On January 7, 2023, a young black man named Tyre Nichols was brutally beaten by five police officers after a traffic stop. As he was being pummeled he called out “I’m just trying to go home” and “Mom, Mom, Mom.” He lived with his mother and stepfather about 100 yards from where he was assaulted. Three days later he died from his injuries. The ugly scenes of the beating were caught on video from bodycams and surveillance footage. The officers, oblivious to being filmed, seemed to think their badges would shield them from consequences. Instead, they have been dismissed and are facing murder charges. Now America must once again wrestle with the issue of police violence.
This is an interesting analysis. As with most of America's broken systems, there are multiple factors at play, racism being just one.
You mention the overwhelming numbers of guns, which certainly make Americsn policing more dangerous than is the case in other countries, but you don't mention the fact that many police officers do not favor gun control. In fact, in response to a ban on assault weapons in IL, numerous sheriff's stated their intention to disregard this law. A measure that would increase safety for both civilian and police is not supported by the police.
I may have missed it, but qualified immunity confers a sense to American officers of being above the law...and attempts to prosecute police are often confounded by this arbitrary protection.
Finally, while I agree with your points about staffing and training, police departments are extraordinarily well funded in the US. The problem is that substantial funds are used for over-militarization (which you note) and hundreds of millions (if not more) on settlements for a wide variety of police misconduct.
Mote training alone is not the answer (and you don't suggest that this is the case), but structural changes are essential for training to be effective. Police unions instill a culture of 'us vs them' that's prevalent in police departments.
There are no simple solutions. Stricter guns laws, elimination of qualified immunity, changes to police unions, greater involvement in the community, enhanced training would all have to be implemented cohesively to effect real change.
A thoughtful and even-handed essay on a subject that could easily fill a book.
I've been curious to see some discussion of the lack of marches and the relatively meager public reaction compared to the Floyd murder. The Nichols murder on video looked at least as awful and violent as that of Floyd. Maybe the arrests so soon after the murder? Maybe most just didn't perceive racism. (Plus it's unimaginable that another DA wouldn't file charges.)
I tend to dislike the 'woke' verbiage of systemic racism and white supremacy. I think there is some poor reasoning and/ or co-opting of language. One interlocutor on Twitter said he couldn't imagine Nichols' assault happening to a white person, though, which rings true to me. I'd love to see ways to enhance economic opportunities for all the poor and won't complain too loudly if I must pay more taxes to do that.
Thanks! Yes, I dunno about the lack of marches. I suspect it's a combo of it being black cops and that the DA jumped on it so fast. — White guys do get beat up by the cops but in general it seems non-white guys are beat up more (even taking other factors into account).
Excellent article, Carl! Definitely maps on to what a lot of my fellow students are doing in terms of research - I can think of a number of projects my lab has done examining unconscious bias and sympathetic nervous system activation in police encounters, and I know many of the people in the Law & Psych program are looking at bias in jury decision-making, as well.
I feel better and more extensive training is maybe the one that jumps out to me the most - I was shocked by how little seems to be required in some precincts and on a first impressions level, it seems completely backwards. Given what police are tasked with and the kinds of decisions they're forced to make (often in a very short period of time), it feels like they'd need the most training on how to effectively use firearms (and more importantly, know when not to use them). I'm very much a supporter of 2A, but I do feel some restrictions (closing the gun show loophole, red flag laws, restricting sales to the mentally ill depending on certain variables) might be helpful, and my personal philosophy on it is that while I don't think "it's the guns" or "guns kill people", and there are a number of other uses for them besides self-defense, you should still keep in mind how easy it is to end a human life with them (and therefore, only use them as an absolute last resort - i.e. use minimum necessary force, and don't go waving them around everywhere). The police should be even more aware of that responsibility imo, and I think you did a great job providing suggestions as to how we can help with that, including collaborating with mental health professionals.
Thank you so much! I'm happy that well-informed people like yourself think I made some sense. It's a giant topic and I still don't know anywhere near as much as I should.
Echoing everyone else here to say that I really appreciate this fair, thorough, and thoughtful analysis. I'll be bookmarking it to share next time I find myself in a conversation or debate in which it might be useful.
Personally, my intuition says that the only real effective solution we have is economic. I don't know exactly what that specific solution is, but as you cover here, it's clear that people who are economically secure do not often commit violent or deadly crimes.
Thank you very much! I wish I had specific economic solutions too. Of course, as with everything, it'll involve a lot of different solutions (I just hope we find them!)
Good piece. It is a pretty much a universally acknowledged matter of fact that every interaction with the police is fraught with danger no matter what your race, color, or creed.
I'm going to write what will probably end up being a fairly lengthy comment. This is because this seems like an essay written by a basically reasonable person that actually cares about the issues and is misinformed in some ways. I hope it's taken in that spirit.
I'm just going to kind of go down the essay and respond as stuff pops up.
As a minor note, the neologism "police violence" shouldn't just be used without examination. The exercise of the state's monopoly on violence is the most basic legitimate function of the police. An organization that doesn't or isn't supposed to exercise violence can be valuable in many ways, but it's not the police. Catastrophizing the actual reason that the police exist is not a healthy approach to the subject.
Regarding MPV (and keeping in mind the above note regarding the term!), I think it's a mistake to just uncritically accept their numbers. MPV (and fatal encounters) basically count any fatality within a quarter mile of a cop as a "police killing".
So for example I just went to MPV's "see the data" link and scrolled through for one where the cause was listed as "accidental" and found this:
A guy is walking in the street at night and a squad car hits him. That's technically "killed by police" but it's not really what people think of when they say "police violence" right? Is this truly "mapping police violence"?
Scroll down another few entries and you find this guy, who was in ill health and most likely was high on cocaine and who went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. What are the chances this guy lives if the cops DON'T help him get in the rig and instead he's allowed to just run around until he tips over? Is this "police violence"? Did the police kill this guy?
