768 as of August 28, 2015—that is the number of people killed this year by police in the US.
Just for comparison, our law enforcement officers killed those they were hired to “protect and serve” at 20 times the rate of Australian police, 36 times the rate of German police, and 86 times the rate of police in England and Wales. While police in Pasco, Washington with 67,000 people fired 17 bullets into one victim, police in Finland, population about 5 million, fired a total of six bullets in all of 2013.
Yet no US federal agency has deemed it important enough to keep an accurate count of police killings. The FBI has been compiling an annual list of “justified” police shootings as reported by law enforcement agencies, but the reporting has been voluntary and woefully inadequate. Most of the country’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies chose not to submit the number.
Aware of the inadequacy of such a list, The Guardian has taken the task upon itself, with the appalling, but hardly surprising results reported in the title. Their ongoing research reveals that law enforcement in the US is on track to kill over 1170 people this year. Clearly, the FBI’s 2013 total of 461 was far from accurate.
A July 1, 2015, article in The Guardian breaks down some of the statistics on police killings for the first half of the year. As of June 30, police had killed 547 civilians. Whites constituted 49.7% of those killed by law enforcement, blacks 28.3%, and Latinos 15.5%. Over 20% of those killed, 119 people, were unarmed. Of the blacks killed 31.6% were unarmed while among the white victims, 16.5% were.
Thanks to the outstanding work of Black Lives Matter and of Shaun King in documenting case after case, most of us are aware that law enforcement aggressiveness has had the most devastating impact on African American communities. While it might be argued that in terms of sheer numbers police killed more whites than blacks, the proportion of blacks killed is far higher. And, taking The Guardian’s demographic figures of 62.8% white and 13.2% black, the rate at which law enforcement has killed unarmed blacks is five times the rate for unarmed whites. In terms of raw numbers police killed more unarmed blacks, 49, than whites, 45.
A yearly total of about 100 unarmed blacks killed by law enforcement is twice the average annual number (47) of lynchings between 1865 and 1950, most of them unobstructed, condoned, supported, or even led by police. Those lynchings created—and were intended to create—a virtual reign of terror in the black community. Should it be any wonder that black people today, aware of that history, would see police as terrorists, as creators of willful terror in their communities?
And odious and despicable as the police killings are, they are only a part of law enforcement’s reign of terror in black communities. Glaring enforcement disparities between black and white as exemplified by policies like New York’s “stop and frisk,” adopted under other names by cities nationwide, and inequitable traffic stops and arrests such as characterized much of the St Louis area before Ferguson and after, lead to the almost inevitable conclusion that police have willfully terrorized black communities in order to stifle and control them.
The contempt of police for people of color is apparent in the way they have handled some of their shootings. Police in Ferguson left Michael Brown’s body lying in the street for four hours and refused to allow either medical personnel or his family to approach the body. They tore apart a shrine of gifts given to memorialize him. In Cleveland officers shot 12 year old Tamir Rice, then not only failed to give him first aid but handcuffed his 14 year old sister when she tried to do so. They just let him die like a dog in the street. Repeatedly, throughout the country, police have refused to offer first aid to injured black suspects and have often refused to allow others to do so. When a part-time policeman shot Eric Harris in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Harris asked for help because he couldn’t breathe. The shooter’s partner told Harris, “F—k your breath.” After shooting unarmed and innocent Akai Gurley, an officer in New York, rather than offering aid and calling in the shooting, called his union rep.
I was on vacation in the Canadian Rockies without television or reliable internet access when Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown. When I returned home and logged onto the internet, I was shocked at what I saw. An entire phalanx of android-like policemen, apparently armed for combat, advanced on a non-violent crowd of black people whose hands were in the air. As they advanced on the crowd, police indiscriminately fired tear gas, an agent prohibited in warfare since 1993, but routinely used by police against protestors in so-called “riot control, http://www.politifact.com/... The police gassed not only peaceful protestors, but journalists and even people in their own yards. As I watched the video, one of the police shouted at the protestors, “Bring it, all you f–king animals! Bring it!”
