US Law Enforcement Kills with Impunity,
especially when the victim’s black:
Genocide of Black Youth
@mdkhuggins (Twitter)
(Not to be quoted without
permission)
Summary: ProPublica[1] recently
concluded using FBI statistics on “justifiable” civilian killings by law
enforcement that between 2010 and 2012, “young black males…were at a far
greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white counterparts—[in
fact] 21 times greater….” I argue based on these same statistics that when US cops investigate another cop’s
use of lethal force it is 21 times more likely that a Black youth’s slaying
will be deemed “justifiable” than when law enforcers investigate their
brethren’s a cop’s killing of a White youth. ProPublica must have missed that the Bureau’s
definition of a cop-involved “justifiable” killing designates that a law
enforcement organization is to investigate a lethal force killing and determine
its justifiability. The Bureau’s
statistics are about an outcome of cops judging cops rather than the relative
rates of Black and White youth being killed.
US Law Enforcement Kills with Impunity
Bureaucratic
Death. As we await
the grand jury’s decision as to whether to indict Ferguson policeman Darren Wilson
for killing Michael Brown, we might ponder the FBI’s likely designation of Michael
Brown’s statistical resting place. If officer
Wilson is not indicted the FBI is likely to statistically inter Michael Brown’s
killing as “justifiable.” This occurs according to the Bureau when a “peace officer [kills] a felon…in the
line of duty [and the killing is subsequently] determined through [a] law enforcement investigation to
be justifiable….” I
am confident that if national and international media attention and relentless
protests in Ferguson, St. Louis had not derailed police business as usual, Michael
Brown’s slaying would have been immediately designated “justifiable,” no grand
jury hearing to be sure. Michael
Brown--a high school graduate about to enter community college—killed for
walking in the street rather than on the sidewalk, would have been
‘officialized as a “thug” who had
threatened a “peace officer’s” life, a
designation that is still far too likely.
Recalling Trayvon Martin’s killing by neighborhood watch volunteer George
Zimmerman, I must assume that Trayvon’s slaying has already been assigned by the FBI to its “justifiable”
civilian-on-civilian” killings. The FBI’s definition of such a slaying—“the killing of a felon, during the
commission of a felony, by a private citizen” which is investigated and deemed
“justifiable” by a police organization--suggests that, given the outcome of
Zimmerman’s trial, the Bureau must have logged
his 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin as “justifiable.” With the touch of a key board all that was good about Trayvon
Martin would then be coldly erased by the all-defining label, “felon,” when in
fact the 17 year-old African American
student was killed while on his way to his father’s condo in a predominately
white Florida suburb.
Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin were killed along with countless other
Black youth between 2012 and 2014, not because they had committed a felony but
because their shooters considered young Black men ‘matter out of place.’ British
anthropologist Mary Douglas proposes this concept to signal how a perceived
culturally-polluting danger is socially protected against and the
culturally-linked processes for doing so. Whether in the US or beyond, a social
group that is considered ‘matter out of place’ is restricted in what its
members can and cannot do and how
perceived violators are to be handled.
In the case of US Blacks--where being Black is associated with
criminality and being a criminal is associated with being black[2]--the
social rituals most often used involve structuring their movements and choices[3]
and total elimination for those who appear
to violate such controls and place ‘good’ citizens in peril.
US law and FBI-defined and
implemented kangaroo-court process for excusing a killing as “justifiable,” protects
killers whether cops or civilians. The on-going
genocide of Black youth in the US and beyond is therefore not driven solely by the shooter’s personal
hatred of Blacks, although many who kill bear such feelings. Blacks are victims of America’s unstated, yet vigorously
defended, geographies of exclusion. A
product of corporate real estate ‘redlining’ and other multiple forms of de
facto segregation, these geographies of exclusion provide employment for some
to ‘protect’ the rest of us from ‘criminals.’ The ready-made, race-linked label—“felon”—justifies
lethal force against these threats to de-facto segregation. The cops and
civilians who kill those seen as ‘matter out of place’ are immune most of the
time from prosecution for their lethal actions disproportionately against poor
youth of color.
Government-linked
killers. One needs to
take seriously even the civilian killings committed by other civilians since some
portion of the “civilians” who kill have links to law enforcement. The US National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA), which is the parent organization for US
Watch[4] organizations,
“work[s] intimately with police” who train and vet Sheriff Department-registered
Neighborhood Watch organizations and their volunteers. George Zimmerman—who
killed Trayvon Martin—is said by a National Sheriff’s association spokesperson
not to have been “a member of any group recognized by [the US National Sheriff’s
Association].”[5]
Just the same, Zimmerman had close connections with Sanford’s police department.
Some
‘civilians’ who kill are actually off-duty cops guarding businesses or
non-profit organizations through a private-duty ‘detail’ usually arranged by
the officer’s own police department.