That's two examples of extremely questionable inclusions just by scrolling through the most recent 20 or 30 entries on their table, right? One of my favorite examples of an inclusion - I can't remember if it was MPV or FE - where a driver crossed over the center line of a 2-lane road and struck a cop going the other way, killing both drivers, and that was counted as the police having killed someone!
The overall point being that you can use those places as data sources but their data shouldn't just be credulously accepted as a far accounting of "police violence."
Regarding statistics about number of OIS proportionality, for years and years and years I've been mystified by the comparison to crime rates. It's not completely without value but it seems to reach for a level of abstraction that's not really necessary. Each level of abstraction you add also creates opportunities for people to play little games with interpretation.
Most people would prefer that police generally use force - especially lethal force - in a defensive manner. If that is in fact what's happening, then you would expect to find a higher rate of lethal assault ON police officers in the US, right? Well, it just so happens that the FBI publishes a report on Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA). LEOKA is part of UCR and UCR is a mess right now, so the most recent LEOKA I could find was 2019:
1. That's a total of 537 officers killed in a 9-year span, and those are just cases tracked by UCR (incomplete) and of the UCR cases, only the ones where offender is known. If you expressed this as a rate per 1k officers it would be some multiple of any comparable European country, and that rate would still be lower than the ACTUAL rate.
2. 97% of the offenders were male, which generally lines up with the percent of people shot and killed by police being male.
3. 37% of the offenders were black, which is actually a HIGHER percentage than the percent of people shot and killed by police being black (roughly 25%).
Table 116 is "Law Enforcement Officers Assaulted and Injured with Firearms, Knives, or Other Cutting Instruments":
Of those 1,031 incidents, the offender is known in 903 of them. The percent of those offenders that were black is again 37%, and again this is HIGHER than the percent of persons shot and killed by police.
"But still," you may say, "that's only about 1,600 cops murdered or shot/stabbed in a decade, why are cops shooting and killing 1,000 people annually?"
That's 22,088 firearms assaults in that 9 year span (always remember: this is only a partial accounting! The actual number is higher!). 22,088 incidents where someone shot, shot at, or pointed a firearm at a police officer. 2,454 such incidents per year, averaged out. 10,008 "knife or cutting instrument" assaults, or 1,112 per year. 81,166 assaults with "other dangerous weapons" (bats, rocks, screwdrivers, etc) or 9,018 per year. 436,630 assaults with "personal weapons" i.e.: hands, feet, biting, etc. 48,514 assaults like that per year. And at least one or two cops get beaten to death most years! Or if you get knocked out or incapacitated your opponent can take your weapons!
These are not hidden, arcane facts, right? This is just publicly available information. And I can not stress this enough: these are lower than the actual numbers. These tables have between 9 and 12k agencies reporting, but the US has about 18k agencies.
Why do US police shoot and kill so many people every year? Because we're assaulted with lethal force so frequently!
That's it! That's what causes it! That's why there is NO AMOUNT of "accountability measures" that will substantially reduce that number because overwhelmingly police are using lethal force in response to a legitimate lethal threat.
The "slave patrols" thing is just dumb abolitionist rhetoric mindlessly repeated by people who overwhelmingly live in safe neighborhoods. It's a very clear example of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs. It's a status symbol.
Regarding the 2007 incident with Chauvin: I think it's a mistake to just assume that you've got a full and complete version of the event. My read of DC's behavior during the Floyd death is that he believed GF was making a BS claim of medical distress to avoid jail, and further that it was going to work. He already had an ambulance coming before they even put GF on the ground, he was going to have GF transported to hospital and write the report and move on to the next call. He let his frustration with incarceritis and bystanders override his judgement, training, and policy and failed to put GF in the recovery position or monitor his vitals prior to ambulance arrival (as he was required to do by training and policy).
FWIW I also believe that DC could have done everything right and the bystanders would have perceived everything exactly the same way. Bystanders generally have no understanding of anything that's happening.
All of that to say: it's hard to know how much of the 2007 complainant's perspective is accurate. If he got disciplined for it he probably screwed some stuff up, but cops are human beings, they're going to screw things up sometimes. You can't just fire a cop every time they screw something up because you will very quickly have 0 police officers.
People also routinely lie (both on purpose and on accident) about their police contacts, make stuff up, don't understand things, etc. One of my perennial frustrations is that the same people who say "oh, police lie, you have to be suspicious of everything the police say" exercise actually zero skepticism of any claim of police misconduct, despite all of the obvious incentives to lie about the cops.
My favorite was the lady whose boyfriend was probably cheating on her and blamed his weekend absence on a false arrest and the girlfriend just accepted the story as true and posted a tearful youtube video about it.
Elijah McClain is one of the really tough ones. It's pretty clear to me that he was just a sweet kid who panicked and my heart aches at his death. At the same time it's way, way, way more complicated than your paragraph acknowledges.
The police in question were responding to a 911 call that alleged vaguely suspicious behavior, somewhere between "suspicious" and a welfare check. They found the correct person from the call and when they attempted to make contact he behaved exactly like Malcolm Orr:
When they tried to physically restrain him he immediately fought, and fought HARD. He made an active effort to try to take an officer's gun - like he got his hand on the gun and tried to get it out of the holster. Watch the BWC and then ask yourself: if Elijah McClain had been able to, would he have killed those officers to get away?
I think the answer is absolutely yes, he would have. Not because he's a bad person or murderous but because was completely consumed by blind panic. He would have done anything to get away.
It is in that context that the officers used a Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint (LVNR), which was NOT illegal and was NOT prohibited by policy. LVNR is practiced in BJJ and MMA studios every day in this country. It's actually extremely safe, it has a much lower propensity for injury than basically any other force option, it works regardless of clothing, temperature, drugs, emotional state, etc.
LVNR is a technique that would - and has - ABSOLUTELY save lives because it ends the fights that result in death. McClain is actually an example of this. Once the fight was ended due to LVNR they secured him in cuffs and moved him on to his side in the recovery position and he kept fighting because he had lost rational control.
