History isn’t Bunk, part 1

This is Part One of Two.

There’s so much Jill Lepore gets wrong in her New Yorker article “The Invention of the Police.” The spoiler is in the subtitle: “Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery.” She seems to ignores the actual history of police in America, but I’ll get to that in my next post. For now let me obsess on this paragraph Lepore wrote:

One study suggests that two-thirds of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards, about as many people as the number of pedestrians injured by motor vehicles.

Now if you, gentle reader, were to read a study that said that, what would your reaction be? Perhaps: “Huh?” “Can’t be.” “Crazy.” “Must be a bad study.” “Maybe I misread it?” Also, not to get all math on you, but “how can you have admissions made up of two distinct groups of two-thirds each?”

All of the above. Actually, though, it’s not a bad study. It’s a clever study by Feldman et al (2016). Limited by data, as the authors admit, but good for what it is.

As to Lepore, I had a tough time reading the rest of her article. I like (or liked) her work. But this is subject I know a little about. And her article is so skewed, so biased, and so absent of historical context and accuracy. But keep in mind, though, I just teach this at a public university. She’s a chaired Harvard historian. Plus she writes in the New Yorker. But has she never visited a high crime neighborhood? Has she never been to an emergency room?

This mistake stood uncorrected online for more than a week. Currently it’s gone from the web version. But the mistake went to print. Online it says this:

An earlier version of this piece misrepresented the number of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated as a result of police-inflicted injuries in emergency rooms.

That’s it? Shouldn’t the correction correct the error, and not just make it go “poof”? It should say: “An earlier version of this piece suggested that nearly 66% of Americans between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four who were treated in emergency rooms suffered from injuries inflicted by police and security guards. The real number closer to is 0.1% We regret the error.”

The error isn’t in the study she’s citing. The error is in how she read it. It could have been from reading this:

We restricted our queries to persons age 15–34, the highest risk group, accounting for 61.1 % of all legal intervention injuries over the study period.

But most likely she didn’t even read the study and misread the Harvard press release about the study:

Sixty-four percent of the estimated 683,033 injuries logged between 2001-2014 among persons age 15-34 resulted from an officer hitting a civilian. The data did not distinguish between injuries caused by police and private security guards, who the authors said now number nationally about the same as police officers.

But the context for the 64% isn’t all admissions. It’s 64% of those admitted for injuries related to what the authors call “legal intervention.” 64% of them have been hit. That might mean, hypothetically, that 20% were beaten with a rubber rose, 10% fell down stairs, and 6% had too tight hand-cuffs.

Aside from common sense, there is also another way this error should have been caught. Lepore says two-thirds of injuries are from cops or security, and it’s the same number as pedestrians injuries by cars. Last I checked, 2/3 + 2/3 > 1.

Here’s a more thorough take-down of Lepore’s claim by Louise Perry.

So what is the correct percentage? The number of people in the ED (Emergency Department, AKA ER) for cop-security injury annually is 683,000 divided by 14 years. About 48,800 admissions a year. The data doesn’t break down how much of this is police vs private security (the authors’ acknowledge this).

I would note: 1) private security — and they’re more of them than there are cops — can be much more brutal than police (I’m thinking bouncer / club-security). And 2) police can be very quick to take people to the hospital (to CYA), no matter how minor the injury. So of those 48,800 admissions, some (an unknown fraction) have been injured by police. But we don’t know. But grouping two groups when you’re talking about one is a bit dodgy. Potentially like saying, “cops and grandmothers killed a 1,000 people” and blaming grandmothers.

There are 139 million Emergency Departments visits in the US. Roughly 45 million of this visits are 15-34 years old. (That exact age breakdown isn’t in that link, but you can find it if you care). So 48,800 is 0.1%, one-tenth of one percent. Were to Lepore to claim “two in three” when the actual number was “one in three,” I’d be upset. But she claimed “two in three” when the real number is “one in one thousand.” How could you be off by so much?

