VIOLENCE IN AMERICA — AGAIN
Sutcliffe, editorial on race and police
Five more names have been added to the long list of American police officers killed in the line of duty. But the casualties in Dallas are only one side of a troubling ledger.
When Alton Sterling and Philando Castile died earlier this week, their names and particulars were also added to a meticulously maintained electronic database. Sterling, who was shot by police officers who had pinned him to the ground outside a store in Louisiana, is now the 559th person on the list. Castile, who was killed by an officer while behind the wheel of a vehicle in Minnesota, is No. 563.
The database is updated whenever someone is killed by the police or any other law enforcement official in the United States. But unlike stats about slain police officers, the data is not compiled by the U.S. Department of Justice or any other branch of government. The records are kept by The Guardian, a British newspaper that has established the most thorough public accounting of the names, demographics and stories of the 566 people (as of Friday morning) who have been killed by U.S. law enforcement so far in 2016. (The Washington Post also keeps a database.)
As the American Civil Liberties Union points out, the U.S. government keeps statistics on an extraordinary range of topics, from the number of unprovoked shark attacks to the population of pigs and hogs on American farms. But it keeps no data on the number of times civilians have been shot by police officers.
This wilful blindness about the crisis contributes to the escalating distrust between law enforcement officials and the communities they serve. It puts civilians — and officers — across America at risk as the shocking and disturbing events in Dallas demonstrated.
It’s not as though there haven’t been previous opportunities to confront the issue. In 2014, following events such as the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., U.S. President Barack Obama launched a task force to examine policing in America. One of the group’s recommendations was to collect accurate data on the frequency of fatal shootings. At the time, only 224 of America’s more than 18,000 police departments reported such incidents to the federal government.
But in the 14 months since, no new rules have been put in place to compel law enforcement agencies to comply with the recommendation. So the job is left to a British newspaper and members of the public who assist with its crowdsourced project.
According to The Guardian’s data, the number of people killed by the police in the U.S. in the first 24 days of 2015 is almost identical to the number killed by officers in England and Wales over 24 years. The number of fatal shootings in one month in the U.S. is the equivalent of 20 years of similar incidents in Australia.
The facts are stark, but the issue is incredibly complex. In many individual cases, the officer’s actions were justified, but the sum total points to a disturbing systemic problem. The prevalence of guns in America is an enormous factor; it’s far more likely that a police officer knocking on a door or pulling over a vehicle in the U.S. will be confronted with a weapon than in Canada, the U.K. or Australia. It’s something an American officer thinks about on every single call.
Of course, it’s not just that more fatal shootings by police happen in America. It’s that they happen discriminately.
In 2015, according to The Guardian, young black men were nine times more likely than other Americans to be killed by police officers. Visible minorities comprise 37 per cent of the U.S. population, but 53 per cent of the unarmed individuals fatally shot by police.
If it weren’t for cellphone videos, many of these events wouldn’t have become known to the public.
When there is no trust between a community and the officers who are sworn to protect it, the result is chaos. The first casualty of war is the truth. When law enforcement doesn’t seek accurate information, it’s no wonder some Americans think their lives don’t matter and that the police are fighting a battle against them.