The optics of former Baltimore police officer Arthur Williams wildly punching Mr. Dashawn McGrier in the face is antithetical to the prevailing narrative of urban police violence: white cop uses force, often deadly, on a black body.
But numerous underpublicized studies have argued that black-on-black police violence is just as, if not more, likely to occur than the racially-charged storylines which emanated from American cities like Ferguson and New York City and went on to capture the world’s attention.
Unfortunately, many of the documented instances of intraracial police violence don’t appear to result in an injured eye socket and broken jaw – as was the case with Mr. McGrier after being hammered by Mr. Williams, the 25-year-old who resigned a day after a video of the incident went viral and who has since pleaded not guilty to assault and misconduct – but rather a fatality.
Indeed, in June of this year, more research was published to, again, assert that the disproportionate killing of black suspects is not driven by white police officers.
“While African-Americans are disproportionately killed by police, they are killed at much higher rates by nonwhite officers than by white officers,” claims the study which was led by Mr. Charles Menifield, who serves as Dean of the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University-Newark.
The study further asserts that the disproportionate killing of African-Americans by police officers does not appear to be driven by micro-level racism. Rather, it is likely driven by a combination of macro-level public policies that target minority populations and meso-level policies and practices of police forces.
Mr. Menifield’s analysis of all the confirmed uses of lethal force by police officers in the U.S. in 2014 and 2015 is congruous with what ProPublica found when they looked at federal data on fatal police shootings from 2010 to 2012: 78 percent of the people African-American officers shot were Black, compared to 46 percent of the people killed by White officers.
An article in The Pittsburgh Courier last year cited a 20-year-old study which found that the intraracial kill rate was 32 per 100,000 Black officers, while the interracial kill rate was 14 per 100,000 White officers.
The U.S. Department of Justice investigated deadly force by the Philadelphia Police Department and released its findings in early 2015, shortly after a fleeing 26-year-old black male was fatally shot by a white rookie cop. It found, among many things, that the threat-perception failure – which means that the officer mistakenly believed that an unarmed suspect had a weapon – for White officers and Black suspects was 6.8 percent. For Black officers and Black suspects, the threat-perception failure rate was 11.4 percent.
The aforementioned facts seem to have little influence over the debate on police-community interactions and how to mitigate police violence. For example, Philadelphia’s mayor has lamented the homogeneity of the PPD and both he and the police commissioner wish for greater diversity.
But available evidence doesn’t dictate that White officers, which make up the majority of most police forces, are causing the greatest harm. Moreover, there are no statistics to suggest that the addition of nonwhite officers reduce citizen complaints or fatal police killings.
According to Mr. Menifield’s study, while White citizens make up only 61 percent of the total U.S. population, roughly 75 percent of police officers are white.
“For this reason, we expect that most police killings of all races will be done by white officers; however, we do not expect that white officers will use lethal force on black or other minority suspects disproportionate to their share of the police force,” the study states.
It’s clear then that the issue of (fatal) police violence isn’t as black-and-white as many of us have been led to believe. It’s also evident that simply hiring men who look like Mr. Williams of Baltimore, in an effort to reach a quota, isn’t the answer.
Then what is the answer?
According to the June 2018 study, “fundamental macro-level policy changes, as well as to meso-level organizational practices, are necessary to address the root causes of racial disparities in police killings.”
Thanks for reading! Until next time, I’m Flood the Drummer® and I’m Drumming for Justice!™