[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…
[See parts 1 and 3 and NYC] 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…
An op-ed of mine to appear in Sunday’s Washington Post: This one is different. Walter Scott was killed — shot multiple times in the back — by North Charleston, S.C., police officer Michael Slager last weekend. Scott, already running away, was no threat to the officer when the first shot was fired. He was even less of a threat when…
Very bad. For a lot of reasons. A man is wanted for arrest for unpaid child support. A cop shoots the man while the man is running away and clearly, at that moment, is not a threat. The officer then apparently picks up and moves and drops his Taser closer to the dead body? Oh, it’s all bad. The North…
This isn’t really news. But some seem to think that blacks only care about black lives murder when it’s at the hands of police. (And certainly police-involved killings seems to be the only ones that get a lot of press). But when blacks do protest and act against violence in the black community, very few seem to notice. This happenedin…
Three years ago I wrote about the problem of “procedural justice.” If you’ve misplaced your copy of William Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, just read Leon Neyfakh’s review in the Boston Globe. Procedural justice still matters because the Presidential Report places emphasis on it: “Police and sheriffs’ departments should adopt procedural justice as the guiding principle for internal…
[My other posts on the DOJ reports, 1 & 3.] The DOJ’s report of Ferguson isn’t just about police or just about race. A large part of the report — to me the more disturbing part — is about a whole system of government using the criminal justice system as a tool to legally steal from its residents. It’s feudal,…
[My other posts on the DOJ reports, 1 & 2.] I have read (most of) the incredibly damning DOJ’s report on the Ferguson P.D. I tried to read it a bit as Thomas Jefferson edited the Bible. Thomas Jefferson thought that even if Jesus isn’t the son of God, even if there are no supernatural events, there’s still something good…
I’ve written before about their foolish and inaccurate claim that the black-to-white racial disparity among those shot by police is 21 to 1. I said, given the group they look at, the number is 9 to 1. But without any slight-of-hand or misleading highlighting of statistical outliers, the actually black-to-white racial disparity, the take-home stat, is 4 to 1. More…
A lot of people really believe that cops are out there gunning for blacks. People who know more about police officers find this absurd. Of course black lives do indeed matter. But other things being equal (like committing a violent crime), are cops more likely to shoot and kill blacks because they are black? That’s an empirical question worth trying…