McClain was even aware of this! The cops told him "stop fighting" and he responded "I can't!" That's WHY they got medical there. Even when he overloaded his entire body with lactic acid, causing him to vomit, he STILL kept struggling. This is exactly the kind of scenario where someone fights until their heart stops beating, which is why the medics dosed him with ketamine.
The problem is that the medics gave him way too much ketamine, and that killed him.
Again - the death of Elijah McClain makes me heartsick. I got into cop work to protect people like him. But what are the cops to do here?
They responded to a 911 call regarding him. They found him. He immediately fled from the police, and when they tried to detain to investigate further he immediately fought, to include trying to take an officer's gun. Even if the medics hadn't killed him with a ketamine overdose, I would prefer that he not be subjected to the panic and struggle of the fight, right? But literally the only way that I can see to avoid that is the following sequence of events:
1. Police receive the 911 call.
2. Police locate the subject of that 911 call.
3. The subject flees from police contact.
4. Police just let him flee.
That's it. That's the only way this is avoided, and that has tradeoffs too. You the essay writer here are evaluating the McClain detention with perfect hindsight, whether you realize that or not. You're going "given that the police knew that he was a gentle weird kid who played violin for kittens, why would they detain him?"
But they didn't know that. Most of the time, the guy that immediately flees from the police and then fights isn't a panicked kid. If I received that original call, I'd be thinking most likely someone on meth, maybe doing some car prowling, there are a lot of options. This is the hard question that very few people actually make even the slightest effort to grapple with, right? The STANDARD MODE of police criticism is to use perfect hindsight.
In the real world police are responding to scenarios with deeply imperfect information, subject to the limitations of human perception. Then, months or years later, attorneys and activists and journalists dissect decisions from the comfort of their armchairs with the full array of facts available to them, watching videos with the freedom to pause on a single frame to cogitate for minutes or hours at a time on a moment that passed in the literal blink of an eye.
And the funny part is that journalists are also humans and also make mistakes, right? You said the LVNR used on McClain was illegal, but it wasn't. Not only was it legal, it was actually reasonable and appropriate and it immediately ended a fight that could have dragged on for another 5 or 10 or 15 minutes, or resulted in a 10-cop pigpile with much more elevated risks of injury or death.
The cops trusted the medics to administer a reasonable dose of ketamine but they didn't. And all of that is a much more complicated story than "evil police used an illegal chokehold to kill an innocent teen." It's just that the more complicated story is the true one, while the simple story is false.
What I would also ask you to consider when you write things like "The stories are endless and the grim problem of civilian deaths remains." is the following:
The stories of police deaths are also endless, it's just that no one really cares about those. How many people know about the following story:
There exists BWC video of Rittmanic helpless, begging for her life before she's executed by Sullivan. Think about any of the most viral police UOF incidents of the last two decades. Do any of them - and I mean this sincerely - do any of them approach that level of depravity?
How many truly awful or illegal homicides were committed by police in 2022? 5? 10? 15? 20? 50?
I have yet to see anyone even start to suggest anything even beginning to approach allegations of 50 illegal police-caused homicides in 2022, but let's just take that as a number. We'll assume that for every viral case there's 10 or 20 cases that don't get reported on.
In that same year, 2022, there were 74 police officers murdered in the US according to ODMP:
Because it's my view that even in the most aggressively anti-police interpretation of the facts, cops pay with our blood and lives for our mistakes much more often than the population at large.
None of this is to say that police are perfect, right? This is only to say two things:
1. Police are human beings.
2. The story that cops are broadly cavalier with the safety of citizens is just false. It's not true.
And keep in mind that even someone who is actively and regularly engaging in numerous crimes great and small will maybe have 10-20 police contacts in a year, and they can basically eliminate those contacts by curtailing their criminal behavior.
A police officer has a full time working life that's nothing BUT police contacts, and we can't do anything to curtail them! We just have to work 40+ hours a week, 52 weeks a year, and either make it to retirement or quit.
Regarding training, I will again refer you to the earlier section of this essay regarding assaults on LEO. Training is all well and good, but the low hanging fruit of "police violence" reduction have been plucked. "Better training" will not meaningfully reduce police UOF because almost all UOF of all levels is a reasonable and proportional response to the resistance faced.
"Besides crime rates, one possible answer is training. American police are probably undertrained, getting far less training than their European counterparts."
These statements and charts are generally dishonest and false. I'm not necessarily saying that you're being dishonest - the chart seems to be sourced from some organization, and that organization is playing games. The most common game played is to find some tiny 3-cop department in rural Alabama and claim that it's representative. They also routinely pretend as if educational requirements to become eligible for licensure don't exist and further that FTO doesn't exist.
I can not stress enough how very dishonest that chart is. It is trash. Sincerely.
"Training varies widely between police departments in the United States, both in hours and quality. Two of the Minneapolis cops who watched while George Floyd was being murdered were rookies fresh out of the academy who had only trained for 16 weeks."
This is not true. Lane and Keung were in the cadet program, which takes new hires with no LE experience or education and trains them all the way through MN POST board requirements AND MPD specific requirements. They had ALSO both recently completed FTO, a 5-month program ASSUMING you don't get extended. The idea that they had 16 weeks of training is clearly incoherent if you just looked at their hire date in January 2019:
If they had only 16 weeks of training, how is it that they were "fresh out of the academy" 72 weeks later?
What has happened is that you weren't aware of the difference between the MPD cadet and recruit academy and you weren't aware of FTO and you didn't take the time to double check your priors, right? The MPD recruit academy, BTW, is intended for new hires that have passed the MN state POST board requirements for licensure. This typically requires a two year associate's degree followed by completion of a "skills" program.
That two year program will of course be deliberately ignored by the "police in the US only need 5 minutes of training!" crowd. Because they're dishonest.
I agree that our urban departments are understaffed. I especially liked the "cops per homicide" ratio from this MIT paper:
"Militarization" is largely a nonsense term. Journalist and author Radley Balko is a dishonest hack that's made a career out of catastrophizing policing because libertarians loathe police, although it's funny that this has made him a darling of the crazy left (I'm not saying that's you, just that's a fact about Balko).
