Reports the LA Times. This came about after a very bad shooting.
Twenty-eight people have been shot to death by Albuquerque police over the last five years, a per capita rate eight times that of New York.
Tag: police-involved shooting
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“Albuquerque to pay $5 million in death of mentally ill man shot by police”
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Yeah, but they’re foreigners!
What can we learn from them? I know. Nothing. Because this is America. Exceptionalism and all that. I’m not saying we could go to this model overnight, damnit! But we could still learn from it. We could learn a lot from other countries, if we got around to looking. If we start looking at police in other countries, next thing you know we’ll have socialism and universal health care.
Man… that’s a lot of disclaimers for a thought provoking piece in the Washington Post about Britain’s police and their tendency to not shoot people.
Of course there are differences — big differences, mostly with guns and gun laws — between the US and UK. No need to point this out. I know. But it’s not like England doesn’t have guns. There are about 1.8 million legally owned guns in England and Wales.
The stats are amazing. In all of England and Wales, with 56 million people, only about 5 officers discharge their firearm in any given year. (Killing about 3 people per year. There are about 550 homicides over there in all. About 44 or so with guns.)
About 1 in 13 gun killings in the US are committed by law enforcement. That probably means something like 1 in 20 of all homicides (I have not done the math. But 5 percent is probably a good ballpark figure). That figure kind of shocks me. In England and UK, it’s about 0.5 percent. (For what it’s worth, police over there are still responsible for about 1 in 13 gun killings. It’s just the numbers for both are a lot lower.)
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Aiming for the legs
Right or wrong, American policing are taught to shoot center mass. And only center mass. The goal is not to kill, though the outcome of center-mass shot is usually death. The goal is to shoot to stop or incapacitate the threat. Once the there is no threat (which often happens before the suspect is killed), you stop shooting. This is how I was taught. This is what I have explained to many people.
It’s simply too hard in the heat of battle to shoot a leg. Most police miss when shooting center mass. Shooting a smaller target is even more difficult. The idea against shooting to wound is ingrained in American police officers.
But here is a fascinating read from 2011 (one, two, and three) on how you can shoot to wound. How training is done in at least one other country (anybody know about others?). In the Czech Republic they do train police to shoot people in the leg.
It certainly makes me wonder if we could do the same. Are American police inherently worse shots? Why can’t we change our training, if need be? If nothing else, training officers to have the option to shoot to wound would give police a justifiable choice. Now maybe you don’t want to have choices in the heat of the battle, but you always have a choice (most officers, myself include, have been in situations where they could have used lethal force, but choose not to). Right now, officers are forbidden to aim for anything but center mass (or the head) (and yet I’ve spoken officers who would consider doing so in some circumstances, despite the prohibition on it).
Some highlights:
“Okay,” I said, “but what if the round passes through? What about the round striking an innocent person who happened to be on the other side of the target?” Now I had him against the ropes, surely these cops are mindful of the dynamic environment in which law enforcement plays out.
Again, he responded without hesitation. “That’s another reason why we aim to the legs. At the distance we usually fire — remember, two to three meters — the bullet has a trajectory towards the ground of only a few feet. A pass through is rare — we use hollow point bullets — but if it does occur, it is not likely to travel much farther.”
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“Well, what if the guy is shooting at you? Dropping him to the ground with a leg shot may stop the forward attack but it is not likely to stop the threat?” he can still fire at you — and you won’t have time to assess the continued threat to see if he stopped!
He grinned at me, “If he is shooting at you? Well, then we use lethal shots — two to the chest, one to the head.”
He smacked it out of the park. If you are being shot at, well, then you use lethal shots — two to the chest and one on the head. Of course you do!
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When officers recite the “we don’t shoot to kill” mantra — and believe it — we may reasonably conclude that they are not properly prepared to take a human life. Deluding officers into actually believing that police are not supposed to kill — or are even allowed to kill — creates a deadly mental block that will most likely surface in that critical moment of truth — when ending a life for the sake of the greater good may be necessary.
Further, the mantra sends the wrong message to the community. That message indicates that whenever a subject is killed at the hands of a law enforcement officer, then something must have been done wrong, for surely law enforcement does not shoot to kill — they only shoot to stop.
