The story of Police
Violence in the US
On one hand, policing in the US has come under public scrutiny. Police violence and its racial angle are being questioned. On the other hand, there appears to be an increasing accommodation of the use of excessive force. Using data, we plan to explore the impact of the country's policing system.
On May 25, 2020, the world woke up to the horrid news of the murder of a 46-year-old man in Minneapolis. George Floyd was handcuffed and pinned to the ground under the knee of Mr. Chauvin, a police officer, for more than nine minutes.
The bystander video of the encounter quickly went viral, sparking large protests against police brutality and systemic racism in America.
George Floyd's, however, was not an isolated incident.
Hundreds of other deaths have gone unheard. Sometimes, even uncounted. Independent research teams, including 'Mapping Police Violence', are providing alternative solutions by aggregating data from various sources. According to their database, about 1100 people are killed every year as a result of police violence. That is around three deaths every day. In fact, there were only 18 days without police killings in 2020.
Despite increased awareness and pressure from the public, there appears to be no reduction in the number of incidents. 2018 rose to be the worst year, with the death of 1144 people. An article by 'The Appeal' identifies three possible causes:
• the trickle effect of president Trump’s loose remarks about tolerating police brutality
• the Department of Justice ending a program that scrutinized police officers
• increased protection for police by the Supreme court, even in cases involving excessive force.
This is in contrast with many other countries, including Finland, where the police are typically unarmed. They are permitted to use guns only under exceptional circumstances and only after receiving permission from a senior official. Many, for example, are not allowed to carry weapons for tasks like highway patrolling, where gun use is not expected. Most of these countries also extensively train their law enforcement officers, sometimes up to five years. On the other hand, the US spends an average of 21 weeks in training (Godin, 2020).
These measures help officers avoid making a split-second decision that could turn out to be an error.
The high risk of carrying a gun is also applicable to a civilian. For example, it is more likely that a person possessing a firearm will use it in an argument. Higher access to firearms is often linked to higher rates of gun deaths by homicides and suicides (Lopez, 2018). Besides, it is easier to disarm a person who is not carrying firearms.
The fact that many victims were carrying a gun indicates the high riskiness of situations that the police often find themselves in.
The estimate of civilian firearms per 100 persons is also the highest in the US (~120) - almost twice the second-highest country (Wikipedia, 2021). A higher chance of a civilian pulling out a gun also increases fear among police officers who may reasonably expect the same (Lopez, 2018). This can be observed in the correlation between weaker gun laws and higher rates of police killings.
However, the biggest victims of a system that provides easy access to firearms are the minorities. Implicit bias makes them highly vulnerable and more likely to be killed. This is supported by studies that have found that police officers with implicit bias are more likely to shoot black suspects than white (Desmond-Harris, 2014).
Police killings are clearly biased against black people in all US states. Utah and Rhode Island are two extreme cases. In Rhode Island, 50% of the people killed were black whereas they only constitute 5.6% of the population. But the number might not be so surprising, as it corresponds to the poverty data of the race in Utah as well.
A huge chunk of data for Native Americans is also missing and some sources cite that it is under-reported due to people of mixed race and homeless people. Bias against the race can still be identified in the data present.
Latinos are disproportionately killed in some states, but overall, there is a bias against the race as well. According to a Washington Post article, in 2019, 4.2 latinos were killed per a million, a number higher than 2.3 white people per million.
Pacific Islanders are a missing minority in criminal justice data. But for the states where data is present, the numbers are greatly skewed. For the data we have, 93 pacific islanders were killed by the police per million in the years 2013-2021.
The data does not show police bias against Asians. South Dakota has a very low population of Asians and in fact, only 1 Asian person was killed in the entire period from 2013-2021 in South Dakota. Hate crimes against Asians are however on rise, as per reports.
For the white population, the percentage white victims is lower than the percentage white people.