The reality is that cops have been quietly learning from past failures since professionalized police forces were created. Complaints about "militarized" police are just kind of free-floating complaints about vibes rather than substance. And of course everyone hates "militarized warrior police" right up until the very second that something goes wrong, right?
Were the cops in Uvalde over militarized hyper violent warriors? Or was there a different problem there?
Where are the complaints about militarized warrior police when it comes to this incident?
The basic problem is that it's not a substantive criticism of any particular law, policy, or anything else. It's a shallow, unfalsifiable complaint about appearances. People don't like the color or style of the equipment, cops shouldn't wear helmets when being pelted with bricks, people don't like the names of the units, whatever.
I agree SCORPION is a dumb name, but the name didn't beat Nichols to death. Any urban department is going to need a specialized unit that targets specifically violent offenders, and all the research shows that in fact they should have such a unit! Violent crime is concentrated among small cadres of core offenders and it's further concentrated in small geographic areas. It is literally best practice to target those groups and places with a specialized unit.
It's ALSO true that specialized units tend to create bubbles around themselves. They're isolated from broader agency culture and specifically because they target and repeatedly confront the most dangerous offenders they draw particular personalities. Police department administration needs to be very careful with who gets appointed to those units and good leadership is key.
The MOST SENIOR cop on the Nichols scene was hired in 2017 (and even finding that basic fact required looking through a zillion dimwitted thinkpieces about the event). There were FIVE COPS, members of a specialized unit, on a t-stop that went to a foot chase and then to an use of an extremely high level force and not a single Sergeant was in sight?
I'm on the suburban version of a specialized unit (I left my violent urban police department in late 2020) and our Sergeant is there for most of our arrests. WHERE was the supervision for these junior cops?
Why are COPS the only people asking that question? Well, because everyone else is distracted by nonsense about "militarization" or the name of the unit.
"It’s possible charges would not have been filed in the Tyre Nichols case if Memphis had not in 2022 elected a progressive District Attorney, replacing a hardline Republican incumbent."
This is complete nonsense. I don't say this to be rude (although it is, sorry) but it's just nonsense. They beat a man to death on video in 2023. Derek Chauvin was always going to get charged, the only thing all the rioting and statements by politicians did was give him good grounds for an appeal.
"They are frustrated by the endless stories of abuse at the hands of cops."
Well, that is a problem, isn't it? Sadly the police don't really have much ability to do anything about it, do we?
On many occasions in my career I've walked into the middle of huge street brawls of 10-20 people with just myself and 1-3 other cops, broken up the fight, and arrested people with guns right as the guns were coming out. I've personally prevented shootings, shootings that may have been murders. Robberies that may have turned into rapes. I've been assaulted. I've been within miliseconds of being in a gunfight before more cops arrived and the suspect decided to toss the gun and flee on foot instead.
Basically when the cops save a life, or risk our own lives to use less force than authorized to effect an arrest, or restore order to a chaotic scene with little to no injury to anyone - none of that will make the news, ever. It will never be a statistic. When an officer COULD legally shoot someone but resolves the scenario without doing so, that video will never be seen. When an officer is executed with her own gun as she begs for her life, that video will never be seen.
But the entire media establishment is on a 24/7 hunt for the slightest whiff of police misconduct. Videos are edited, context is removed, ignorant commentary added, video is resurrected over and over years later without context as if it just happened. Riots happen because a man is shot for "holding a bible" or a sandwich or whatever and when it turns out that it was actually a gun the record is never corrected - and how would it be?
In the US, GOOD police work is not only never seen, if anyone TRIES to show it, it's often concealed. On those rare occasions when it is seen, that's "copaganda." All allegations of police malfeasance are breathlessly amplified for outrage clicks.
"If every cop in America underwent extensive diversity training the police would still be killing too many people."
Again. Look at the LEOKA stats.
Do you want to reduce the number of people killed by police? Sincerely? Then literally your only options are to not have police or to reduce the rate of lethal assaults on police.
That's it.
"Sometimes force is necessary—American cops can’t go unarmed like British bobbies—but the emphasis should be on de-escalation."
"Deescalation" is treated like a magical spell from Harry Potter, but it's not.
What if police in the US are actually already routinely deescalating extremely violent, armed confrontations and it's just never reported? How would you know? Is "police resolve violent armed confrontation peacefully without any injury to anyone" a compelling news story? Will it get people outraged?
"A rich country should do better with its police and for its citizens. We have lost too many men like Tyre Nichols"
It is March 1st and 7 police officers have been murdered so far this year. Have we also lost too many men like Darnell Calhoun, Gonzalo Carrasco, or Sean Sluganski? Or is that an ok number? Do we have any worries about the training or systems that lead to those deaths?
My point here (as always) is not that the cops are perfect. But actually given the violence and crime that we're handling we're doing pretty god damn good.
Human beings are fallible and imperfect and this country needs to develop the ability to address those failings and imperfections without immolating itself. Incremental improvement and learning lessons from the past is slow, hard work but it's work we should be doing. We need to stop with the lazy, reductionist takes about "warrior cops" or whatever and actually do some sober, factual analysis and we need to acknowledge that even with perfect systems sometimes people are going to do bad, wrong things.
Thank you very much! Glad you liked it!
Took the words right out of my keyboard
This is an interesting analysis. As with most of America's broken systems, there are multiple factors at play, racism being just one.
You mention the overwhelming numbers of guns, which certainly make Americsn policing more dangerous than is the case in other countries, but you don't mention the fact that many police officers do not favor gun control. In fact, in response to a ban on assault weapons in IL, numerous sheriff's stated their intention to disregard this law. A measure that would increase safety for both civilian and police is not supported by the police.
I may have missed it, but qualified immunity confers a sense to American officers of being above the law...and attempts to prosecute police are often confounded by this arbitrary protection.
Finally, while I agree with your points about staffing and training, police departments are extraordinarily well funded in the US. The problem is that substantial funds are used for over-militarization (which you note) and hundreds of millions (if not more) on settlements for a wide variety of police misconduct.
