As Terrill and Mastrofski note, there are (broadly) three conceptual problems with measuring police use of force: measuring “excessive” force versus all force, measuring force dichotomously, and measuring force incidents as static rather than dynamic. The first critique stems from the fact that many who investigate police use of force are particularly concerned with its abuses. As a result, they focus on the rare cases where force is used unwarrantedly or far out of proportion to what resident resistance and criminal activity requires. Investigating a rare subset of a rare behavior is still important, but without the broader universe of data for all use of force incidents, this research fails to provide a representative picture of how public safety officials use coercive force. For instance, “less lethal” force such as Tasers may be far more common than lethal force and have a relatively larger impact (Taylor et al., 2011), but will be overlooked if the focus is on lethal force. Accordingly, Terrill & Mastrofski, among others, have encouraged researchers to examine the full range of force options, and not just lethal or excessive uses. In response to this critique, the present analyses include all use of force data provided by participating departments.
The second critique rightly points out that there is a great difference between being physically restrained by an officer’s hands and having a baton strike one’s knees. However, in part because administrative data are so inconsistently archived, previous researchers have sometimes been forced to analyze merely the presence or absence of force. Such an approach erases the differences between different levels of severity on the use of force continuum. In response to this critique, the present report includes two sections that examine severity in the use of force. The first details racial disparities at each level of force. The second creates a weighted use of force score with more severe force on the continuum being weighted more heavily than less severe force.
Finally, as previous scholars have noted (Alpert & Dunham, 2004; Bayley, 1994; Worden, 1995), a thorough understanding of police use of force is not possible without a thorough account of the interaction that produced it. That is, without understanding the relative timing of a resident’s and officer’s behavior, it is possible to misunderstand the justification for applying force. For instance, arresting someone simply for jaywalking would not seem to warrant the use of a Taser. The situation is far different if the jaywalking individual produces a weapon and makes threats. Sadly, these data are not often captured in use of force forms. When they are, it is often in the context of a narrative that is time-intensive to extract. This is why some of the most rigorous previous research on force has relied on direct observations of police encounters.
After selecting data from 12 different cities with populations ranging from under 100,000 to over 1 million, with a median of 600,000, and which were geographically and racially diverse, this is what they found regarding the mean use of force by race across all locations and departments:
The mean use of force against African Americans contrasted to whites is over four times greater per 100,000 residents. Obviously, that’s a higher mean rate of use of force even when some of the cities included were predominantly white; most did not have more than 50 percent of their populace dominated by any one racial demographic.
But is this a misnomer, or do we see a similar trends based on different severities of force?
Well ….
While they actually found a lower rate per 1,000 arrests of deadly force being used against African Americans—which may be related to shooting rates in the specific cities selected—in each and every other level of force there were higher rates used against African Americans than whites when controlling for all arrests and all offenses.
Or to put it another way, even when dealing with the same level of offense—from jaywalking to bank robbery, to assault or murder— greater force was consistently used against black people.
When CPE looked specifically at arrests for violent crimes, they found the following rate of disadvantage for black citizens across various different levels of force:
As you can tell by now, none of this is looking good for the “black people brought it on themselves” argument. Particularly when the study weighted the level of violence used (from 1 “Hands” to 6 “Lethal”) and again ran the numbers.
From a cursory look, even when you compare apples to apples, crime to crime and intensity of use of force side to side, it is quite consistent that the default to use force against black citizens is far higher than against all other citizens. What we don’t yet know, or the CPE doesn’t even attempt to explain, is why, as explored in the report’s conclusion:
1) That racially disparate crime rate is an insufficient explanation of racially disparate use of force rates for this sample of police departments. Given that these departments range widely in size and represent urban cities, suburban counties, and transportation police in geographically diverse jurisdictions, the results are suggestive that these findings may generalize beyond the sample
2) That significant attention should be paid to additional situational factors in attempting to quantify and explain racial disparities in use of force. For instance, might racial disparities in the tendency to resist, flee, or disrespect officers be implicated in the observed differences? Might cultural mismatches and/or officers’ perceptions of cooperation be influenced by residents’ race? There is some suggestive evidence that there are racial disparities in resistance based on research by Smith and colleagues for the National Institute of Justice. They find that the rate of officer injury is lower when arresting a White suspect than a suspect of another racial group (Smith et al., 2009). However, this finding should be taken only as suggestive, since suspect resistance was not measured in a robust manner and a number of circumstances could have contributed to this finding. Each of these possibilities gains in importance if demographics of crime do not undergird racial disparities in the use of force.