This places moonlighting cops and their occupational loyalties in a legal
no-man’s-land: Are public cops who moonlight still ‘public’ even when
working off the clock? The New Orleans’
police department’s ‘detail’ system, described in an investigation of these paid private ‘details’ as “the aorta of [NOPD]
corruption,”[6]
adds an additional layer to off-duty cops serving private interests. When I
shopped during almost ten years at a New Orleans Walgreens at the corner of Rampart
and Esplanade, an NOPD policeman sat on
a stool just inside the front door wearing his NOPD uniform and his department-issued
weapon strapped to his belt. The officer’s police vehicle sat outside in the
Walgreen’s parking lot. I wondered, if a
uniformed NOPD cop kills someone while employed by Walgreens would he be investigated
as a public servant or as a Walgreen’s
employee? Would his own police
organization assess the “justifiability” of his killing or would Walgreen’s
lawyers do so? What would be the
defining role of the courts, if such a case were ever to go to court?
US case law has expanded to address these and other gnarly
problems associated with police moonlighting[7]
but when push comes to shove, neither the state nor the local governments that
pay law enforcers’ official government salaries, nor the private security
companies that hire moonlighting police, nor the businesses and non-profits that
hire them, want responsibility for investigating and assuming the economic and
legal blow-back resulting from a seemingly
off-duty killing. Perhaps due
to the problematic legal status of cops’ moonlighting in private security some US police
departments have banned their officers[8]
from doing this.
Government agents who kill. For 40 years I have studied police killings
in Brazil and during 20 of these I have been qualified in US immigration courts
as an expert witness for Brazilian victims seeking US asylum from their government-linked
police and death squad violence. Knowing that the US State Department, Homeland
Security, and immigration court judges take seriously the involvement of another government’s police and related agents
in the past persecution of an asylum seeker, it seemed my responsibility to do this
for US law enforcement’s victims as well.
But because there is an absolute absence of US government statistics on all lethal force killings by law enforcement—‘justifiable’
and ‘unjustifiable’--it is impossible to accurately monitor law enforcement
killings of civilians, whether carried out by on-duty or moonlighting
cops.
The
FBI falls short. By publishing only US law enforcement’s
“justifiable” killings, the Bureau could be sending the message that ‘our law
enforcers only kill when absolutely necessary.’ Unfortunately, the Bureau’s one-sided publication
of law enforcement killings follows no recognized system of research analysis
and presentation. To do so the FBI would
need to collect and publish statistics on “unjustifiable” civilian killings by
law enforcement as well as the “justifiable” ones. And the Bureau would need to include for each
kind of a killing the numbers of victims, according to race, ethnicity, gender,
and age, that fall into each
‘justifiability’ category. Such data would
permit a better assessment of the
relative vulnerability of different population groups to being slain by law
enforcement.
When
definitions promote outcomes. But there is yet another problem with the
Bureau’s research methods: for over
sixty years it has employed a circular
definition of a “justifiable” law enforcement killing. Whether
explicitly planned or not, by failing to place the qualifier alleged before the word felon in its description of the victim who
is ‘justifiably’ killed, the Bureau lends its substantial power to the
well-worn law enforcement practice of racially profiling groups considered dangerous.
And by failing to identify which felony
can excusably trigger a “peace officer’s” use of lethal force, the Bureau gives
the blue brotherhood the power to come up with the ‘felony’ that most excusably prompts a cop-involved killing.[9] In
most cases this involves the shooter’s claiming that a Black youth with a gun,
knife, or razor threatened the cop’s life.
Increasing media reports of US law enforcement
officers’ seemingly legitimate use of lethal force against Blacks, lead me to
wonder whether the FBI, criminal prosecutors, and the courts remember important
research from their ‘Psychology 101’ courses?
Scholarly investigations going back 67 years[10]
have found that “merely thinking about Blacks can lead people to evaluate their…behavior
as aggressive, [and] to miscategorize harmless objects as weapons, or to shoot
quickly, and, at times, inappropriately.” Recent scholarship finds that “thinking of
crime can trigger thoughts of Black people.” Putting the two sets of findings together suggests
the unsettling conclusion that if you’re Black you’re criminal and dangerous and
if you’re criminal you’re Black and threatening.[11]
Such an ante-facto imagined social danger easily renders Blacks ‘matter out of
place’ with lethal consequences for many.
Definitions
shape research conclusions. The
FBI’s definition of a “justifiable” killing by law enforcement influences what
state, county, and municipal law enforcement agencies send--or not—to the
FBI. Although, frankly, not many law
enforcement organizations actually send anything to the Bureau on the
“justifiable” law enforcement killings.
Indeed, “fewer than 5 percent of the
nation’s 17,000 law enforcement agencies currently send [the Bureau this]
information.” [12]
In any case, what ends
up in the Bureau’s Uniform Crime Report statistics on “justifiable” civilian
killings by cops structures the conclusions available to those analyzing these data. The respected investigative journalism
organization ProPublica—full disclosure, I have proudly donated to them--recently
interpreted the FBI’s data on “justifiable” killings by law enforcement to say that
between 2010 and 2012, “young black
males…were at a far greater risk of being shot dead by police than their white
counterparts—[in fact] 21 times greater….”
Although ProPublica skillfully analyzed a great deal of FBI data on law
enforcement-related “justifiable” killings, they likely forgot to look back at
the Bureau’s definition of how such killings are determined.
