Watching the initial protests over the death of George Floyd by police, a revolting real-life scene brought to us by smart phone videos, I turned to social media and wrote an adage about myself: Still back the Blue. That’s because there are a half million police officers in America, and their jobs are not easy even for the well trained. And I wrote Still Back the Blue because just a few years ago, lest we forget, Dallas police officers were gunned down by a sniper during a Black Lives Matter rally, a national shock that brought President Barack Obama to the city to eulogize the slain officers at the nationally televised funeral.
When I was a news reporter, the cop shop featured somber yet approachable police chiefs and sheriffs and was a routine beat for stories on crime, criminal activity and the occasional homicide investigation. Then with a career change to public school teacher, I found again myself befriending the police, a visible presence on practically every campus. Reporters, teachers and police work with the same folks. This is a statement not meant to be insulting. Crime occurs a lot in poor neighborhoods where nonwhite disenfranchised families are perpetual victims. A professional, therefore, working within poor communities must convey a disposition of kindness, compassion with a calm level head.
That is not the professionalism captured by cell cam video of a policeman holding his knee over the neck of Mr. Floyd, who police apprehended for allegedly trying to pass a fake bill at a Minneapolis convenience store. Upon seeing the viral video, our nation held its collective breath along with Mr. Floyd as the scene lasted more than eight minutes, and the handcuffed suspect on his belly told law officers he could not breathe. Autopsies report Mr. Floyd died not from a cracked windpipe—which emotionally is what we saw—but from a heart attack and/or asphyxiation brought on by pressure applied to his neck. But no one can wipe away the imagery witnessed via cell cam: a white officer holding his knee on a black man, already under arrest and handcuffed, until he died. We also saw three other policemen standing at the scene and doing nothing to stop the unjustified deadly arrest. The live video did capture nearby citizens warning officers that Mr. Floyd can’t breathe. Then it appears he died right before our eyes.
The past two weeks of angry protests in U.S. cities and around the world against deadly police brutality specifically involving African Americans (and even the recent unjustified shooting death by former and wannabe cops) have drawn together tens of millions of people. Protest signs read “Stop Police Brutality.” Agree. “Stop racism.” Agree. “Abolish the Police.” Can’t agree with that. And “Defund the Police.” Wha? Protesters are up in arms over not one, not two, not three, not four, not five … but in the past few years too-many-to-count deadly police apprehensions of and encounters with unarmed African Americans—some caught on phone cameras by citizens.
What’s going on?
Anyone can research statistics on police use of deadly force. They are kept by the FBI and more recently by The Washington Post. The Post’s report is called Fatal Force and shows that 1,028 people were shot and killed by police in 2019. About the same number of people have been killed by police in the U.S. every year since 2015 when the Post started collecting data. Almost half of police shootings were of white people, a fifth were Hispanic, and a third (30 percent) were blacks.
However, the report finds blacks are shot and killed disproportionately than whites considering racial demographics (more whites than blacks, still a minority in most cities and in our nation’s total population). Since 2015, the total number of whites killed by police was 2,416 (population 197 million) while 1,265 blacks (population 42 million) were killed. The report also noted 889 Hispanics and 797 other/unknown race/ethnicity were killed in police shootings. About 20 percent of those shot by police had serious mental illnesses. Most alarming, police body cameras were not worn or were unavailable on most of the shootings, according to Fatal Force.
Of those shot and killed by police, 321 were unarmed. More than 3,000 of the deceased had a gun. Some had toy guns: 180. Most killed by police were men (5,130) and 235 women. The statistic is low for those shot while fleeing the police, but 3,375 were not fleeing officers. This may point to another problem for the police.
Last year was the deadliest for police shootings since statistics were recorded by the newspaper. Still, each year marked close to 1,000 police shooting deaths. So far in 2020, the figure is 429.
Standing trial
On the flip side, police killed in the line of duty in 2019 was 89: half by criminals during a crime. In 2018, the figure was 144. In one year, 64 officers were shot and killed and an additional 21 were killed by ambush. The statistics for police killed in the line of duty are: 164 in 2015; 171 in 2016; 152 in 2017; and 150 in 2018.
Police arrest ten million people a year. Does that cast perspective on what’s going on? In dealing with crime, police are not encountering the most upstanding citizens. Let us not forget that the police deal with criminals. They expect to deal with people who break the law.
But ten million arrests, and less than one percent deaths, should show that 99 percent of police do their jobs well instead of the opposite. They protect and serve the good citizens and try to catch the bad guy. We pay them to do this because otherwise each of us would be left with taking the time to stalk and investigate someone who may or may not have caused a crime against us. Every one of us cannot play cops with no training and assume we’ll remain calm when we want to impose our own justice and shoot to kill.
There are close to 687,000 law officers, and the figure is down quite a bit from just a few years ago. The racial makeup of our nation’s police force is 77 percent white and 13 percent black. By city, the figures, from 2013, were:
Los Angeles: white 35 percent, black 11 percent, Hispanic 43 percent
Dallas: white 54 percent, black 25 percent, Hispanic 18 percent
Houston: white 45 percent, black 23 percent, Hispanic 25 percent
New York: white 52 percent, black 16 percent, Hispanic 26 percent
New Orleans: white 38 percent, black 58 percent, Hispanic 2 percent
Chicago: white 52 percent, black 25 percent, Hispanic 19 percent
Baltimore: white 50 percent, black 40 percent, Hispanic 7 percent
Philadelphia: white 57 percent, black 33 percent, Hispanic 8 percent
Minneapolis: white 80 percent, black 9 percent, Hispanic 4 percent.
Police racial demographics often do not represent community makeup. Usually the number of white officers is more than the demographic while black and Hispanic officers come short of matching the real community racial and ethnic demographics. And all of that should not matter. By now every American should be able to deal with people as individuals and not with racial, ethnic and socioeconomic prejudices and bigotry. That is practically rule number one and has been in this country for decades. That is our community and nation’s expectation. Yet again another unarmed black man is shot or killed by a police officer who is usually white. Americans want those incidents—whatever the reason—stopped NOW, and they are no longer willing to sit idly by when practically every day another citizen cell cam shoots a police encounter that in the public’s eye should never have ended in death.