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This is probably why American police are reluctant to adopt policies that suggest that shooting in certain scenarios might be intended only to wound, for fear that a wounding shot might accidentally kill. No, it is better for a killing shot to accidentally wound. American police routinely adopt policies that plan for the worst, and hope for the best.
Center mass shots will likely remain the only target area taught and supported by training in the United States. If we don’t have a justification to kill, then we simply teach to not shoot. We prefer a model where we aren’t forced to account so much for accuracy, rather our mission is to describe the elements of using deadly force. We prefer that our accountability virtually end at the squeeze of the trigger.
If the bullet hits and kills, that’s OK — if it doesn’t kill, perhaps that’s better?
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Well done, NYPD. What’s your secret?
The national average, the rate of people killed by police (as they define it, which is pretty loose, but OK) is 0.36 per 100,000. This is over the past 23 months. That’s roughly 1,135 killed per year.
This is based on these data from May 2013 to April 2014. I believe it’s similar to (but a bit messier than) killedbypolice.net. But it’s got city and county data, which isn’t at killedbypolice.net.
Now we already knowthat the rate of being killed by police is a hell of a lot higher in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona (0.8) — five times higher — than it is in New Jersey, Michigan, and New York (0.15).
But states are big and have hundreds of police departments. I want to break it down by city. The rate in California is twice the national average. I don’t think San Francisco police are shooting a lot of people. So who is?
Well, Bakersfield (rate = 2.1, which includes killing in the city killings both by the Bakersfield PD and the Kern County Sheriff Dept.), Salinas (2.0), Stockton (1.4), Fresno (1.1), and Santa Ana (0.9) come to mind. These are crazy high rates.
Super high seem to be Kansas City, MO (rate = 2.0), Oklahoma City (1.7), St Louis (1.5), Tulsa (1.4), Phoenix (1.2), and Albuquerque (1.1). Remember all these figures are rough. So I don’t mean to rank order, but I do mean to group these cities together.
Bakersfield? Salinas? Maybe it’s been a bad two years, but there are only 363,000 people who live in Bakersfield. Between 2012 and 2013, the NYPD killed 21 people. And in the past 23 months 15(!) people have bit the dust in Bakersfield? Do correct me if I’m wrong. The stats may be a fluke. Or maybe it was a bad two years. Or maybe the numbers are wrong. But it’s still a hell of a red flag!
The rate in Los Angeles 0.5. That’s not quite twice the national average… but it’s one-forth of Bakersfield and Salinas. Baltimore’s rate is 0.9. Chicago comes in at 0.6.
The NYPD? The big bad NYPD? The killers of Diallo, Gurley, Bell, Garner, and so many other?
Zero-point-one-three. New York City’s rate is 0.13. The rate of people killed by police in one-third the national average. This is amazing.
Put another way, Chicagoans are 5 times as likely to be killed by police. Baltimoreans 7 times as likely. And Bakersfield? Lovely Bakersfield? In the streets of Bakersfield you’re 16 times more likely to be killed by police than you are in New York City. [Update 2017: This is no longer true. The number of people killed by police in Bakersfield has declined greatly. But the overall numbers for small- to medium-sized cities west of the Mississippi are still very large.]
[Update: See Nick Selby’s description of those shot and killed by police in Bakersfield. Maybe the streets just really are meaner.]
Think of this, too, as my NYPD friends do. Shootings by NYPD may be tragic, but compared to the rest of the nation, they really do seem to fall in the category of isolated incidents. Whatever the NYPD is doing to shoot so few people seems to be a case of best practices. Maybe the focus should be not to criticize the NYPD but to learn from it. The systemic problems seem to be out west. And maybe people who want to protest police shootings should protest police who really are shooting too many people.
Go west, young man, go west. There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.
[I want to emphasize these results are primarily, not double-checked, and based on unverified data. But the even as just ballpark figures, the differences are too dramatic to ignore.]
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“If I had a hammer… I’d hammer out justice.”
This is the second paragraph of an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates:
When Walter Scott fled from the North Charleston police, he was not merely fleeing Thomas Slager, he was attempting to flee incarceration. He was doing this because we have decided that the criminal-justice system is the best tool for dealing with men who can’t, or won’t, support their children at a level that we deem satisfactory. Peel back the layers of most of the recent police shootings that have captured attention and you will find a broad societal problem that we have looked at, thrown our hands up, and said to the criminal-justice system, “You deal with this.”
