Police and Racism: National Perspective

It is simply impossible to deny the existence of police brutality, racism, and unjust treatment in the United States. When looking at cases such as Freddie Gray or Rodney King, most decent people are appalled at the extreme, racially motivated use of force against these individuals. The police officers responsible for these atrocities do not deserve the badge they wear or the authority they carry. That being said, rare and isolated instances should not reflect as a whole on the thousands of police officers that responsibly carry out their duties every day for the betterment of society.

Statistics, without context, can often appear condemning to the police of the United States, touting shocking numbers that would easily convince a reasonable person that minorities are subject to the most extreme racism. One such article which was written by German Lopez for Vox which states that "Black people accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population." While this statistic is not false, it is misleading. The FBI reported in 2012 that of the 9,390,473 arrests made that year, 2,640,067 of those arrests were of African Americans. After the numbers are crunched it appears African Americans account for 28 percent of all arrests made in 2012.

While the Vox article is correct in saying that 13 percent of Americans are black and 31 percent of police killing victims were African American, it omits the critical detail that African Americans have a higher crime rate than other groups, thus leading to more inevitable casualties at the hands of cops. It is not an inherent trait for African Americans to behave more criminally, rather is because of the long history of systemic racism, segregation, Jim Crow Laws, ect., from the past which has forced them into a more toxic situation.

A counter-argument could be made against the previous FBI statistics saying that the numbers are skewed, saying because the cops have some racial biases that they do not arrest as many white people as they should, and arrest too many black people. To counter this one can look at the FBI's 2013 report on homicide rates in the United States. It says, "An examination of data regarding the offenders for whom race was known showed that 53.6 percent were black, 43.9 percent were white." Again suggesting that there is a higher crime rate among black people than white people. Homicide, unlike arrests, is a much more difficult thing to claim that the statistics are stacked against black people because of racism because in a homicide, there is much less subjectivity involved and more concrete evidence against the perpetrator, in general. Granted, this evidence is not perfect because it requires one to make the assumption that there is a direct positive relationship between homicide rates and crime rates, as well as a correlation between crime rates and police shootings. However, under the given circumstance it is a reasonable connection to draw.

This article's intent is not to solely defend the police, nor to condemn one group. It is only meant to suggest that there are more important details, variables, and statistics beyond what is often highly publicized. This article did only cover a small number of details in this vast and complex topic. However, when assessing all the facts and statistics such as the ones given here, it becomes much more difficult to claim systemic racism in US police forces.