Black Lives Do Matter

Protests continue in cities across the US, demanding that the police abandon violent enforcement methods and cease discriminating against black citizens. President Trump has framed the protests as the greater danger and called on voters to re-elect the law-and-order president, himself.

It is an occasion for well-intentioned citizens to reconsider the evidence. Are black people really discriminated against by the police? The Congenial Iconoclast said “Yes” to this question in August. But every serious question deserves to be reconsidered. A thoughtful person who has one good reason to believe something should seek two reasons, or twenty.

Washington Post writer Radley Balko has done that. He has worked the police and justice beat for years, and has accumulated a list of reports and studies regarding how the law treats black citizens. Here is his conclusion:

[A]fter more than a decade covering these issues, it’s pretty clear to me that the evidence of racial bias in our criminal justice system isn’t just convincing — it’s overwhelming.

Balko summarizes nearly 200 studies and reports about all aspects of the American justice system and finds discrimination everywhere. Bias against black citizens is found in every state, in cities and small towns, in the patrol cars, in the courtrooms, in the press rooms and in the prisons. Balko’s report (click the link above) is so long that you’ll get tired of scrolling, not to mention reading his article which, is, mind you, just an outline of many articles, reports and studies.

Multiple studies show that black drivers are more likely than white drivers to be stopped by police, and more likely to be given a ticket where a white driver would get a warning. Black drivers are more likely to be arrested after a traffic stop even though contraband is more often found in white drivers’ cars.

A rigorous study of 95 million traffic stops shows that black drivers are pulled over more often during the daytime, but not at night. This can be explained one of two ways. Either a) black people drive better after dark, or b) police across America deliberately target drivers when they can see they are black. Police in affluent, suburban Carmel, Indiana issue 18 times as many traffic tickets to black drivers as to white drivers. Carmel has settled discrimination lawsuits as recently as 2016 over their targeting of black drivers.

Another study finds disparate treatment against black people in five areas of law enforcement: “seriousness of charges brought, the number of companion charges, bail-bond release decisions, the length of stay awaiting trial, and guilty outcomes.” When a black man and a white man are suspected of the same crime or infraction, the black man is more likely to be arrested, more likely to be charged with extra counts, more likely to be denied bail, more likely to be convicted, and given a longer sentence for the same crime. Possession of marijuana is illegal in Indiana for everyone, but black people who are caught with a small amount of weed are more likely to be arrested than whites caught with the same amount.

Balko’s report touches on everything that happens in the justice system from the first police contact through arrest, filing of charges, trial and sentencing. He finds discrimination at every step.

A thoughtful person who is semi-informed might believe that the different rates of incarceration are simply a result of black people — especially young black men — doing more crimes. It is no longer possible to believe that after spending sufficient time with Balko’s links. It becomes clear that the entire system is unfair.

Most Americans never sit on a jury and pay little thought to the role of juries in the American justice system. But there is discrimination in jury selection, too. Prospective jurors are called through a random lottery of voter roles. But potential jurors who are black are dismissed by prosecutors and judges at discriminatory rates. It is against the law to dismiss a prospective juror simply because of race. But it happens. According to the report linked above, one woman was dismissed because she wore tinted glasses. One man was dismissed because he attended a historically black college. Another was deemed illiterate because he hadn’t read details of the case in the newspaper. Yet others have been dismissed because of how they walked or because they chewed gum.

Balko works his way through through the entire process, and every step of the way he presents major studies shows long-term, widespread patterns of discrimination.

 Many of Balko’s sources are simple tallies of arrests balanced against the proportion of black citizens in a population. But some of the reports he cites are rigorous and scholarly. Unfortunately, “rigorous and scholarly” doesn’t always mean true and accurate.

The National Academy of Sciences published “Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings.” That report was published in August 2019. It was heavily critiqued, then revised by the authors and finally retracted in July 2020 by the journal’s editors. Normally, the correction would have sufficed. But in this case, the editors retracted the article to stop non-technical writers (mostly conservatives) who continued to cite the article incorrectly.

[O]ur work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general. To be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements.

As noted in the Epistemology section of this website, experts are often wrong about the facts or how they interpret facts. When journalists write about complex subjects they imperfectly understand, they can compound the errors in the original research.

Writers on the right (Rich Lowry of National Review) and on the left (Andrew Sullivan of New York Magazine), have argued that black arrests are proportional to their share of the population, or proportional to the rates at which they commit crimes. Both have cited a criminologist named John Pfaff to support their arguments. Pfaff has replied that their conclusions are wrong and certainly not supported by his research. Most tellingly, Pfaff notes that Lowry and Sullivan have founded their argument that race doesn’t matter in arrests and police tactics on a section of his book that is titled, “Race Matters.”

  Anyone who reads Balko’s article with eyes to see and ears to hear will be convinced that racial bias pervades the American justice system. Nevertheless, there are counter arguments that deserve to be considered.