Nothing against women’s rights advocates, but I haven’t heard anybody question the logic of passing laws that lock people up for failure to pay child support. (And while I’m at it, can I just mention that mandatory domestic violence laws are racist, do not work, and have have hurt countless men and women.)
This is the first paragraph. It’s just as good:
There is a tendency, when examining police shootings, to focus on tactics at the expense of strategy. One interrogates the actions of the officer in the moment trying to discern their mind-state. We ask ourselves, “Were they justified in shooting?” But, in this time of heightened concern around the policing, a more essential question might be, “Were we justified in sending them?” At some point, Americans decided that the best answer to every social ill lay in the power of the criminal-justice system. Vexing social problems–homelessness, drug use, the inability to support one’s children, mental illness–are presently solved by sending in men and women who specialize in inspiring fear and ensuring compliance. Fear and compliance have their place, but it can’t be every place.
And this if from the end:
Police officers fight crime. Police officers are neither case-workers, nor teachers, nor mental-health professionals, nor drug counselors.
I’m pretty sure Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t trying to be pro-cop, but that’s the kind of line that will get carried off on cops’ shoulders at a police convention!
That last paragraph goes on:
The problem of restoring police authority is not really a problem of police authority, but a problem of democratic authority. It is what happens when you decide to solve all your problems with a hammer. To ask, at this late date, why the police seem to have lost their minds is to ask why our hammers are so bad at installing air-conditioners. More it is to ignore the state of the house all around us. A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all. It’s avoidance. It’s a continuance of the American preference for considering the actions of bad individuals, as opposed to the function and intention of systems.
There’s more. And you should read the whole thing. But that is my good-parts version.
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Killed by Police (3 of 3): Cutting the number in half
[See my previous posts 1 and 2 and about NYC.]
It’s not unreasonable to believe — even when one knows the vast majority of police-involved shootings to be justified — that three police-involved homicides per day is perhaps two too many. Can the number of police-involved killings be reduced without placing officer’s lives in danger? Of course. We know this because some departments shoot a hell of lot more people than other departments.
If California could reduce their rate of police-involved shootings down to the rate that already exists in the state of New York? 135 people a year would by killed by police. And that’s just in California alone.
Police in some states are much more likely to pull the trigger than in other states. Now this does not take crime and violence against police into account, which would in an ideal world. But the differences are still incredibly stark. And since we’re looked it states rather than cities, I mean, it’s not like cities in New York, New Jersey, and Michigan normally come to mind as epitomizing peace, love, and non-violence.
[It’s worth warning and repeating that all this assumes the data is valid enough. I am assuming that. But I may be wrong.]
Oklahoma has a police-involved homicide rate of 0.78. That’s higher than the overall homicide rate in Sweden. Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona all have rates of police-involved killings that are twice the national average (0.36) and four to five times higher than Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Virginia, New Jersey, Michigan, and New York.
My guess is the differences have to do with better training, more police officers per capita, less public tolerance of police-involved killings, higher police standards and pay, and differences in police culture.
But really, in terms of police training and standards, there’s no reason to think we couldn’t bring all states in line with the best states. And if police across the nation killed just as often as police in those least trigger-happy six states currently do? That would cut the national rate of police-involved killings by half and save 500 lives a year. This would also save 500 cops a year from having to shoot and kill somebody. Police lives matter, too.
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“Who gave this reserve cop a gun?”
Uh, it’s his own gun. But headline aside (writers don’t write the headline), I like to think I make some good points in this CNN piece about Robert Bates, the Tulsa County “reserve deputy” who thought his gun was a Taser and shot and killed a criminal.
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“You’re doin’ fine, Oklahoma!” Not.
A 73-year old man, Robert C. Bates, liked to play cops and robbers. He thought he was going to get to Tase a bad guy. But instead of holding his Taser, Bob was holding his personal gun. Bang. You’re dead. Oops.