ProPublica might recall
that the FBI’s data only allow a researcher to generalize about what happens to
black and white victims respectively when cops investigate another cop’s killing
of a civilian. Saddled with the same insufficiency of
FBI information as ProPublica faced—that we only know about “justifiable” civilian
killings by law enforcement not also the “unjustifiable,” ones—I propose the alternative
conclusion that when US cops investigate another
cops’ use of lethal force, it is 21 times more likely that a Black youth’s slaying will be deemed
“justifiable” than when cops investigate the killing of a White youth.
Black
genocide. There is every reason to believe that in the US,
Black male youth--especially poor ones between their teens and late 20s--are
killed at higher rates than comparable White youth. Yet US government statistics
make it impossible to convincingly explore and propose this finding. Suffice it to say that Black youth are in
serious peril of being killed by law enforcement every time they leave their
house. Their slayings by cops, as I have
noted, are also disproportionately likely to be deemed “justifiable” by a law
enforcement organization.
Public policy researchers Guy Adams
and Danny Balfour--drawing on the work of Holocaust scholar Zygmunt Bauman[13]--remind
that “legal procedures and accounting routines were essential to…removing Jews
from German Society.” Once Jews had “ceased
to exist as members of a political community,” they could then be killed without
repercussions. These facts are as troublingly
true for the Blacks in the US today, where those who kill them usually enjoy almost
total impunity from prosecution in part due to America’s deep addiction to
‘risk-managing’ police brutality rather than eliminating it.
Underwriting
Police Brutality. Managing Black youth within and out of US geographies of exclusion, especially given
our country’s stated ethos of exercising fair and equal justice for all, requires state and local governments to ‘risk-manage’
the possible social and political impacts of their law enforcers’ often very
visibly carrying out this exclusion by violating victims’ civil rights. I argue
that law enforcement impunity from prosecution for committing civil rights
violations—with lethal force killings the most serious of these—is fostered outside
public scrutiny through a symbiotic relationship between corporate liability
insurers and state and local US governments.
This mutually-beneficial interdependence is the centerpiece of a ‘risk-management’
mind-set that shapes how US state and local governments protect themselves against
their own state and local police and sheriffs.
“Risk-management”
enables a government to hide cops’ civil rights violations such that its consequences
most of the time will be obscured from local taxpayers and civil rights groups. The mantra driving government ‘risk-management’--that
‘brutality is an expected part of a
cop’s job,’ so ‘settling police brutality lawsuits is just “god business,” not
an admission of guilt—ends up enriching corporate insurers and sustaining a public
belief that government is of and for
“the people.” Of course, the usual targets of law enforcement violence know
full well that civil rights violations are borne disproportionately by them--America’s
minority poor and lower middle-class. It is less known that America’s most
disadvantaged tax payers pay a larger share of their family incomes toward
funding the risk-management that hides
their twice-over victimization.
[1] ProPublica. 2014. “Deadly force in Black and
white.” http://www.propublica.org/article/deadly-force-in-black-and-white
[2]
See discussion p. 7 and footnotes 9 and 10
[3] KW
on school segreg, NOLA for renting, etc, redlining, doug McAdam for, new jim crow
[6] Laura Maggi.
2011. “NOPD corruption fueled by system of paid,
private details, federal officials say.” Times-Picayune,
March 18. (http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/03/system_of_paid_private_details.html).
[7] See Michael J Gilbert, David Schichor. 2001. Privatization of Criminal Justice: Past Present and Future. UAE: Mixed Media Publishing
[8] Hong, Peter Y. (2006). “Police Panel Concerned Over Officers Moonlighting as Pis.” Los Angeles Times, March 15. (http://articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/15/local/me-private15)
[9] Examples of this can be seen in
Ferguson, Mo. today (Daily Kos. 2014. “Earliest police report from Ferguson
is released and conflicts with Darren Wilson's testimony leaks,” October, 29. (http://m.dailykos.com/story/2014/10/29/1340042/-Earliest-police-report-from-Ferguson-is-released-and-conflicts-with-Darren-Wilson-s-testimony-leaks?detail=facebook), and for New Orleans’ Danziger Bridge killings (Times Picayune Staff. 2011. “Danziger
Bridge shootings cover-up was brazen, former NOPD detective testifies.”
Times-Picayune, July 12. (http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2011/07/danziger_bridge_shootings_cove.html)
[10] Allport, G. W. and Postman, L.
J. (1947). The psychology of rumor. New York: Russell & Russell.
[11] Eberhardt, Jenifer et al. (2004). Seeing Black: Race, Crime, and Visual Processing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological
Association, Vol. 87, No. 6, 876–893.
[12] Phillips,
Victoria L. 2014. “What surgery and
police have in common: Both kill a disproportionate number of black men.” The Washington Post, October 21. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/10/21/black-men-die-disproportionately-at-the-hands-of-surgeons-and-police-officers-heres-how-to-fix-both-professions/)
Guy
B. Adams and Danny L. Balfour.
2004. Unmasking Administrative Evil. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, p. 52
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