Last month, I wrote a piece about how 20% of all homicides in Seattle were committed by police. Now we learn that 15% of all homicides in the entire state of Utah were committed by police.
People suggested that the Seattle data was the result of cherry picking. Now we are looking at an entire state, and instead of looking at two years, we are looking at data from five. Here's what the study found:
In the past five years, more Utahns have been killed by police than by gang members. Or drug dealers. Or from child abuse.
The only category of homicide that ranked higher than police shootings was killings by intimate partners. But even that is changing.
And so far this year, deadly force by police has claimed more lives — 13, including a Saturday shooting in South Jordan — than has violence between spouses and dating partners.
So now it is official. You are more likely to be killed by a cop in Utah than anyone else.
Think about that....
Utah is a relatively low density state with slightly less than 3 million people. It's predominantly white (88%), with blacks making up less than 3% of the population and hispanics (of any race) making up about 10%. This is not some urban warzone. In spite of the favorable demographics
Through October, 45 people had been killed by law enforcement officers in Utah since 2010, accounting for 15 percent of all homicides during that period.
This isn't some statistical glitch. We are talking about the entire state of Utah over several years. When you have a principal cause of people being killed, it is appropriate to ask what happened to the killers. (We'll call this the [modified]
Dyson Test* ) When you look at the legal consequences of these killings, something glaring comes through:
Nearly all of the fatal shootings by police have been deemed by county prosecutors to be justified. Only one — the 2012 shooting of Danielle Willard by West Valley City police — was deemed unjustified, and the subsequent criminal charge was thrown out last month by a judge.
That's pretty stunning. No cop in the last 5 years has been punished for killing anyone in Utah. People argue the line between "legal" and "necessary" is a blurred. But that is a distinction without a difference when the training manual police use is clear:
Officers may use any force available provided they can justify the reasonableness of force used
If that isn't "a license to kill," I don't know what is.
*The Dyson Test: This comes from the Giuliani/Dyson appearance on Meet The Press where Rudy said some of the stupidest stuff he has said since switching from his winning formula of "a noun, a verb, 9/11!" In response to his preposterous false equivalency that tried to trivialize police killing people because more criminals kill people, Michael Dyson pointed out:
Black people who kill black people go to jail.
White people who are policemen who kill black people do not go to jail.
Giuliani's irrelevant point that 97% of black people are killed by other black people is, not surprisingly, suspect.
According to FBI statistics: about 90% of all black victims are killed by black assailants. This is not all that different from the fact that 86% of all white victims are killed by white assailants. The numbers are similar because, in cases where the relationship between victim and assailant are known, about 90% of victims knew their assailants. In about 25% of cases, they were related to each other.
However, if you break the statistics out by gender of victim, an interesting result emerges. Women are twice as likely to be killed by a white person than a black person. Somehow, I don't expect Giuliani is going to draw attention to that fact. It undermines "the dangerous black animal" narrative conservatives like to push.
Given Utah's demographics, I guess we can look for the silver lining here and point out at least in Utah, they are color blind. When it comes to getting shot, it doesn't matter what color you are. That's nice. But it's cold comfort to know police can kill anyone in Utah and not go to jail.
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