If you could for even a moment believe that 67% of hospital emergency admissions for any group are because they’re getting beat by cops (or security), how clueless can you be? What does that say about your worldview? What crazy lens are seeing the world through? Who actual believes this? And why? Is it the articles there about cops hunting black men, talk of a literal epidemic of police brutality, comparisons to a real pandemic? Maybe.

Partly what bothers me about Lepore’s statement is that it was in the New Yorker. This means that after it was written, it went through an editor, a copy editor, a proofreader, and, in theory, a “fact checker.” All this and not one of those people — and by “those people” I mean people of New Yorker persuasive (liberal and white) — thought, “Hey, this can’t be true.” No, it’s almost like they want it to be true.

The blueprint for law enforcement from Nixon to Reagan came from the Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson between 1968, in his book Varieties of Police Behavior, and 1982, in an essay in The Atlantic titled “Broken Windows.” … Wilson called for police to arrest people for petty crimes, on the theory that they contributed to more serious crimes. Wilson’s work informed programs like Detroit’s STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets), begun in 1971, in which Detroit police patrolled the city undercover… The campaign to end STRESS arguably marked the very beginnings of police abolitionism.

To say say something “informed” something is a cheap why to link two things that aren’t related, simply because one happened before the other. She wants to slander James Q. Wilson because he was conservative. It’s what Ivy League academics do, I suppose. But what do Varieties of Police Behavior and “Broken Windows” have to do with either Nixon or Reagan? And nobody outside the field knew of “Broken Windows” until Bratton brought it to New York in the early 1990s (and brought down crime).

And why go after August Vollmer? There are enough bad guys you don’t have to go after the good guys, too. And Vollmer, ironically, could have strengthened her point and serve as an inspiration for today’s police-reform movement. In his 1936 The Police and Modern Society, Vollmer questioned the police roll in traffic enforcement. He said the laws against prostitution can’t work and therefore we shouldn’t have them; gambling should the licensed and regulated; prohibition was a mighty failure; and let’s leave the moralizing to the church and other such agencies. As to to illegal drugs?

Drug addiction, like prostitution, and like liquor, is not a police problem; it never has been, and never can be solved by policemen. It is first and last a medical problem…. The first step in any plan to alleviate this dreadful affliction should be the establishment of federal control and dispensation–at cost–of habit forming drugs.

Instead (why? I don’t know) Lepore blames slaps the label of “Vollmer-era Police” on everything bad (including some items that were before Vollmer’s time). [Though I too, like Lepore, like to highlight the harm of the so-called “progressive” era of policing, which generally gets off too easy. And I would start police abolitionism a bit early. The mayor of New York called for the abolition the police in 1848. But those facts don’t matter when you’re writing about narrative.] Why blame Vollmer for what he was trying to change? Why not call it the “W.E.B. Du Bois-era Police.” Would almost make as much sense. Du Bois, too, wrote about crime and police.

In Lepore’s narrative nobody gets shot, except by police; the only legitimate fear is to be afraid of police; riots are protests; crime is a non-issue (and police do nothing to prevent it); the only victims are “victims of police brutality [who] are disproportionately Black teen-age boys: children.” I doubt that to be true. But who knows? Certainly not Lepore.

I don’t mean to “whatabout” her article by bringing up crime and victims of violence, but she did write an article about the history of police. I’m supposed to snuggle down with my New Yorker, sip an herbal tea, and believe violent crime is but a figment of the racist right. At a time when shootings in my city have recently tripled and 96% of shooting and murder victims in New York City are Black or Hispanic, I’m supposed to think the roots of US police lie in slavery? That police have never been anything more than agents of White Supremacy? But I don’t live in Lepore’s world; a world without violence; a world divided between privilege and victimhood; a world in which one can think hospitals Emergency Departments are just filling up daily with black children beat by police.

My next post is going to talk about the history of policing in New York City, where modern police in America started.