Mote training alone is not the answer (and you don't suggest that this is the case), but structural changes are essential for training to be effective. Police unions instill a culture of 'us vs them' that's prevalent in police departments.
There are no simple solutions. Stricter guns laws, elimination of qualified immunity, changes to police unions, greater involvement in the community, enhanced training would all have to be implemented cohesively to effect real change.
Truly excellent. Hits pretty much every point I covered in three days of class on policing in Criminal Justice Policy.
Thank you so much! I honored that I lived up to your class (although I'm sure you covered it in more detail!)
A thoughtful and even-handed essay on a subject that could easily fill a book.
I've been curious to see some discussion of the lack of marches and the relatively meager public reaction compared to the Floyd murder. The Nichols murder on video looked at least as awful and violent as that of Floyd. Maybe the arrests so soon after the murder? Maybe most just didn't perceive racism. (Plus it's unimaginable that another DA wouldn't file charges.)
I tend to dislike the 'woke' verbiage of systemic racism and white supremacy. I think there is some poor reasoning and/ or co-opting of language. One interlocutor on Twitter said he couldn't imagine Nichols' assault happening to a white person, though, which rings true to me. I'd love to see ways to enhance economic opportunities for all the poor and won't complain too loudly if I must pay more taxes to do that.
Thanks! Yes, I dunno about the lack of marches. I suspect it's a combo of it being black cops and that the DA jumped on it so fast. — White guys do get beat up by the cops but in general it seems non-white guys are beat up more (even taking other factors into account).
Excellent article, Carl! Definitely maps on to what a lot of my fellow students are doing in terms of research - I can think of a number of projects my lab has done examining unconscious bias and sympathetic nervous system activation in police encounters, and I know many of the people in the Law & Psych program are looking at bias in jury decision-making, as well.
I feel better and more extensive training is maybe the one that jumps out to me the most - I was shocked by how little seems to be required in some precincts and on a first impressions level, it seems completely backwards. Given what police are tasked with and the kinds of decisions they're forced to make (often in a very short period of time), it feels like they'd need the most training on how to effectively use firearms (and more importantly, know when not to use them). I'm very much a supporter of 2A, but I do feel some restrictions (closing the gun show loophole, red flag laws, restricting sales to the mentally ill depending on certain variables) might be helpful, and my personal philosophy on it is that while I don't think "it's the guns" or "guns kill people", and there are a number of other uses for them besides self-defense, you should still keep in mind how easy it is to end a human life with them (and therefore, only use them as an absolute last resort - i.e. use minimum necessary force, and don't go waving them around everywhere). The police should be even more aware of that responsibility imo, and I think you did a great job providing suggestions as to how we can help with that, including collaborating with mental health professionals.
Thank you so much! I'm happy that well-informed people like yourself think I made some sense. It's a giant topic and I still don't know anywhere near as much as I should.
Echoing everyone else here to say that I really appreciate this fair, thorough, and thoughtful analysis. I'll be bookmarking it to share next time I find myself in a conversation or debate in which it might be useful.
Personally, my intuition says that the only real effective solution we have is economic. I don't know exactly what that specific solution is, but as you cover here, it's clear that people who are economically secure do not often commit violent or deadly crimes.
Thank you very much! I wish I had specific economic solutions too. Of course, as with everything, it'll involve a lot of different solutions (I just hope we find them!)
Good piece. It is a pretty much a universally acknowledged matter of fact that every interaction with the police is fraught with danger no matter what your race, color, or creed.
I'm going to write what will probably end up being a fairly lengthy comment. This is because this seems like an essay written by a basically reasonable person that actually cares about the issues and is misinformed in some ways. I hope it's taken in that spirit.
I'm just going to kind of go down the essay and respond as stuff pops up.
As a minor note, the neologism "police violence" shouldn't just be used without examination. The exercise of the state's monopoly on violence is the most basic legitimate function of the police. An organization that doesn't or isn't supposed to exercise violence can be valuable in many ways, but it's not the police. Catastrophizing the actual reason that the police exist is not a healthy approach to the subject.
Regarding MPV (and keeping in mind the above note regarding the term!), I think it's a mistake to just uncritically accept their numbers. MPV (and fatal encounters) basically count any fatality within a quarter mile of a cop as a "police killing".
So for example I just went to MPV's "see the data" link and scrolled through for one where the cause was listed as "accidental" and found this:
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.houstonchronicle.com%2Fnews%2Fhouston-texas%2Fcrime%2Farticle%2Fhouston-police-car-hits-man-during-call-17696131.php
A guy is walking in the street at night and a squad car hits him. That's technically "killed by police" but it's not really what people think of when they say "police violence" right? Is this truly "mapping police violence"?
Scroll down another few entries and you find this guy, who was in ill health and most likely was high on cocaine and who went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance. What are the chances this guy lives if the cops DON'T help him get in the rig and instead he's allowed to just run around until he tips over? Is this "police violence"? Did the police kill this guy?
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2023/01/06/body-cam-footage-released-after-dallas-police-say-man-died-in-custody-after-cardiac-arrest/
That's two examples of extremely questionable inclusions just by scrolling through the most recent 20 or 30 entries on their table, right? One of my favorite examples of an inclusion - I can't remember if it was MPV or FE - where a driver crossed over the center line of a 2-lane road and struck a cop going the other way, killing both drivers, and that was counted as the police having killed someone!
The overall point being that you can use those places as data sources but their data shouldn't just be credulously accepted as a far accounting of "police violence."
Regarding statistics about number of OIS proportionality, for years and years and years I've been mystified by the comparison to crime rates. It's not completely without value but it seems to reach for a level of abstraction that's not really necessary. Each level of abstraction you add also creates opportunities for people to play little games with interpretation.
