Fewer people shot and killed by police

I think this is the first time anybody has been able to compare police use-of-lethal force, apples-to-apples, over 50 years, with honest, reliable, and accurate data! It would be better to have total number of people shot by cops, simply to have a larger n (a bigger sample, for statistical reasons), but the problem is those numbers don’t reliably exist for cities today. On that, see Nix’s article. Because of that, I wouldn’t read too much into the increases above (except Honolulu, which is an interesting outlier) in Portland and San Jose. But I don’t know, that’s the problem with a small sample size of rare events.

This isn’t big news if this is your field. But there was a recent Guardian headline that got my goat:

This bothered a lot of people, me included, because it’s — I don’t know how else to put this — a lie.

I mean you can think it’s true and be honestly mistaken. You’re wrong, but you can learn. I’ve got no issue with that. I’m an “educator,” as they say (personally I like “teacher” or “professor”). But the people at the “Mapping Police Violence” project? They’re not stupid. They must know. Right? They fed the story to The Guardian (more than willing to lap it up). And now people can cite The Guardian as gospel, and the circle is complete!

Here’s the thing. It’s just not true. It’s like not even close to true. Not unless “ever” only goes back to 2015. The first year of decent national data (the best source was, Fatal Encounters, which unfortunately retired after 2021), the US population has gone up 4%. Murders are up 30%(!). And the WaPo count of people killed by cops? Up 9% from a low in 2015 and 2019. Up is worse than down, I guess. But it kind of goes against the whole “Police Violence Higher Than Ever!” manufactured outrage.

See if I said, “actually police shoot 5% fewer people now than before” and you said, “No, they shoot 10% more!” we could quibble about methods and sources and reasonable people could differ. But what if you said, “2022 was the deadliest year for police violence,” and I said, “Actually 65% fewer people are being killed by police than in the past” — and let’s also say I was right, because I am definitely more right than wrong — then how could you say “more than ever!”? Either the people who say this are unbelievably ignorant, and I don’t think they are, or they’re willfully telling miss-truths. In other words: lying.

Far be it from me to answer, “why?” I really don’t get it, because I think it’s bad strategy to say everything is getting worse if you want to improve policing and save lives. I think the issue is many people do not want better policing. They want “zero police violence.” They want to abolish police — believe them when they say so — don’t think “that’s so crazy they can’t possible mean it.” At least once you see the ideology, it clears the cognitive dissonance.

Anyway, they have these nicely funded non-partisan research organizations paid for by individuals or corporations who have people to give away money, people who don’t dig too deep into what the organization does but love the veneer of “equity” and “racial justice.” Some of the people working these organizations are hard workers and some are pure grifters. Most are somewhere in between. The thing about grifting is it ain’t easy, and the job is never done.And the donors these Philanthropic progressives also get the added benefit of having a few Black people (other than the caterers) show up at their parties.

Anyway, this is long way of saying “police violence” (a bad term that assumes “police violence” is bad; but we pay police to use “violence”, though I prefer the term force; use it judiciously, legally, and constitutionally; police use of force, call it what you will, is literally the function of police in society) is not at an all time high.

But here’s why this matters even more. If we ignore the progress made, progress will stop. Imagine if I could tell you we were going to reduce some form of dying by 70%? That’s what happened. Not by accident. Not by defunding. But by good leaders, pressured by the public, to care. And then academics who had free reign (and money through the Police Foundation) to research policing!

There’s a long and discombobulated thread of twitter for people who want to get into weeds on this.

Long story short: I knew OIC (officer-involved shootings) were down over decades. Because this is what I do. I talk to people. And there literally is no evidence anywhere that cops kill more people now than in the 1970s. We (anybody in the field) all know this. It’s both common sense (you think Tennessee v Garner had no impact?!) and backed by the very limited data we have. You get bits of data here and there. You talk to people who were there. One of the guys I worked with came on the job in 1968. He told about all the people he shot at. “I never hit anybody, but I shot at a lot of people. And there was no paperwork. You just had buy more ammo.”

But here was the problem: the national data (Vital Statistics and UCR) were wrong and horribly so. Anyway, the problem with looking back to the 1970s (or any times before 2015) is the data on police-involved shootings are scattered or really really bad. They _only_ city I knew that kept good numbers year after year was from 1970-on is NYC.

And so there are published reports from the 1970’s saying police killed 300 people a year. With more accurate data, I can show police just in cities with a total of 23.5 million people killed 228 people a year. And that is ~10% of the US population. So who knows how many people cops killed back then? But more than 300! Guessing (I hate to guess) I’d say near 2,000? There’s a greater story about the bad data, which matters if you care, but I won’t get into it here. But Professor David Klinger is the go-to for that kind of thing.

But this isn’t an “I told you so.” The point is if we don’t acknowledge policing has gotten better and much less lethal, we can’t continue to improve. Because policing has gotten better and less lethal. Not by chance but because people worked hard to make it so. And those who want to abolish policing are not helping the cause. But they do influence the public discussion. And many of the “reforms” they push for in response to cops killing people make the problem worse.

To deny the progress means to deny _decades_ of life saving research, policy, technology, education and training — even lawsuit –that drastically change police culture and practice. It worked. It made policing safer , too. Why pretend it didn’t happen?

(Thanks to David Klinger, Justine Nix, Rajiv Sethi, John Shjarbackand, David Thacher, and Robert VerBruggen who helped move the methods and data and discussion along, mostly on twittter!)

Note: This is the number of fatal police-involved shootings by year, for the nation, as per Fatal Encounters.