So as this data shows, in addition to Bureau of Justice Statistics data, black people are stopped by police twice as often, and searched three times as often—even when drugs are found on them less—experience use of force three times as often, are killed by police about three to four times as often, and killed when unarmed about five times as often. There is no doubt that there is clear systematic bias and an increased tendency for police to use force against black citizens, which is not related to the crime or arrest in progress.
But does that systematic bias prove that our police forces themselves have a tendency for racism? Not necessarily.
In all fairness, it’s just as prejudicial to assume the tendency can only be the result of widespread racism as it is to assume that black people are more prone to crime. In both cases, there can be other causes for these disparities, and in fact the across-the-board consistency of these results coming from different types of communities in different parts of the nation tends to speak to some general systemic elements rather than the kind of personal or individual views or choices that lead one to become either a racist or a criminal.
Particularly when the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates there or stronger links between rates of poverty and violence than there are with race.
For the period 2008–12—
- Persons in poor households at or below the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) (39.8 per 1,000) had more than double the rate of violent victimization as persons in high-income households (16.9 per 1,000).
- Persons in poor households had a higher rate of violence involving a firearm (3.5 per 1,000) compared to persons above the FPL (0.8–2.5 per 1,000).
- The overall pattern of poor persons having the highest rates of violent victimization was consistent for both whites and blacks. However, the rate of violent victimization for Hispanics did not vary across poverty levels.
- Poor Hispanics (25.3 per 1,000) had lower rates of violence compared to poor whites (46.4 per 1,000) and poor blacks (43.4 per 1,000).
- Poor persons living in urban areas (43.9 per 1,000) had violent victimization rates similar to poor persons living in rural areas (38.8 per 1,000).
- Poor urban blacks (51.3 per 1,000) had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites (56.4 per 1,000).
Now one could argue that being the victim of a crime isn’t the same as being a criminal and that’s true, but it’s also true that most crime is not interracial—the race of the victims tends to be the same race as the criminal and as such this finding can be illustrative. These facts reminded me of a question I received in a recent comment:
Cops investigate homicide, and when they patrol a geographic area known for increased homicide, they have reasonable fear.
This supposes the idea that police aren’t reacting to the race of the potential suspects, but to the rate of violent crime in the local area, and it is fair to note that even if the rate of violence compared with the poverty rate may be largely the same between urban blacks at 51.3 per 1000 and urban whites at 56.4 per 1000, many cities may have larger sections of urban black versus urban or even rural whites living poverty in greater density.
Take a look at two very different metro areas—Milwaukee and Houston. Back in 1980, Milwaukee’s poor blacks were quite tightly clustered, while poor whites were much more widely dispersed. The region was home to relatively few Hispanics or Asians. Today, poverty is much more evident across the whole Milwaukee region, but the patterns still differ quite starkly by race and ethnicity. Poor blacks occupy a much larger area than in 1980, extending northwest from the city. Farther south, we see a significant cluster of Hispanic poverty. Several smaller clusters of poor Asians appear within areas of black, Hispanic, and white poverty. And poor whites are still far more dispersed geographically than are poor minorities—scattered across the metropolitan landscape.
These dense pockets of poor minorities may have roots in historical redlining and housing discrimination, but the results are still the results. These communities have long been crafted as open-air economic prisons where citizens are penned in to keep the away from “decent people,” using the same policing ideas and policies that formed the slave patrols centuries ago. But the impacts today and how to improve them are what we need to focus on.
And it just so happens that rate of black poverty at 28 percent still remains several times higher than the white poverty rate at just 10 percent. An unlucky coincidence?
Poverty Rates by Race
So is it possible that police aren’t reacting with greater force not purely because of their own racial bias, or even real levels of “greater criminality” but instead they are responding to tighter groupings of higher poverty among urban blacks, which is far more directly linked to higher rates of violence than is race?
It’s possible.
And if that’s the case, when black people are accused of being “more criminal,” they’re really being asked to live up to a standard that no other group in the same economic situation is being asked, required, or bullied into accomplishing.
On the other hand, there are plenty of examples where police have used excessive force and shown extreme fear and panic far away from urban crime hot zones. Philando Castile was shot and killed right outside the governor’s mansion in Minnesota.
Is that a high poverty/high crime area?
Sandra Bland was pulled over for an “illegal lane change,” wrestled to the ground, and arrested because of her backtalk and attitude on an open road near the college where she worked. The McKinney pool party was in a fairly affluent area where most of the black kids who were being shouted at to sit and stay, leave or else be slammed to the ground and have guns pointed in their faces, actually lived there and had passes to the pool area. White kids were allowed to stand around, watch and film the events—mostly—didn’t. Did Officer Slam check parents’ tax returns before he threw a teenage girl across the room?
I don’t think so.