Most people would prefer that police generally use force - especially lethal force - in a defensive manner. If that is in fact what's happening, then you would expect to find a higher rate of lethal assault ON police officers in the US, right? Well, it just so happens that the FBI publishes a report on Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA). LEOKA is part of UCR and UCR is a mess right now, so the most recent LEOKA I could find was 2019:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019
The formatting isn't especially friendly, but here's the table for race/ethnicity of known offenders in the felonious murder of LEOS from 2010 - 2019:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-42.xls
Some interesting facts:
1. That's a total of 537 officers killed in a 9-year span, and those are just cases tracked by UCR (incomplete) and of the UCR cases, only the ones where offender is known. If you expressed this as a rate per 1k officers it would be some multiple of any comparable European country, and that rate would still be lower than the ACTUAL rate.
2. 97% of the offenders were male, which generally lines up with the percent of people shot and killed by police being male.
3. 37% of the offenders were black, which is actually a HIGHER percentage than the percent of people shot and killed by police being black (roughly 25%).
Table 116 is "Law Enforcement Officers Assaulted and Injured with Firearms, Knives, or Other Cutting Instruments":
https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-116.xls
That's a further 1,031 officers shot or stabbed during that time period, and again this is a floor. The actual number will be higher.
Next look at Table 129:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-129.xls
Of those 1,031 incidents, the offender is known in 903 of them. The percent of those offenders that were black is again 37%, and again this is HIGHER than the percent of persons shot and killed by police.
"But still," you may say, "that's only about 1,600 cops murdered or shot/stabbed in a decade, why are cops shooting and killing 1,000 people annually?"
Well, take a look at table 85:
https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-85.xls
That's 22,088 firearms assaults in that 9 year span (always remember: this is only a partial accounting! The actual number is higher!). 22,088 incidents where someone shot, shot at, or pointed a firearm at a police officer. 2,454 such incidents per year, averaged out. 10,008 "knife or cutting instrument" assaults, or 1,112 per year. 81,166 assaults with "other dangerous weapons" (bats, rocks, screwdrivers, etc) or 9,018 per year. 436,630 assaults with "personal weapons" i.e.: hands, feet, biting, etc. 48,514 assaults like that per year. And at least one or two cops get beaten to death most years! Or if you get knocked out or incapacitated your opponent can take your weapons!
These are not hidden, arcane facts, right? This is just publicly available information. And I can not stress this enough: these are lower than the actual numbers. These tables have between 9 and 12k agencies reporting, but the US has about 18k agencies.
Why do US police shoot and kill so many people every year? Because we're assaulted with lethal force so frequently!
That's it! That's what causes it! That's why there is NO AMOUNT of "accountability measures" that will substantially reduce that number because overwhelmingly police are using lethal force in response to a legitimate lethal threat.
The "slave patrols" thing is just dumb abolitionist rhetoric mindlessly repeated by people who overwhelmingly live in safe neighborhoods. It's a very clear example of Rob Henderson's luxury beliefs. It's a status symbol.
Regarding the 2007 incident with Chauvin: I think it's a mistake to just assume that you've got a full and complete version of the event. My read of DC's behavior during the Floyd death is that he believed GF was making a BS claim of medical distress to avoid jail, and further that it was going to work. He already had an ambulance coming before they even put GF on the ground, he was going to have GF transported to hospital and write the report and move on to the next call. He let his frustration with incarceritis and bystanders override his judgement, training, and policy and failed to put GF in the recovery position or monitor his vitals prior to ambulance arrival (as he was required to do by training and policy).
FWIW I also believe that DC could have done everything right and the bystanders would have perceived everything exactly the same way. Bystanders generally have no understanding of anything that's happening.
All of that to say: it's hard to know how much of the 2007 complainant's perspective is accurate. If he got disciplined for it he probably screwed some stuff up, but cops are human beings, they're going to screw things up sometimes. You can't just fire a cop every time they screw something up because you will very quickly have 0 police officers.
People also routinely lie (both on purpose and on accident) about their police contacts, make stuff up, don't understand things, etc. One of my perennial frustrations is that the same people who say "oh, police lie, you have to be suspicious of everything the police say" exercise actually zero skepticism of any claim of police misconduct, despite all of the obvious incentives to lie about the cops.
My favorite was the lady whose boyfriend was probably cheating on her and blamed his weekend absence on a false arrest and the girlfriend just accepted the story as true and posted a tearful youtube video about it.
Elijah McClain is one of the really tough ones. It's pretty clear to me that he was just a sweet kid who panicked and my heart aches at his death. At the same time it's way, way, way more complicated than your paragraph acknowledges.
The police in question were responding to a 911 call that alleged vaguely suspicious behavior, somewhere between "suspicious" and a welfare check. They found the correct person from the call and when they attempted to make contact he behaved exactly like Malcolm Orr:
https://youtu.be/7Qq3dXfzvdw
When they tried to physically restrain him he immediately fought, and fought HARD. He made an active effort to try to take an officer's gun - like he got his hand on the gun and tried to get it out of the holster. Watch the BWC and then ask yourself: if Elijah McClain had been able to, would he have killed those officers to get away?
I think the answer is absolutely yes, he would have. Not because he's a bad person or murderous but because was completely consumed by blind panic. He would have done anything to get away.
It is in that context that the officers used a Lateral Vascular Neck Restraint (LVNR), which was NOT illegal and was NOT prohibited by policy. LVNR is practiced in BJJ and MMA studios every day in this country. It's actually extremely safe, it has a much lower propensity for injury than basically any other force option, it works regardless of clothing, temperature, drugs, emotional state, etc.
https://aztroopers.org/enews/force-science-study-on-vascular-neck-restraint
LVNR is a technique that would - and has - ABSOLUTELY save lives because it ends the fights that result in death. McClain is actually an example of this. Once the fight was ended due to LVNR they secured him in cuffs and moved him on to his side in the recovery position and he kept fighting because he had lost rational control.
McClain was even aware of this! The cops told him "stop fighting" and he responded "I can't!" That's WHY they got medical there. Even when he overloaded his entire body with lactic acid, causing him to vomit, he STILL kept struggling. This is exactly the kind of scenario where someone fights until their heart stops beating, which is why the medics dosed him with ketamine.
The problem is that the medics gave him way too much ketamine, and that killed him.
