Stop trying to scare black people: Police are not the enemy

© Provided by Washington Examiner Rodney Wells, center, stepfather of Tyre Nichols, listens to speakers at a prayer gathering at the site where Nichols was beaten by Memphis police officers, and later died from his injuries, in Memphis, Tenn., Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

In the wake of the awful Memphis, Tennessee, death-by-cop case, two things can and should happen simultaneously.

First, to the extent that otherwise inexplicable disparities show police more often mistreating people of color than they mistreat white people — and the disparities exist, but they are marginal, not in overwhelming disproportion — then every effort must be made to eliminate those disparities.

Second, and more importantly, it is long past time for the media and entertainment industries to stop spreading the pernicious message that most nonwhite people have reason, in general, to fear the police. That message is not just flagrantly false but also deadly. The reactions to that message cause far more damage than the ethnically disparate treatments themselves.

The examples of this flagrantly false message, this obsession, are astonishingly numerous, but let’s take just one from the Hillyer house’s typically five-years-behind-the-times entertainment viewing. The episode of the otherwise entertaining and inspirational TV hospital drama New Amsterdam we watched last night featured nonwhite youths wrongly shot by police, with multiple comments portraying it as an everyday occurrence. Worse still was the over-the-top subplot wherein a black female doctor desperately wanting a baby literally said she wondered if it’s unethical to “bring a brown child into this world” because, well, racist police officers. As another doctor ludicrously called it, one must consider “the dangers of walking around this country in brown skin.”

This mendacious narrative is a cancer on our society. As columnist Jason Riley (who happens to be black) wrote in the Jan. 31 Wall Street Journal, voluminous statistics show that the serious dangers from bad police to anybody, very much including black people, are almost negligible. Contrarily, less aggressive policing causes dangers much greater, by many degrees of multitude, to the ordinary public, and especially to nonwhites, than do the dangers from police maltreating suspects. When police retreat, criminals advance, and victims multiply — especially in “communities of color.”

To add to Riley’s data: Each year, this nation sees between 50 million and 60 million enforcement-related interactions between police and citizens. In the six years from 2017 through 2022, from those more than 350 million interactions, 91 unarmed black people were killed by police. Fifteen of those were in the middle of mental health crises — which, sad as they are, can manifest in ways that make police feel the suspect is a serious threat.

In comparison, 124 unarmed white people, 34 of them involved in mental health crises, were killed by police in the same period. The raw numbers for whites were higher, although on a per capita basis, the percentages of black people are marginally higher.

Simple arithmetic, therefore, shows the dangers of death-by-cop are minuscule. In fact — true statistic! — the number of deaths by lightning each year is almost exactly double the unarmed-death-by-cop incidents.

Of course, most complaints about police behavior involve incidents that don’t result in death. But every time one expands the category — any deaths by police, any violence by police, any threatened violence by police, or whatever — the results are consistent: extremely low incidence overall and only mild (especially adjusting for other legitimate factors but no need to get into the weeds) disparities disadvantaging nonwhite people.

Indeed, among the massive amounts of data compiled by the Department of Justice, this interesting tidbit stands out: Year upon year, only 1% of citizens with police contacts report even the slightest bit of police misconduct — and not all of those complaints are valid, either.

There are still too many bad police, even if most officers do a good job. Of course we should be concerned about this and try to fix it.

No, black people in America are not being massively targeted for police abuse. And yes, the police do far more good than bad for people of color. “Walking around while brown” absolutely is not a perilous undertaking in the United States, at least not if the threat is the police. But when brown-skinned people are taught irrational fear of police that the statistics do not justify, tragedies due to crime increase. Let’s stop the false fearmongering and work on building bonds of trust.

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Tags: Opinion, Beltway Confidential, Memphis, Police, Racism, Opinion

Original Author: Quin Hillyer

Original Location: Stop trying to scare black people: Police are not the enemy