issue as one exclusively involving black men. The conservative spin machine then goes into high gear defining the issue as a problem of "inherent" black criminality that force white police to resort to the use of force. In fact the problem is one of deeply embedded racism that white America doesn't want to confront.
Trying to dislodge the structural racism of the criminal injustice complex is a huge and daunting task. I don't presume to tell the various activists how to go about it. There are differences of opinion about the best approach within particular communities. I'm not sure what the possibilities are for a movement that unites across multiple minority communities. However, it does seem to me that it is useful to put the problem into a broader context of the pervasive racism in American society.