Again - the death of Elijah McClain makes me heartsick. I got into cop work to protect people like him. But what are the cops to do here?
They responded to a 911 call regarding him. They found him. He immediately fled from the police, and when they tried to detain to investigate further he immediately fought, to include trying to take an officer's gun. Even if the medics hadn't killed him with a ketamine overdose, I would prefer that he not be subjected to the panic and struggle of the fight, right? But literally the only way that I can see to avoid that is the following sequence of events:
1. Police receive the 911 call.
2. Police locate the subject of that 911 call.
3. The subject flees from police contact.
4. Police just let him flee.
That's it. That's the only way this is avoided, and that has tradeoffs too. You the essay writer here are evaluating the McClain detention with perfect hindsight, whether you realize that or not. You're going "given that the police knew that he was a gentle weird kid who played violin for kittens, why would they detain him?"
But they didn't know that. Most of the time, the guy that immediately flees from the police and then fights isn't a panicked kid. If I received that original call, I'd be thinking most likely someone on meth, maybe doing some car prowling, there are a lot of options. This is the hard question that very few people actually make even the slightest effort to grapple with, right? The STANDARD MODE of police criticism is to use perfect hindsight.
In the real world police are responding to scenarios with deeply imperfect information, subject to the limitations of human perception. Then, months or years later, attorneys and activists and journalists dissect decisions from the comfort of their armchairs with the full array of facts available to them, watching videos with the freedom to pause on a single frame to cogitate for minutes or hours at a time on a moment that passed in the literal blink of an eye.
And the funny part is that journalists are also humans and also make mistakes, right? You said the LVNR used on McClain was illegal, but it wasn't. Not only was it legal, it was actually reasonable and appropriate and it immediately ended a fight that could have dragged on for another 5 or 10 or 15 minutes, or resulted in a 10-cop pigpile with much more elevated risks of injury or death.
The cops trusted the medics to administer a reasonable dose of ketamine but they didn't. And all of that is a much more complicated story than "evil police used an illegal chokehold to kill an innocent teen." It's just that the more complicated story is the true one, while the simple story is false.
What I would also ask you to consider when you write things like "The stories are endless and the grim problem of civilian deaths remains." is the following:
The stories of police deaths are also endless, it's just that no one really cares about those. How many people know about the following story:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/illinois-police-officer-pleaded-life-was-fatally-shot-gun-prosecutors-rcna10875
There exists BWC video of Rittmanic helpless, begging for her life before she's executed by Sullivan. Think about any of the most viral police UOF incidents of the last two decades. Do any of them - and I mean this sincerely - do any of them approach that level of depravity?
How many truly awful or illegal homicides were committed by police in 2022? 5? 10? 15? 20? 50?
I have yet to see anyone even start to suggest anything even beginning to approach allegations of 50 illegal police-caused homicides in 2022, but let's just take that as a number. We'll assume that for every viral case there's 10 or 20 cases that don't get reported on.
In that same year, 2022, there were 74 police officers murdered in the US according to ODMP:
https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2022
Why do I bring that up?
Because it's my view that even in the most aggressively anti-police interpretation of the facts, cops pay with our blood and lives for our mistakes much more often than the population at large.
None of this is to say that police are perfect, right? This is only to say two things:
1. Police are human beings.
2. The story that cops are broadly cavalier with the safety of citizens is just false. It's not true.
And keep in mind that even someone who is actively and regularly engaging in numerous crimes great and small will maybe have 10-20 police contacts in a year, and they can basically eliminate those contacts by curtailing their criminal behavior.
A police officer has a full time working life that's nothing BUT police contacts, and we can't do anything to curtail them! We just have to work 40+ hours a week, 52 weeks a year, and either make it to retirement or quit.
Regarding training, I will again refer you to the earlier section of this essay regarding assaults on LEO. Training is all well and good, but the low hanging fruit of "police violence" reduction have been plucked. "Better training" will not meaningfully reduce police UOF because almost all UOF of all levels is a reasonable and proportional response to the resistance faced.
"Besides crime rates, one possible answer is training. American police are probably undertrained, getting far less training than their European counterparts."
These statements and charts are generally dishonest and false. I'm not necessarily saying that you're being dishonest - the chart seems to be sourced from some organization, and that organization is playing games. The most common game played is to find some tiny 3-cop department in rural Alabama and claim that it's representative. They also routinely pretend as if educational requirements to become eligible for licensure don't exist and further that FTO doesn't exist.
I can not stress enough how very dishonest that chart is. It is trash. Sincerely.
You then make a factual error:
"Training varies widely between police departments in the United States, both in hours and quality. Two of the Minneapolis cops who watched while George Floyd was being murdered were rookies fresh out of the academy who had only trained for 16 weeks."
This is not true. Lane and Keung were in the cadet program, which takes new hires with no LE experience or education and trains them all the way through MN POST board requirements AND MPD specific requirements. They had ALSO both recently completed FTO, a 5-month program ASSUMING you don't get extended. The idea that they had 16 weeks of training is clearly incoherent if you just looked at their hire date in January 2019:
https://conandaily.com/2022/07/21/thomas-lane-biography-13-things-about-ex-cop-involved-in-george-floyds-arrest-in-minneapolis-minnesota/
If they had only 16 weeks of training, how is it that they were "fresh out of the academy" 72 weeks later?
What has happened is that you weren't aware of the difference between the MPD cadet and recruit academy and you weren't aware of FTO and you didn't take the time to double check your priors, right? The MPD recruit academy, BTW, is intended for new hires that have passed the MN state POST board requirements for licensure. This typically requires a two year associate's degree followed by completion of a "skills" program.
Here's an example:
https://hennepintech.edu/academic-programs/emergency-and-public-service/law-enforcement/index.html
That two year program will of course be deliberately ignored by the "police in the US only need 5 minutes of training!" crowd. Because they're dishonest.