Though the costumes and weapons of these mighty warrior police are generally referred to as “riot gear,” I saw, at least initially, no riots, only peaceful protestors gathered in solidarity with a mourning community to demand justice. As events developed a few in the crowds caused property damage and threw various objects at the police, but only, as best I could tell, after police had deliberately escalated the encounter.
During the following weeks as news came of ever more police shootings, more and more cities chose to send large numbers of police outfitted in “riot gear” to quell “disturbances” as people exercised their first amendment rights to assemble in shared grief and anger and shock at the callousness of those they paid to “protect and serve.” In addition to Ferguson, those cities included Minneapolis, New York, Denver Baltimore, Cleveland, St Louis, San Francisco, and Oakland. The Washington Post describes these excessively aggressive police responses:
. . .Wave after wave of nonviolent civil disobedience . . . has been met with paramilitary tactics and military grade weaponry . . . The police will either kettle a crowd of demonstrators or attempt to disperse them by any means necessary, whether with batons, rubber bullets, sound cannons or tear-gas canisters. The use of force on an unarmed crowd — especially one drawn from an already traumatized community — tends to foreclose the possibility of nonviolent action, because you can’t demonstrate peacefully while you’re under attack, and, at worst, invites a violent response. Protesters and police become locked in a logic of escalation.”
Some of you who are white have experienced this kind of aggressive police action during protests. Others have suffered the burning, tearing, choking pain of tear gas. But how many of us who are white have seen a phalanx of hundreds of police in combat gear moving down our own streets in our own neighborhoods? If you are white, I ask you to consider how you would feel if hordes of heavily armed police in paramilitary gear, appearing and acting like some hyped up army, invaded your neighborhood as if it were Fallujah or Mosul. You’ve done nothing wrong; you may peacefully have protested, or you might just be sitting on your front porch or walking and laughing with friends in the neighborhood when you look up to see this invading army marching toward you, perhaps even backed up by an armored vehicle. Would you not be angry? Would you not be terrified? Would you not consider these people terrorists, out to cause terror in your community?
In the two days since I began working on this diary, the number of police killings has risen to 777, a total of nine killings in just two days. Will it never stop? Just over a year after Ferguson, as we’ve learned more and more about police terrorism in black communities, have we made any measurable progress? Has anyone or any agency with authority to act begun even to ask the questions we need answered?
What are we to make of the fact that the FBI in its most recent count of police killings in 2013 came up with 461? Did the number increase by over 700 in just two years? Why did the FBI not gather a list of unjustified killings? Why were so few killings reported to the FBI? Did the police departments not consider them important enough to report? Or did the killings not fit the label “justified”? Can we conclude, then, that the unreported 640 were unjustified? And why did the FBI not consider the killings important enough to require that all be reported?
Is our higher crime rate a cause or effect of more police shootings? What effect do police presence, enforcement of minor crimes, and killings have on the crime rate? Why was it necessary for a foreign newspaper to fill the gap left by our own government and media, to take up the count for us? What does it say about us that foreign media have taken on more responsibility for our failures than we have ourselves? And how effective in stopping crime have these police killings been?
No thanks to those in a position to address them, we have the numbers of those killed by police. But has anyone been keeping a running list of the serious injuries caused by police brutality? And has anyone been looking at the cost, not only the direct costs to taxpayers to settle lawsuits against the police, but also the indirect costs for medical care and the social and psychological costs to communities of color?
Nine years ago the FBI warned of “white supremacist infiltration of law enforcement.”
Now that “infiltration” may in part account for some of the police shootings. So how has Washington responded to this “infiltration”? By arming the “infiltrators.” The Pentagon and DHS have given policedepartments $46.1 billion worth of surplus military equipment
And now, we learn that DHS, a department initiated to protect us against terrorism, and the FBI Counter Intelligence Program, whose purpose is comparable, have been monitoring the Black Lives Matter protestors. So rather than holding the violent police accountable for terrorizing black communities, they are now monitoring the terrorized, apparently regarding them as the potential terrorists! The Orwellian irony of our "national security" state just keeps building.