Also, for some reason the rate of violence in relation to Hispanic poverty or use of force by police against Hispanics doesn’t really rise as it does with blacks even though the Hispanic poverty rate is 25 percent compared to 28 percent for blacks.
So what else could it be if not deeply seated rampant racism? Well, maybe the answer resides in neuroscience:
It doesn’t matter if the police officer does not consider himself a racist, or holds no overt racist beliefs or attitudes. It is an ugly fact of nature that an intrinsic racial bias that influences automatic reactions may be hardwired into his or her brain. Racism can accompany racial biases, or be driven by them, but a racial bias can exist independent from conscious racism as well. In fact, some studies show that the implicit racial bias towards blacks can even exist in black individuals themselves.
At the neural level, the bias manifests itself as an enhanced electrical response in the brain region associated with threat processing and fear. An fMRI study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience found increased activity in the amygdala when white participants were shown images of black male faces on a computer screen relative to white male faces. Greater amygdala activation is indicative of an unconscious negative reaction to black faces. Since past studies have shown that damage to the amygdala extinguishes fear, the results imply that white Americans are vulnerable to perceiving black men as threatening when no threat exists.
At the cognitive level, visual attention is biased towards black faces with neutral expression as if they were threatening. Decades of research has shown that all individuals, regardless of race, tend to direct their attention towards threatening stimuli—like snakes, spiders, or angry faces—more quickly than they do towards non-threatening images. This is because evolution has shaped our attentional systems to rapidly detect threat as a survival tactic. A 2008 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology found that, in much the same way, white participants orient their attention toward black faces faster than to same-race faces. This effect occurred even in those who reported no racist beliefs. Additionally, since the faces were only presented for 30 milliseconds in this study, it is unlikely that the race-related attention bias is a conscious phenomenon.
Perhaps that’s how something like this happens [No, this is not another black man killed by cop snuff video]:
This story at least had not a happy but a not totally horrific outcome. The victim, 35-year-old Levar Jones, recovered and the shooter, 31-year old Sean Groubert, was prosecuted. He eventually pled guilty, just this March, to assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature. He faces up to twenty years in prison.
The video is as fascinating as it is horrific. One thing about it is that it catches everything. There are no ambiguities, no moments when someone's hands aren't in view and might conceivably be doing something that changes the situation. The engagement begins. Groubert tells Jones to show him his license and registration. Jones reaches into his car to get them, as instructed. Groubert freaks out and unloads multiple bullets into Jones' body at relatively close range.
The officer in this case reacts with abject panic when the victim does exactly what he asked for and reaches into his car to retrieve his ID, just as the officer who shot Philando Castile was clearly in a panicked agitated state immediately after firing his weapon with a 4-year-old in the back seat of the car. This officer was successfully prosecuted, but like so many others I doubt the killer of Philando Castile will be simply because he was, lawfully, armed. Sometimes there simply is no proper way to respond to a police stop.
At some point, either before or perhaps after they joined the force, these officers seem to become subconsciously indoctrinated into the “black male criminal” myth. It may have been as a result of the media, it might even be from having a personal bad experience with a violent suspect who happened to have been black, it might just be how they’ve been raised, or thanks to biased Houck-like statistics, whatever, just as one would reflexively swat at spotting a black widow spider crawling on your arm in panic these officers—including black officers—are responding even faster than they can form a conscious thought to what and who registers in their brain as an imminent threat.
If this is the case, if this is true in the majority of these events, constantly accusing officers of “widespread racism” will simply force them and their leaders into a defensive crouch. In fact, they’re already in that crouch as we see Houck yet again attacking and mocking Philando Castile’s girlfriend for filming him after he was shot.
Way to show compassion there, pal.
As has been shown in various studies, this type of unconscious fear response from the amygdala can be detected by performing periodic neuro studies on randomly chosen officers just as you might perform a random drug test. Perhaps some training to counter an officer’s inherent fear response, training that can allow them remain calm, cool, and collected even when faced with a perceived atavistic threat, can be worked on and brought to bear to limit this type of thing.
We don't want officers to doubt themselves, to overthink things at a crucial split second, putting themselves or the public at greater risk, but at the same time it seems like we have the opposite problem where in the effort to ensure officer safety, a great many black men are being brutalized and murdered in the streets regardless of their own individual guilt and regardless of the severity of the crime they are suspected of.
Whether it’s widespread racism, “greater crime,” the density of urban poverty or neuroscience or some combination of all the above producing these results, we need to find any and all causes rather than duck and dodge those that make us too uncomfortable—and we need to address each and every one of them with commitment and resolve. Either way, the CPE data does show there’s a problem and it’s not just a case of “isolated incidents.”
Too many of us are dying, whether black or blue, for us not to take action to make better informed choices for a better future.
