How Black Lives Matter Got Police Violence Wrong

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By Christopher J. Ferguson

In the early 2000s the United States enjoyed comparative racial optimism.  Majorities of both black and white citizens felt race relations were improving.  Even left-leaning NPR highlighted “colorblindness” as an ideal.  A generation later, race relations have nosedived.  We hear regularly about “systemic racism” and “white supremacy.”  Colorblindness now is considered racist.  This whiplash may leave many people wondering what happened. 
 

The 2014 Collapse in Race Relations

 
Christopher Ferguson for RCI
Gallup
 
The collapse in race relations began in 2014. Exactly why this year was pivotal is unknown, though it coincides with the debunked “hands up, don’t shoot” framing of the Michael Brown killing and a larger “great awokening” wherein extreme identitarian views became more influential on the political left. Since 2014, little data suggests race disparities have gotten worse. Racist attitudes in the United States are at historic lows.  However, news media coverage worrying over racism soared.    
 
I studied this issue empirically in 2021.  I wanted to see whether actual police shootings of unarmed black men correlated with race relations or whether news media coverage highlighting police shootings of black men was a better predictor.  It turns out race relations are unrelated to actual police shootings, but correlate with news media coverage, which tends to obsess over shootings of black Americans while ignoring shootings of other individuals.  
 

The Moral Panic Over Race and Policing

 
After the 2020 murder of George Floyd, the United States experienced a “racial reckoning.”  News media claimed police were systemically targeting black Americans for fatal violence.  Defunding or even literally abolishing policing became serious policy proposals.  The United States, we were told, was systemically racist.   
 
Data on policing and race is complex and nuanced.  Police killings of unarmed suspects are rare, according to the Washington Post, and they’ve been declining.  Numbers peak at 95 for all races in 2015, declining to 32 for all races in 2021.   
 
When it comes to police shootings of unarmed individuals, white suspects are shot more often than black suspects (by contrast, Asians are rarely shot by police compared to either group).  Though more unarmed whites than blacks are killed by police, black suspects are indeed proportionally overrepresented.  We can see the proportional differences in the following chart: 
 
Christopher Ferguson for RCI
Washington Post Police Shootings Database
 
However, commission of violent crime is also ethnically disproportional.  Black and Hispanic men commit violent crimes disproportionally more often than do white or Asian men.  That police shootings and commission of violent crime so neatly track one another is not a coincidence.  
 
Christopher Ferguson for RCI
Bureau of Justice Statistics
 
One might conclude that, perhaps, overrepresentation of black Americans as perpetrators of violent crime might be due to overpolicing of black communities.  However, when we look at victims of homicide, most of which are the same race as the killers, we see the same pattern of black victims being overrepresented.  This means the overpolicing hypothesis does not fit the data.   
 
It is also worth noting that most young men of any ethnicity do not commit violent crimes.  Race itself is not a determinant of violent crime.  In one recent study, although racial composition of neighborhoods predicted violent crime, race no longer predicted violent crime once other community factors such as insufficient food, housing issues, air pollution and proportion of single-parent homes are controlled..   
 
Studies largely find the same thing when it comes to excessive use of police force.  In another recent study, we found that class issues, particularly communities experiencing higher levels of mental health issues among residents — not race — predicted reports of excessive police force (except for Latinos, who reported less police force).  To be fair, studies on this do vary in conclusion.  However, in my view the weight of evidence suggests that class, not race, predicts excessive police force.   
 
We found that higher levels of mental health problems among community residents predicted reports of excessive police force.  This is probably because police are likely coming into contact with mentally ill residents who may escalate an encounter that began over something trivial.  Other studies also suggest the chronically mentally ill moreoften experience physical force during police encounters.  The mentally ill may struggle to respond to aggressive police commands.  Thus, relatively minor encounters initially may intensify into dangerous situations. Better police training with mental illness may help. 

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Last edited 10 months ago by fojayaw277

Over time, the stereotypes of race have been destroyed. People of different races have been melding together since the end of segregation and everyone gets the opportunity to see people of other races for what they really are: people just like us.

But, using tragedies like Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and other to create political division, blacks, for instance, became the stereotypes. They became violent, they became irrational, they became thieves, they became… racists. Not ALL blacks, of course, but the vast majority people would see in the media were behaving just like the the stereotypes of old. They don’t have jobs, so they are free to riot all night. They riot and loot, so they would rather steal than honestly make a living. The lie about “hands up, don’t shoot” and “white Hispanic” bullshit. Nothing can damage race relations like trotting out race baiters like Sharpton or creating new racist ambulance-chasers like Crump.