I agree that our urban departments are understaffed. I especially liked the "cops per homicide" ratio from this MIT paper:
https://direct.mit.edu/ajle/article/doi/10.1162/ajle_a_00030/112647/THE-INJUSTICE-OF-UNDER-POLICING-IN-AMERICA1
"Militarization" is largely a nonsense term. Journalist and author Radley Balko is a dishonest hack that's made a career out of catastrophizing policing because libertarians loathe police, although it's funny that this has made him a darling of the crazy left (I'm not saying that's you, just that's a fact about Balko).
The reality is that cops have been quietly learning from past failures since professionalized police forces were created. Complaints about "militarized" police are just kind of free-floating complaints about vibes rather than substance. And of course everyone hates "militarized warrior police" right up until the very second that something goes wrong, right?
Were the cops in Uvalde over militarized hyper violent warriors? Or was there a different problem there?
Where are the complaints about militarized warrior police when it comes to this incident?
https://news.stlpublicradio.org/education/2022-10-25/st-louis-police-urge-vigilance-around-mental-health-following-mondays-school-shooting
The basic problem is that it's not a substantive criticism of any particular law, policy, or anything else. It's a shallow, unfalsifiable complaint about appearances. People don't like the color or style of the equipment, cops shouldn't wear helmets when being pelted with bricks, people don't like the names of the units, whatever.
I agree SCORPION is a dumb name, but the name didn't beat Nichols to death. Any urban department is going to need a specialized unit that targets specifically violent offenders, and all the research shows that in fact they should have such a unit! Violent crime is concentrated among small cadres of core offenders and it's further concentrated in small geographic areas. It is literally best practice to target those groups and places with a specialized unit.
It's ALSO true that specialized units tend to create bubbles around themselves. They're isolated from broader agency culture and specifically because they target and repeatedly confront the most dangerous offenders they draw particular personalities. Police department administration needs to be very careful with who gets appointed to those units and good leadership is key.
The MOST SENIOR cop on the Nichols scene was hired in 2017 (and even finding that basic fact required looking through a zillion dimwitted thinkpieces about the event). There were FIVE COPS, members of a specialized unit, on a t-stop that went to a foot chase and then to an use of an extremely high level force and not a single Sergeant was in sight?
I'm on the suburban version of a specialized unit (I left my violent urban police department in late 2020) and our Sergeant is there for most of our arrests. WHERE was the supervision for these junior cops?
Why are COPS the only people asking that question? Well, because everyone else is distracted by nonsense about "militarization" or the name of the unit.
Police stations in the US are fortified because of stuff like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qG6JwoxIdko
And stuff like this:
https://www.apmreports.org/story/2020/06/30/what-happened-at-minneapolis-3rd-precinct
"It’s possible charges would not have been filed in the Tyre Nichols case if Memphis had not in 2022 elected a progressive District Attorney, replacing a hardline Republican incumbent."
This is complete nonsense. I don't say this to be rude (although it is, sorry) but it's just nonsense. They beat a man to death on video in 2023. Derek Chauvin was always going to get charged, the only thing all the rioting and statements by politicians did was give him good grounds for an appeal.
"They are frustrated by the endless stories of abuse at the hands of cops."
Well, that is a problem, isn't it? Sadly the police don't really have much ability to do anything about it, do we?
On many occasions in my career I've walked into the middle of huge street brawls of 10-20 people with just myself and 1-3 other cops, broken up the fight, and arrested people with guns right as the guns were coming out. I've personally prevented shootings, shootings that may have been murders. Robberies that may have turned into rapes. I've been assaulted. I've been within miliseconds of being in a gunfight before more cops arrived and the suspect decided to toss the gun and flee on foot instead.
Basically when the cops save a life, or risk our own lives to use less force than authorized to effect an arrest, or restore order to a chaotic scene with little to no injury to anyone - none of that will make the news, ever. It will never be a statistic. When an officer COULD legally shoot someone but resolves the scenario without doing so, that video will never be seen. When an officer is executed with her own gun as she begs for her life, that video will never be seen.
But the entire media establishment is on a 24/7 hunt for the slightest whiff of police misconduct. Videos are edited, context is removed, ignorant commentary added, video is resurrected over and over years later without context as if it just happened. Riots happen because a man is shot for "holding a bible" or a sandwich or whatever and when it turns out that it was actually a gun the record is never corrected - and how would it be?
In the US, GOOD police work is not only never seen, if anyone TRIES to show it, it's often concealed. On those rare occasions when it is seen, that's "copaganda." All allegations of police malfeasance are breathlessly amplified for outrage clicks.
"If every cop in America underwent extensive diversity training the police would still be killing too many people."
Again. Look at the LEOKA stats.
Do you want to reduce the number of people killed by police? Sincerely? Then literally your only options are to not have police or to reduce the rate of lethal assaults on police.
That's it.
"Sometimes force is necessary—American cops can’t go unarmed like British bobbies—but the emphasis should be on de-escalation."
"Deescalation" is treated like a magical spell from Harry Potter, but it's not.
What deescalation can be done here?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ-jkQs3EvQ
Here?
https://youtu.be/O789MrHjDhc
What if police in the US are actually already routinely deescalating extremely violent, armed confrontations and it's just never reported? How would you know? Is "police resolve violent armed confrontation peacefully without any injury to anyone" a compelling news story? Will it get people outraged?
"A rich country should do better with its police and for its citizens. We have lost too many men like Tyre Nichols"
It is March 1st and 7 police officers have been murdered so far this year. Have we also lost too many men like Darnell Calhoun, Gonzalo Carrasco, or Sean Sluganski? Or is that an ok number? Do we have any worries about the training or systems that lead to those deaths?
My point here (as always) is not that the cops are perfect. But actually given the violence and crime that we're handling we're doing pretty god damn good.
Human beings are fallible and imperfect and this country needs to develop the ability to address those failings and imperfections without immolating itself. Incremental improvement and learning lessons from the past is slow, hard work but it's work we should be doing. We need to stop with the lazy, reductionist takes about "warrior cops" or whatever and actually do some sober, factual analysis and we need to acknowledge that even with perfect systems sometimes people are going to do bad, wrong things.