One argument again systemic racial bias is that sometimes the officer who shoots a black person is himself black. But that is no rebuttal at all to the allegation that police departments are biased against black citizens. A black cop is a cop. A black cop can still perceive a social divide and hate the people on the other side of it. A black cop who thinks he can shoot a black suspect and get away with it more easily than shooting a white citizen is as big a problem, and just as much of a systemic crisis, as a white cop doing the same thing.

Another objection that well-intentioned people may raise is that the people who are shot, or just roughed up, by police, are often guilty of something. They conclude that, because the victim wasn’t a perfect angel, that they deserved what they got. But where police shootings are concerned, that is true almost never. Michael Brown, who was shot to death in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, probably stole from a convenience store. He should have been arrested and tried. If he was convicted, he should have been sent to jail. But he should not have been shot to death in the street.

The “He was no angel” argument becomes more persuasive when a gun is involved. But it shouldn’t. Aggressive police tactics often accelerate confrontation. That was certainly the case in Louisville when Breonna Taylor was killed inside her own home. The police barged into Taylor’s apartment on a “No knock warrant.” Taylor’s boyfriend, thinking a home invasion robbery was happening, pulled out his weapon and fired a shot. That brought a reaction of 10 or more swift shots from the police and Taylor, who wasn’t armed and had no drugs, died.

As recently as September, 2020, Police in Los Angeles shot and killed a black teenager after he had dropped his weapon. The weapon on the ground was no longer a threat to police safety. But it provided a justification to shoot, and the officer shot him. Too many Americans accept the existence of the gun as sufficient reason for the police to shoot even though possessing a gun is legal in the US. Philando Castile was a licensed gun owner, but that didn’t stop police in St Paul, Minnesota in 2016 from shooting him. The officer had asked for Castile’s license but shot him when he reached for it.

Another reason to be skeptical when a gun shows up in a police shooting is that police are known to plant weapons on the bodies after they’ve shot someone. It is a common trope on television and in movies. But it happens in real life, too.

Yet another way of disputing the matter is by arguing that police kill more white people than black people. The Washington Post has maintained, since 2015, a database of all police shootings in the US.  The total number of shootings (as of 9/14/20) is 5,624. That is a pace of more than two-and-a-half police shootings a day, sustained for nearly six years.

According to the database, the pace of police killings is constant — about 1000 each year. Most people shot by police are white — 2,555 people over the six years, compared to 1,329 black people. Why, then, ask some reasonable people, is the focus on the smaller number? And the answer is, because black people are a much smaller share of the US population. Proportionally, black people are shot by police about three times as often as white.

Again, it is easy for a “law-and-order” citizen to excuse or explain away most of the problems with policing in America by judging by their own experience. Most white people never have any trouble with the police. They fail to imagine how different life is for black citizens.

There is one last, lingering question that deserves an answer. Despite all the emotional impact, the number of black citizens killed by police is small. Of the 5,624 in the database (as of 9/14/20), only 1,329 are black. Only 1,281 are black men. In a single year, only 244 black men were killed in a nation of 330 million. And when we look at unarmed, black men killed in a single year, the number is only 13 for 2019 and never more than 36 in any year since 2015. A reasonable person could ask why such a small number should get such attention.

There are several answers. One is that the number of occasions doesn’t measure the severity of a disaster. Only four American presidents have been assassinated. But the death of Lincoln is perhaps the greatest moment of pathos in our history. Out of the forest of skyscrapers in Manhattan, just two high-rise office towers fell on 9/11. But nobody shrugs at that. Luxury cruise ships almost never sink after colliding with icebergs. But the one time it happened remains alive in memory and imagination more than a century later.

The Black Lives Matter movement refuses to accept the argument that a small number of injustices amounts to no injustice at all. Their “Say Their Names” campaign demands that the worst cases of aggressive policing not be diminished to a number.

When a climber scales a great mountain, they typically pose for a picture standing atop the pinnacle. The framing of the picture shows only a small rise of ground. But every sensible person understands there are thousands of feet of treacherous trail under the climber. It should be the same with Black Lives Matter. If the number of unarmed, black, male victims in a year is small, we should remember that hundreds were shot non-fatally, thousands were brutally arrested on weak or non-existent charges, tens of thousands were harassed, and million lived in daily fear of the police.

And then, finally, there’s the fact that black people in America have been waiting and wishing for fair treatment under the law for centuries and they still don’t have it. Each shooting reminds them that being patient and being calm and subordinate and respectful and obeying the laws can still get them shot.

One might insist that American society gives black people enough material comfort and opportunity that they should be patient and respectful of our long-standing traditions. But the country was founded on the idea that when legitimate complaints go unanswered for too long, citizens ave a right, even a duty, to push for relief from the injustice.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

What do you think? Do you believe the natural right of people to get fair treatment is, at the very least, a standard that governments ought to respect? Do you believe that people have a right to protest against unfair, tyrannical government? Do you see that, in the minds of the Black Lives Matter protesters, their cause is as urgent and justified as the cause Thomas Jefferson espoused when he wrote those words?