Bates wasn’t a real cop. He was a “reserve deputy sheriff,” which isn’t necessarily a bad concept, within reason. But this isn’t reasonable. Bates paid to play. He gave money to the Tulsa County sheriff’s election campaign. Maybe he could have been a deputy sheriff without donating money. But he gave cars to the undercover unit to which he had access. And now, irony of ironies, Bates might be convicted based on the evidence provided by the very eye-glass cameras he perhaps gave to the department!
Bates didn’t even have good reason to even Tase Eric Harris. Cops were on scene. Harris wasn’t getting the upper hand. He wasn’t going anywhere. Despite what Bates later said, I do not think Bates thought Harris was armed. I say this because Harris was flying. Booking. Like a man who does not have a gun in his waistband. His arms were pumping, not going to his dip. Not in what I saw. And this is very much contrary to what supposedly “independent consultant” Sgt. Jim Clark claimed while defending Bates after being paid to investigate the shooting.
[And Kudos to the cop who tackled Bates. Good job. He was a fast runner and knew exactly where to tell the driver to stop the car, though the driver was a bit slow in doing so.]
“This horrible situation is going to be about what a corrupt sheriff’s office does after a bad shooting,” said Daniel Smolen, said a lawyer for the SOB who was shot.
I think Smolen may be right…. wait. Did I just speak bad of the dead? Yeah. And I say this without at all saying the shooting was justified. And I’m certainly not defending an elected sheriff who allowed the guy to be on the scene with a gun. But what a bastard Harris was: Violence. Drugs. Guns. Robbery. Assault on cops. Escape from prison(?!). The whole nine yards. A real life of crime.
I mention this in relation to my Washington Post article in which I describe how cops were so bothered about the shooting of Walter Scott. That one was different. This was a tragedy. A fuck up. And blame can and should be placed. But if you want cops to shed a tear over the death of Eric Harris, you’re going to be waiting a long time. Harris was a harbinger of violence and doom.
[Having watched the whole unedited video in the CNN office today, it’s unfair to just air the part where cops say bad things to Harris. One line — “fuck your breath” — out of context is just a gotcha moment. The media should also show Harris yelling at the cops. Now granted, Harris has just been shot. Maybe you wouldn’t like the line even in context, but the context matters. Harris, on the ground after a dangerous chase, is yelling about how he “didn’t do shit.” This is a man who had just ran from police after selling an illegal gun to an undercover cop. My actual thought when I heard his protests of innocence was, “fuck you!” Though I did manage to just think this and not blurt it out in the middle of a newsroom. I also didn’t just have to chase, catch, and restrain this jerk. This situation, to paraphrase Jay-Z, has 99 problems, but the cops’ words ain’t one.]
Maybe it’s because as a police officer you’re around of lot of death and even a lot of people murdered. So perhaps it’s inevitable to rank order the value of life. It’s one way you cope with dealing with a lot of death. An innocent kid is worth more than a guilty adult. A robbery victim’s life is worth more than the robber’s life. Somebody who could have prevented his own death by complying with lawful orders deserves less sympathy than somebody who didn’t run. The death of a guy killed after some minor vehicle violation is more tragic than a long-time felon who dies after running and selling undercover cops a gun. Somebody killed with intent is different than somebody killed in an accident. And both of those deaths would be different than somebody who happens to die as a result of less-lethal force.
So Bates had a Taser. And I think Bates wanted to use his toy. Oh, boy! I suspect moments like this were exactly why Bates had given so much to the Tulsa County Sheriff. He wanted to play cop. Bates and the Tulsa County Sheriff’s Department have made a mockery out of professional policing. Clearly Bates should not have have had a gun and a Taser.
Let us not start to consider “slip and capture” (a term I had forgotten before today) justification for using a gun instead of a Taser. Yeah, apparently it is possible to hold and fire a gun that you think is a Taser. “Slip and capture” reminds me of the invented concept “excited delirium,” which to some people means it’s OK when people die after getting tased. Just because you give something a name doesn’t make it real, or defensible. At best, “slip an capture” is a description. Bates, from everything he said before and after firing one round, obviously did not intend to shoot and kill Harris. But that doesn’t make it OK. And with proper training you don’t do it.
