Militarized police and the deadly use of force by cops are
certainly
making headlines in the wake of the
shooting death of unarmed teen Michael Brown in Ferguson,
MO, and the
homicide-by-NYPD-chokehold death of Eric Garner, but
Breitbart.com‘s Warner Todd Huston thinks both the left
and the right are making too much of it:
It seems to be taken for granted by both the left and the right
in America today that incidents of police brutality are growing
even as crime itself is falling. But are they? At least one expert
says no.It is certainly a foregone conclusion to the left that police
brutality is on the rise. Any look through the world of liberal
opinion will find many voices saying that police brutality is
growing in America today.From the right it has also become a favorite theme among
libertarians that police brutality is growing, even out of control.
The libertarian website Reason.com is constantly publishing stories
about America’s increasingly militarized police forces and tales of
police brutality.
Reason.com has indeed regularly published stories on the
growing
militarization of police, which include
training tactics, the proliferation of
war equipment handed over to local police departments by the
Department of Defense, and the exponential
increase in SWAT team deployments. These are quantifiable
facts.
Less quantifiable is the evidence Huston presents, in the form
of a quote from a
Wall Street Journal article where John Jay College of
Criminal Justice professor, Maria
Haberfeld, states, “There is no escalation in the
use of deadly force. What we are seeing is a proliferation of
cellphones and cameras.”
It is perfectly reasonable to suggest the ubiquity of cameras
and social media have made the public far more aware of police
misconduct and thus helped foster the impression of a growing
epidemic of brutality. But neither Huston nor Haberfeld cite
any national statistics or study to back up the claim that the use
of deadly force is not on the rise, because they can’t. There is no
national database, nor anything close to resembling one, which
details the use of deadly force by police.
Former Reasoner and author of “Rise
of the Warrior Cop,” Radley Balko,
examined why that is in 2012:
Both private police groups and the FBI keep close statistics on
the number of cops killed and assaulted while on the job. What you
won’t see is a slate of stories about the number
of citizens killed
by police in 2012. Those data just don’t exist
at a national level. Here’s
the New York Times, back in 2001:
“Despite widespread public interest and a provision in
the 1994 Crime Control Act requiring the attorney general to
collect the data and publish an annual report on them, statistics
on police shootings and use of nondeadly force continue to be
piecemeal products of spotty collection, and are dependent on the
cooperation of local police departments. No comprehensive
accounting for all the nation’s 17,000 police departments
exists.”
The problem is that while the 1994 law requires federal
government to compile data on policing shootings, there’s no
requirement that police departments actually provide them. And so
most don’t.
Even if the use deadly force is not increasing, the
unwillingness of police departments to provide comprehensive
statistics on the use of force increases the perception that it
is.
University of St. Louis criminologist David Klinger, a
former cop himself, has argued that greater transparency by police
departments regarding the use of deadly force could make for better
relations with their communities and
sees nothing strange about the public taking special note of
the deaths of fellow citizens at the hands of police:
“(Americans) are drawn to police shootings not just because they
are violent acts but also because they are the most dramatic
instance of government doing battle with the bad guys that threaten
us. And we are repulsed by them not only because of the damage they
inflict but also because they are the ultimate form of government
intrusion.”
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