Lives That Matter
July 8, 2016 (need to update data)
I’ve been conflicted all day about my response to last nights’ murders in Dallas. Not conflicted about my personal feelings which are that the shooting of officers Thompson, Zamarripa, Krol, Smith and Ahrens was awful and tragic and sad. But conflicted about the response to the shootings. I’ve seen many posts calling for peace and prayers and equating the deaths of Mr. Sterling, Mr. Castile and the five officers. Posts touting the fact that the officers were killed because of their profession just as Mr. Sterling and Mr. Castile were killed because of their race or saying things along the lines of “these are all senseless deaths” or “not all police are bad and not all African Americans are thugs.” This all sounds and feels good — to have a point of commonality, a place to build from. But it’s a false equivalency. On an individual, human level comparing a life senselessly lost to another makes sense. But on a large-scale, institutional level the two are completely different. To have real change and real progress we have to get to the bottom of the problem in America and I don’t believe the real problem is that people are targeting police (they aren’t). Instead it’s racism.
Here are the reasons why I will not be hashtagging All Lives Matter or Blue Lives Matter.
Because of course they do. It does not need to be said because literally no one is arguing otherwise. It is only minority lives that have been devalued since the inception of this country (was going to say black and brown lives, but that would ignore Japanese Americans being placed in internment camps, and I won’t do that). Black Lives Matter is a point of focus, not exclusion. The clear implication being black lives matter TOO. We as a nation have to be reminded of this fact because we are constantly told and shown that black and brown lives don’t matter or don’t matter as much.
How do we know that blue lives matter and black ones do not? Well the law tells us so. Let’s look at Illinois, my former home. Just the attempted murder of a police officer carries the same punishment as the actual murder of a regular person, 20 to 60 years in prison. The actual murder of a police officer will lead to an automatic natural life in prison. A police officer’s life in numeric term is worth more than a citizens. (See Illinois Complied Statutes).
But maybe some will argue, this sentencing disparity is to discourage attacks on officers because their job is uniquely dangerous. It is a dangerous job, but not nearly as dangerous as being black in America. The current homicide rate for a black person in America is 19.4 people out of every 100,000. That is 12 times higher than every other developed country. The homicide rate for white Americans is 2.5 out of 100,000. (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/black-americans-are-killed-at-12-times-the-rate-of-people-in-other-developed-countries/)
Then let’s look at police fatalities. In 2015 there were 123 on the job police fatalities and this number includes car accidents, accidental shooting, illness etc… In 2014 there were 122. That’s nation-wide. In fact since 1791, there have only been 20,789 law enforcement fatalities. These numbers are from National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund (http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.html?referrer=https://www.google.com/) and the Officer Down Memorial Page
Then if we separate out the regular fatalities from the homicides, the number drops significantly. Per the FBI Uniform Crime Report in 2014 only 51 of those 122 fatalities were the result of felonious incidents (https://ucr.fbi.gov/leoka/2014/officers-feloniously-killed?fbclid=IwAR2fJY2jLcffhEN6x719yTZzPZgZXZmMZ7EbWZTR9FABhjsug04szX7RIMA).
Numbers of course only matter in context so proportionality must be taken into account. Per the Bureau of Justice report summarizing FBI data in 2012 there were 1.07 million full time officers in America, which includes 750,000 sworn officers (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/nsleed.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1JAwX3RAQc317GaoS9r7TQuYidTIV0klj7nLPGf9w4PPCTPtmuUjf5_2I). 51 felonious incidents deaths out of 1 million officer is numerical proof that it is four times more dangerous to be black in America than to be a police officer.
Let’s look at the response. I found no specific statistics on the clearance rate for officer homicides, so we’ll compare black victims to white victims. Here there is also little national information about clearance rate based on race. However, the national homicide clearance rate in general is 64%. (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hus11.pdf?fbclid=IwAR3w2ouYj0nvzG0XZZcOYr09aWB1sWwvIlkF39QncHL4Lhu_2AGV7EelofI).
While the FBI either doesn’t collect or just doesn’t publish clearance rate information based on race of victim, they do collect information about “missing offender characteristics” (i.e. details about the suspect that are missing such as race or gender.) If a suspect was identified, let alone charged, we should have all of the characteristics, so these missing characteristic stats are clearly part of a larger category of unsolved crimes. Offender characteristics are missing in 31% of all homicides, 22.6% of homicides with white victims and 39.9% of homicides with black victims. On those numbers alone far fewer murderers of black victims are being brought to justice.
More detailed information is available based on clearance rates per city. In 2014 an investigation into New York homicides showed that while the clearance rate for white homicides was 86%, if the victim was black the rate was 45%. (https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/forgotten-record-murder-rate-cases-unsolved-article-1.1566572?fbclid=IwAR1QPn2U997ybGy6X_y8aQcaDGPd79RR4rZ86tzVr3rPM2ihA8QJlIPPNfE). Similar results are found in LA County. An investigation from January 2000 to December 2010 found that half of all unsolved murders had Latino victims and black people, who accounted for 34% of all homicide victims, had a clearance rate of only 50%. By contrast white people accounted for 11% of all LA homicides and only made up 6% of the unsolved cases. In Houston, the same pattern. 54% of Latino murders go unsolved and 40% of black murders. (http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/01/30/want-to-get-away-with-murder-pick-this-kind-of-victim/).
I could no doubt dig and find the same sorts of statistics for rate of conviction and length of sentence.
And for this next, we need no statistics, you only need look at your news feed. When an officer is shot, there is universal condemnation, a call for vigils, for peace. When a black man is killed by the police, there is instant character assassination of the victim — did he have a criminal record, was he aggressive, he should have complied more, he shouldn’t have talked back, he shouldn’t have struggled, he shouldn’t have had a gun even when its legal to do so, he shouldn’t have committed a petty misdemeanor, he shouldn’t have committed a traffic infraction, he shouldn’t have followed directions and reached for his ID.
The converse is also true. When the murderer is a police officer — we shouldn’t rush to judgement, wait until the facts are in, he was just trying to do his job under stressful circumstances, the video doesn’t show everything, not all police are bad. But if the killer is black he’s a thug, a domestic terrorist, a monster, an animal. There is no waiting, only the rush to judgement. And even worse, he somehow represents us all. The actions of one man somehow invalidate a peaceful protest, invalidate the feelings of justifiably angry people who nonetheless have not and will not retaliate, invalidate a movement that he wasn’t even a part of.
I’m sad today, just like I was yesterday. The loss of an innocent human life should always be mourned and the officers who were slain did nothing to provoke the attack. But I’m also sad at the change in the focus of the conversation. It felt like the country was on the verge of a breakthrough or at least on the verge of realizing that a breakthrough was needed at last.
We have to keep pushing, we have to continue the conversation about race and police brutality. We have to because it’s real.
We have to because Black Lives Still Matter today.
