Police Killings by
the Numbers
Peter Kaufman
If there has been one dominant, sociologically-relevant
story in the news lately,
it has arguably been the treatment of African Americans
by the police.
From Michael
Brown in Missouri to Eric Garner in Staten Island to
the McKinney, Texas,
swimming pool incident, there is a heightened awareness,
an ongoing conversation,
and a growing sentiment of anger about how race
influences policing.
As increasing attention has been devoted to this social
problem, and more questions
have been raised about it, there have been calls for
greater accountability from law enforcement.
In particular, many people want to know how many citizens
are killed each year by police officers. Unfortunately, because the United
States government does not keep a systematic record
of these deaths, this data has been either unavailable or
unreliable. That is, until now.
An ambitious project was started recently by the U.S.
branch of the U.K. news organization,
The Guardian. The project, appropriately called The
Counted, is an attempt to document
every person killed by law enforcement in the United States
this year.
Using their own reporting as well as crowd sourced
information,
The Counted database offers details about every police
fatality in 2015,
including the victim’s name, age, race, gender, location,
cause of death,
and whether or not they were armed.
The Guardian recognizes that The Counted is “an
imperfect work in progress” and as such,
is regularly updated and revived. Still, since its launch
in the beginning of June,
The Counted has garnered quite a bit of attention.
Members of Congress have pointed to this new project
as an important momentum builder
in the efforts to create a permanent national database of
police killings.
Sociologists should take note too. Despite its
imperfections, this database offers us a wonderful tool for both research and
teaching. Although it is ostensibly being created to answer the question
of how many people are killed each year at the hands of
the police,
The Counted is also a generator for important
sociological questions.
Knowing about these lethal encounters is one thing; it’s
equally important to understand
why they occur, how they occur, and whether they occur in
other nations.
The question-generating aspect of The Counted was
illustrated recently in one of the first articles that The
Guardian published about their new project. Jamiles Lartey, a
reporter for the news agency (and, full disclosure, a former student of mine),
used the current data from The Counted
to make some interesting comparisons between the United
States and other countries:
Police in the U.S. fatally shot 59 people in the first 24
days of 2015.
In England and Wales combined, 55 people have been shot
by police in the past 24 years.
In the first five months of 2015, police in Stockton,
California fatally shot 3 people.
In Iceland, there has been one fatal shooting by police
in the past 71 years.
More people have been shot and killed each week by the
police in the United States this year
than are typically killed by German police in an entire
year.
Police in the U.S. fatally shot 97 people in March 2015.
In Australia, 94 people were officially reported being
killed by police during the 19 years
between 1992-2011.
Police in California fatally shot 72 people in the first
five months of 2015.
In Canada, the average number of fatal police shootings
per year is 25.
Antonio Zambrano-Montes, who was found throwing rocks at
cars in Pasco, Washington,
had 17 bullets fired at him by police in his fatal
shooting.
In Finland, police officers fired 6 bullets during all of
2013.
There is no doubt that these differences between the
United States and other countries are startling. But we must keep in mind that
these comparisons are based on raw data that merely describe
what is happening; they do not tell us why this
is happening. If you are thinking sociologically
about these comparisons, and about the database in
general, then you are probably
finding yourself flooded with sociological questions.
Here are some that came to my mind:
What is about the culture and social structure of places
like Finland and Iceland that make it so rare for police to resort to deadly
force? How do the police and the public interact in these countries? What are
the defining characteristics of the relationship between the police and the
public, and how (and why) is this different than in the United States?
How did the U.S. become so much more of a violent society
than its Western counterparts? If deadly force by the police in the U.S. is
justified, on what grounds is it defended? If deadly force by the police in the
U.S. is not justified, why does it occur in law enforcement agencies around the
country?
Why is police violence drastically different in states of
comparable size such as Oklahoma (population 3.8 million and 23 people killed
by police this year) versus Connecticut (population 3.6 million and 1 police
killing this year)? Are police tactics, training academies, or law enforcement
cultures different in states with a higher number of killings or is there
something else to account for these disparities?
Whether you are a student of sociology or a social
researcher, you can mine this data to draw inferences. You can try to
decipher between probabilities
and certainties, between causation
and correlation, and between realities
and assumptions. As a catalyst for future research, a pedagogical
tool for sociological learning, and a clarion call for social activism, The
Counted database offers many possibilities. I encourage you to take a look at
this evolving website, see what sociological questions come to mind, and then
set out to provide an intellectually sound answer to your questions.
http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2015/06/police-killings-by-the-numbers.html
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