Police, race and misconceptions
By Emil Pulsifer, Guest Rogue
The recent string of well-publicized police killings of unarmed blacks and the nationwide wave of mass protests by young, multi-ethnic crowds, has once again brought the issue of police and race from the backburner of ethnic-studies classes to the forefront of public debate.
Some incidents triggering the protests are controversial (Ferguson); others, such as the shooting death of a 12-year old boy with a pellet pistol or the death of a sidewalk cigarette salesman from a banned choke-hold appear as unmistakable tragedies to those who have seen the video evidence.
Instead of dissecting these cases on an individual basis, I want to examine the push-back from conservative pundits, whose talking-points and rhetoric mirror police attitudes, including prominent and influential men like Rudy Giuliani, who is widely credited with amazing reductions in crime during his tenure as mayor of New York City, and whose policing models (most notably "broken windows") have been widely emulated.
The rhetoric from law and order conservatives is important because police tactics can best be changed through reforms in police attitudes and in the attitudes of politicians presiding over law enforcement communities. That rhetoric is filled with fictions, half-truths, faulty inferences, and misused statistics. Several prominent talking points deserve scrutiny:
1. "Ninety-three percent of black murder victims in the United States are killed by other blacks" — the "black on black crime" thesis. This comes from a 2010 Bureau of Justice Statistics report covering the period from 1980 through 2008.
The fly in the ointment is that the report also says 84 percent of white murder victims are killed by other whites. Yet nobody is talking about "white on white crime" as a means of distracting the conversation whenever a white is the victim of police abuse. Do we really believe that murderers politely decline to kill the members of other races, or is this simply a statistical artifact of demographic segregation and concentration?
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