Shot by Cops and Forgotten

In the past, I didn't buy into the Black Lives Matter message because I didn't like their poster child, Michael Brown.

But recently I've become convinced that BLM was right, and the thing that changed my mind was the story of Daniel Shaver. Google it and watch the video if you haven't seen it yet -- it might change your mind, too.

He wasn't armed, hadn't committed a crime earlier that day, didn't disrespect the officers, complied with police orders, and had the same skin color as the policeman who shot him. And they executed him anyway.

A jury then acquitted his killer of all charges.

I don't know what to think anymore.

I'm trying to picture a nation in which public and cops, both armed-to-the-teeth, coexist within a culture totally smitten with violence, yet by some magic they don't end up shooting each other a lot. I can't do it. No-one can without being ideologically severed from physical reality.

One of these states of affairs must prevail for the US, from most to least likely (and least to most desirable): (1) it continues to lose more of its people than any comparable wealthy nation to violence, (2) it hugely reduces the amount of ready-to-hand weaponry (on one side or both), or (3) it diminishes its love affair with violence. The last can nearly be discounted, as it is by now too deeply embedded in the US's economy, history, culture and ideology. (2) seems like a distant prospect for similar reasons. (1) would be a safe bet.

> VICE News examined both fatal and nonfatal incidents to determine that cops in the 50 largest local departments shot at least 3,631 people from 2010 through 2016.

But then right below that they give a graphic which covers the same period and breaks the shootings down into fatal (1378), nonfatal (2720), and unknown (283). That's a total of 4381, or 750 more than the number give in the paragraph above the graphic.

Also, note that they say their data is for the 50 largest departments. They say 1378 fatal shootings for 2010 through 2016. Add in the 283 unknown shootings because they might have also been fatal, and that gives 1661 fatal shootings.

It's interesting to compare to the data from killedbypolice.net. KBP data starts 2013-05-01, and here are the fatal shooting counts by year:

  2013:  779
  2014: 1114
  2015: 1220
  2016: 1165

That comes to 4278 in 43 months, or 99.5/month. Compare to Vice's 1661 in 84 months, or 19.8/month.

Vice says their data covers about 148k police officers serving 54 million Americans. That's about 1/5th of all police officers [1], so it looks like the ratio of fatal shootings per month from all departments to those from the 50 largest departments is about the same as the ratio of number of offices to number of office in the 50 largest departments. That suggests there isn't much difference between large departments and small departments.

[1] Based on numbers I Googled, although I was only able to find 2008 numbers.

I am concerned with the proclivity of police to "empty the clip" into an individual. At some point they seem to just make the switch to a violent video game without remorse or empathy for their actions. Shouldn't this be something that should be asked in gauging a police prospect before "arming" them with a license to kill?

Cops have a scary, dangerous job. There are all kinds of people just waiting to harm them, and now they are politicized.

I've known several cops, they are without exception good people who would never harm someone intentionally. (I do believe there are a few bad ones, but I've never met them.)

I can't wait for this issue to become de-politicized again. Cops are totally undercompensated, under appreciated and deserve much better than this.

As horrid as this problem is, it's also an extension of a much wider and more pervasive problem. One that is hugely corrosive to the foundational principles of rule of law and guarantees of liberty that this nation allegedly holds so dear. That problem is, for lack of a better term, street justice. In principle our criminal justice system works like so: an allegation is made, evidence is collected, a prosecutor decides to press charges, a defendant is placed in custody, a fair and speedy trial is performed, a verdict is made by a jury of peers, and if a guilty verdict was attained then the defendant simply serves out a sentence kept away from society at large with no "cruel or unusual punishments" performed. There are problems with this system but it has a lot of merits. However, today basically every aspect of this system is corrupted and destroyed beyond belief.

Relevant here is that the police, with effectively the tacit approval of the public at large, have created an alternate criminal justice pipeline. One where punishment is not merely meted out at the end of a fair trial, but rather one where every aspect of the system itself is a punishment. Even in the best case scenarios being arrested and detained is a traumatic experience. Indeed, the police have often used just this alone, with or without any charges, as a means to punish. In more common worse case scenarios the police use brutal force and the most extreme dehumanizing and degrading methods of bringing someone into custody. You will be injured, you will be humiliated, you will be reduced to inconsequentiality within the meat grinder of the criminal justice system. It's designed to wear people down, to reduce their resistance, to serve as a punishment all on its own.

And in the very most extreme examples the system extends this system of impromptu extra judicial justice dispensed by police officers to street executions. Failing to comply with police (regardless of the details) is a capital offense that can result in immediate summary execution. Running away from the police (regardless of the details) can be met with immediate summary execution. Talking back to the police can potentially result in immediate summary execution. Being a person of a body type or an ethnicity that causes a police officer to fear for their life can result in immediate summary execution. And for every example of a police officer being fired or, rarer still, brought to justice for these heinous acts there are countless more of police officers experiencing no consequences. For every objectively unjust street execution where the police kill someone "innocent" there are many more where the police unjustly execute a "bad guy" (rapist, thief, what-have-you) in a way that is much harder to prove as objectively unjust.

And that's the core of the problem. The police are out on the street and they have tremendous power in their hands these days. The power to dispense "justice" through their own volition on the spur of the moment, even including executions. So the police spend a lot of time working on how to systematically categorize people on the street into the "good guy" or "bad guy" buckets. They don't have the luxury of letting the justice system figure it out, they are the justice system. Worse, they revel in it. Once the "bad guy" bit is flipped, everything is on the table, including summary street execution. For people with power fantasies this is a gold mine. And they've been living it out for years, decades. The system today is designed to encourage, coddle, and facilitate officers who act this way. If you are rough with the "bad guys" you're a hero. If you are aggressive on the street you will make your quotas. And so on.

Today in the America of 2017 it is very difficult to argue with the fact that we live in a police state. It's a hard truth to swallow but every indication is that it's the case. The vast majority of executions (by maybe 10-20:1, statistics aren't even collected) happen extra-judicially by police, on the street. One third of all Americans killed by strangers are killed by police. One third. Legally, civilians have the right to resist unlawful police orders, even up to and including using lethal force against the police if necessary. As a practical matter however, that's a fiction, on the street civilians have no rights, you can be executed for the slightest infraction if you are unfortunate enough to come into conflict with the police in the wrong circumstances.

P.S. Consider how much the popular culture has bought into this conception of the police. Look at the lionization of the "rogue cop" working outside the rules but doing what's right to take down the bad guys (Dirty Harry, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard). Look at the acceptance of allowing the law or norms of human decency to be bent or broken. From Jack Bauer to Batman our "heroes" are willing and able to use torture to extract information from the "villains", and we applaud them for it. All of this is just tacitly accepted by society without even the blink of an eye, we don't think "oh, but Jack Bauer isn't REALLY a good guy if he uses torture", we barely even care. And all of this absolutely does filter in to how the police are allowed to operate within society.