And it’s interesting to note that both in this case and the shooting of Walter Scott in South Carolina (and the shooting of Oscar Grant on the Fruitvale BART platform), that these victims would be alive if the cops (or, “cop” in the Oklahoma case) had not been armed with a Taser. I’ve never been a big Taser fan. I wonder if this is something to consider. There’s particularly irony in people being killed because officers have less-lethal weaponry. (Not running from cops is also a wise preservation strategy, though that didn’t help Grant.)
Finally, let me observe that I don’t know much about Oklahoma except a song (and the history and meaning of “Sooner”). But maybe Oklahoma is not “doin’ fine.”
Oklahoma (together with fair New Mexico) has the highest rate of police-involved killing in the nation! The rate at which people are being killed by police in Oklahoma is twice the national average and five times the rate in New York or Michigan. Five times higher? That’s a big difference. It’s also the subject of my next post.
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Killed by Police (2 of 3): Race
Using the data from killedbypolice.net, I looked at the race of those killed by police. Though before I give you these numbers, ask yourself this question: what percent of those whom cops kill do you think are white, black, and hispanic. Forgive the callousness, but we’re talking numbers. And this figure will get to the core of the notion that cops are “gunning for” or “hunting” black men.
[Update: These are based on the best data from April, 2015. As of November, 2015, we have more data, but I don’t believe the conclusions have changed substantively. See also the Guardian and also, slightly better for what they exclude, the Washington Post for more up-to-date numbers on those killed by police. All three data sources are more or less in sync.]
Given that blacks are 13 percent of the population and whites about 65 percent, what percentage would expect to see among those killed by police? Presumably police are more likely to shoot a murderer than an average Joe. So I wouldn’t think it’s reasonable to expect to find that blacks would be just 13 percent of those killed by police. What percentage would you expect to see. What percentage would mean there isn’t a problem of police shooting African Americans in particular (as opposed to police just shooting too much in general)?
Presumably police are (and should be) more likely to kill those who are willing or trying to kill other people. [Update: others have used arrest rates as the denominator, which seems like a good way to analyze racial disparities vis-a-vis police interactions.] Nationwide, blacks are also about 50 percent of murder victims (and thus presumably murder perpetrators, since most homicides are intra-racial). Over the past 10 years, according to FBI data that looks at those who have feloniously killed a police officer, whites are 53 percent and blacks are 44 percent.
[For various reasons, none particularly good, FBI data seems to lumps all hispanics into the white category. The data at killedbypolice.net counts hispanics as separate. But it means that hispanics are invisible in the FBI data but counted in killedbypolice data. And I’m using both. So consider this a fair warning about comparing numbers and figures from different data sets.]
One would hope that the racial breakdown of police-involved homicides would be not out-of-wack with the racial breakdown of those who kill police. This indeed seems to be the case: 48 percent if those killed by police are white, 30 percent are black, and 18 percent hispanic (the doesn’t-add-up-to-100-percent bit consists of Asian, Indian, Pacific Islander, and other.)
Though if you’re so inclined, and I see so reason not to, you could spin the same data this way:
Now the data doesn’t indicate which shootings are justified (the vast majority) and which are cold-blooded murder (not many, but some). And maybe that would vary by race. I don’t know, but I doubt it.
Still, per capita, blacks are 3.5 times more likely than white men to die at the hands of police. This is now adjusted for population, and only includes men.
Keep in mind the homicide rate for the entire country of Canada is 1.6. So a homicide rate of 1.3 for black men just killed by police (!) is very high.
While it is a very damning figure for our country, it’s not necessarily damning for police. There is a 6:1 (per capita) black-to-white homicide rate disparity and a 4:1 black-to-white disparity (per capita) among those who felonious kill police officers. Given disparate rates of violence, it would be naive to expect equal rates among those killed by police.
Adjusted for the homicide rate, should one choose to do that, whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks die at the hands of police. Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.
Another statistic: A black man is 16 more likely to be killed by a cop than kill a cop. A white man is 20 times more likely.
