Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Police Killings: Why We Must Keep Counting
Guardian Editorial
Sunday, January 31, 2016
The Guardian
At the beginning of 2015, the
Guardian began a grim task – to record the death of every person killed by
American police officers – for a simple reason: astonishingly, the United
States government publishes no such record.
Even as protests and calls for
systemic policing reforms continued after the killing of Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Missouri, the US Justice Department’s best data scientists could not
provide a figure for how frequent officer-involved deaths had become. The
government scientists had been starved of funding [1].
Even as Barack Obama pressed his
post-Ferguson policing task force on “the need to collect more data” for
“appropriate oversight”, the FBI director admitted his agency’s oversight
system was broken: “It’s ridiculous that I can’t tell you how many people are shot
by police in this country right now,” James Comey said earlier this year.
The Guardian did what the US
government by its own admission had failed to do for its own citizens: we
counted.
"The rate of death for young
black men was five times higher than white men of the same age"
We counted 177 deaths of young
black men – 15% of all police killings this year, despite African American
males making up just 2% of the country’s population. We counted 246 deaths of
people about whom mental health issues had been reported – eight of which were
officially ruled a suicide. We counted 124 deaths caused not by gunshot but by
some other use of force – including Freddie Gray, who died after sustaining
injuries in the back of a police van in Baltimore, where six officers face
criminal trials in 2016 in connection with his death.
We have counted 1,134 total deaths
at the hands of American police in 2015. That is approaching three times
greater than the 444 “justifiable homicides” logged by the FBI’s entire team of
government researchers for all of last year.
Just as the police killings have
multiplied, so has the powerful protest movement against them – only with too
little meaningful change. More than 15 police officers have been charged with
manslaughter or murder this year – including one in Virginia first brought to
widespread attention by the Guardian, one in Chicago that led the firing of the
police chief and the institution of body cameras, and one in South Carolina
that, like so many other encounters caught on video this year, went viral. But
there seems to be no justice in Cleveland, where the mother of 12-year-old
Tamir Rice must now live with the reality of an officer who killed her son
going free. And there is no peace for the families of so many people –
predominantly men, disproportionately black – whose lives do not register even
as a number.
There can be no progress without
more comprehensive context.
“It is unacceptable,” James Comey
said in October, that “the lead source of information about violent encounters
between police and civilians” has become the media – specifically naming the
Guardian and the Washington Post, which began publishing a database documenting
only fatal police shootings one month after The Counted was released to the
public.
“That is not good for anybody,”
Comey said. “It’s ridiculous – it’s embarrassing and ridiculous.”
He was right. Indeed, the ongoing
absence of appropriate official oversight is an affront and is no longer
tolerable.
So the FBI announced plans [2] to
overhaul its failed undercount, promising to publish a wide range of data
beyond shootings and in relative real-time, with a system resembling The
Counted. But that count will remain voluntary for police, and thus grossly
incomplete once again. What if only a fraction of the 18,000-odd police
departments in the US have the decency to report themselves, when officers kill
the people they are sworn to protect?
The Justice Department’s data
scientists have restarted their count, too, as the federal government deemed
arrest-related deaths once again meaningful enough statistics to log alongside
lawn care and peanut consumption. But what if this open-source system, which
researchers say could pick up where the Guardian might stop counting, misses
significant incidents? What if the world never knew that somebody had died?
Senators Cory Booker and Barbara
Boxer have called for the US Congress to mandate that all police departments
report when they are responsible for someone dying – which they should. Boxer
has called the Guardian’s work “the wind at our back”. But their legislation
has languished in the Republican-controlled Senate, as Comey and other Obama
cabinet members talk without measurable facts about a “Ferguson effect” of
viral videos and anti-police protests leading to more crime.
America’s crisis of police violence
is one that those at the highest levels of power have only just begun to
comprehend. If the public cannot have a basic understanding of the scale of the
problem, how can we begin to properly grapple with the solutions? What good is
a body camera if hundreds of uncounted lives do not officially matter?
These unanswered questions compel
us to directly hold the government to account by continuing to monitor deaths
in parallel with the Obama administration’s two promised official efforts. The
Guardian will begin a new count of people killed by US police for 2016,
tracking the lethal use of force every day with the help of the community. We
will not stop until we are satisfied that the federal government is doing its
job, and that we no longer have to do it for them.
Links:
[1] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/mar/18/police-killings-government-data-count
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/09/fbi-launch-new-system-count-people-killed-police-officers-the-counted
[2] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/dec/09/fbi-launch-new-system-count-people-killed-police-officers-the-counted
- See more at: https://portside.org/print/node/10523#sthash.NUNjyabn.dpuf
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
No comments:
Post a Comment