Though it goes against the all-cops-are-racist narrative, it’s not inconceivable, given an equal threat level, that a white person is actually more likely to be shot by police. I’ve gone into these reasons before, and it’s just speculation, but two I want to highlight are 1) cops in more minority cities face more political fallout when they shoot, and thus receive better training and are less inclined to shoot, and 2) since cops in more dangerous neighborhoods are more used to danger; so other things being equal (though they rarely are), police in high-crime minority areas are less afraid and thus less likely to shoot. Based on experience, I suspect that police in high-crime areas deserve more credit than they get for not shooting. Some of the bad shootings I’ve seen recently… I can’t imagine a cop in Baltimore being so damn scared for no good reason.
So I am saying that a guy with a gun in the ghetto might actually be less likely to be shot by a cop who is more used to danger and guns. But a guy with a gun who makes a sudden movement in a neighborhood with a cop who has never faced danger in the face? Boom. [Update: it’s not like unarmed white people don’t also get killed by police.]
All this said, one should keep all this morbidity in perspective. The odds that any given black man will shoot and kill a police officer in any given year is slim to none, about one in a million. The odds for any given white man? One in four million. The odds that a black man will be shot and killed by a police officer is about 1 in 60,000. For a white man those odds are 1 in 200,000.
But the odds that any given police officer will have to shoot and kill somebody this year? 1 in 1,000. That is not negligible. Add when one adds in the times a cop was afraid for life and didn’t shoot? Or an officer did shoot and missed? Or shot and wounded? And then you multiply that by 20 years? Those are odds most people would not accept in a job description.
[Go back to Part 1 or forward to Part 3.]
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[My critique of ProPublica’s misleading claims. More analysis from St. Louis NPR.]
[Corrections welcome. Please double check my work.]
Those last figures are based very roughly on 1 million cops, 1,000 killed by police, 20 million black men, 333 killed by police, 100 million white men, 500 killed by police. For everything else, feel free to check my math and excel formulas, if you can make sense of this:
For reference, the top-left cell is Row 13, column A. Annual rate =SUM((B14/2)*(24/23)). Rate: =SUM(C14/(E14/100000)). Rate LE killed by= =SUM(F14/(E14/100000)). Final rate: =SUM(D14/G14). Hom rate: =SUM(J14/(E14/100000)). Killed by adj by hom rate: =SUM(D14/K14).
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Killed by Police (1 of 3): New Data!
Two years ago a somewhat shadowy person or group began compiling all media accounts of people killed by police. It’s at killedbypolice.net. Best I can tell, he/she/it/they do a pretty good job.
According to the site: “Corporate news reports of people killed by nonmilitary law enforcement officers, whether in the line of duty or not, and regardless of reason or method. Inclusion implies neither wrongdoing nor justification on the part of the person killed or the officer involved. The post merely documents the occurrence of a death.”
Not that this list is perfect. Certainly there might be some police-involved homicides that don’t make the local paper or TV news broadcast. But there can’t be too many. From May 2, 2013 to April 8, 2015, there have been 2,177 documented cases of people dying or being killed by police. (The vast majority are shot… but see died after being tased). And one cop killed his own family. Personally I wouldn’t include off-duty and not job related, but that’s a minor quibble, statistically.
The compiled data is impressive both in its thoroughness and documented nature. And compared to only other data we have, such as the crappy UCR data on justifiable police-involved homicides, this killed-by-police list is gold. It’s the first time — ever — we can start looking at who police are shooting.
So I played with the data. I refined it and shined it real nice and turned it into a proper SPSS file (and removed the few who weren’t killed in the 50 states plus DC). I have everything from when the list started (May 2, 2013) to April 8, 2015. So it’s just under two years of data. N = 2,177
So the first thing we learn, which we knew, is that the UCR is a vast undercount. But now we have some idea about how much: a bit more than 50 percent. [For the more statistically inclined, the missing UCR data, at least with regards to race, does seem to be mostly random (which is good), which means the UCR data might be OK for some analysis.]
So we learn that police in America kill about three people a day. Three police-involved deaths a day may seem like a lot. But is it? America is a big country. It doesn’t seem like an epidemic. In a typical day, 38 Americans will be murdered, 90 will die in car crashes, 110 Americans will commit suicide, and 120 will overdose on drugs. Maybe we have to begrudgingly accept three police-involved killings a day as par for a violent nation. But maybe not.
I think we could rather easily cut the number of people killed by police in half. That would save the lives of around 500 people a year. But I’ll get to that in the third and final post.
[Part 2]