Not all are killers
But police officers stick together
Ask your friends what percentage of police officers kills someone in the line of duty in an average year.
Invariably, my friends estimate that every year between 10 percent and 50 percent of cops kill. Given Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates of 669,000 police officers, that would mean American police kill between 67,000 and 335,000 people annually.
This is an appalling loss of life: 67,000 is roughly 30 times the number of U.S. service members killed in Afghanistan since 2001; 335,000 exceeds total U.S. combat deaths in World War II!
You should take your chances with the crooks rather than calling the cops. These so-called “public servants” are in fact brutal killers, paid by our tax dollars. Any right-thinking person will agree that we simply have to defund the police and start over.
Fortunately, none of this is true. As my co-authors and I detail in “We can do better: Police professionalism and Black Lives Matter,” in 2015 roughly one in 669 police officers killed someone on duty. Given that police have literally billions of encounters with people and some of those people are dangerous—an estimated 90.3 percent of those killed by cops were armed—most cops are professional, at least as regards use of deadly force. Consider that some want to arm America’s 3.2 million teachers to stop school shootings. Does anyone think that only one in 669 armed teachers would kill someone in a given year?
Calling cops killers is fake news, but is widely believed for at least four reasons. First, from Dirty Harry to Harry Bosch, Hollywood created fictional cops who bravely kill the bad guys to protect society, like cowboys in the Old West and even more mythical. Some cops embrace this macho image to make their jobs seem more heroic. That can cause problems. As former New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton observed, law enforcement needs fewer adrenaline junkies and more cops who think like social workers.
Second, in living memory, cops killed many more people than presently, disproportionately Black people. NYPD’s highly professional 38,000 officers today kill about 10 civilians annually, compared with 90 to 100 a half-century ago, as John Timoney recalled in “Beat Cop to Top Cop.” No civilized person wants a return to those bad old days when anybody could be a cop and cops could do anything.
Third is social media: People now watch police brutality on YouTube repeatedly, so they think it is ubiquitous. Finally, regarding the regular media, journalists lean left ideologically. They likely sympathize more with upscale social activists than blue-collar cops. Recently both The New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer fired editors for allowing commentaries on civil unrest that offended woke reporters. Our own Tom Cotton penned the Times piece. In politically correct elite media and academia, who wants to disprove the trope that cops are racist killers? Heck, I can only write this commentary because I have tenure at a state university in a red state.
Not all of the statistics exonerate police. As my co-authors and I show, in New York and El Paso, highly professional police departments both keep crime low and avoid killing civilians; neither is the case in my former home, Philadelphia.
Further, as Franklin Zimring reports in “When Police Kill,” only one in 200 cops who kill gets indicted, with just one in five of those found guilty of a felony. Police must make split-second decisions, but it strains credibility that so few face accountability. In bringing transparency to this segment of the justice system, all of us should support Black Lives Matter.
Likewise, the horrendous killing of George Floyd by an officer with a checkered record reminds us that complex civil-service rules and union contracts keep police departments from firing their failures.
Rank-and-file cops deserve some of the blame for this. As Michael Lipsky pointed out 40 years ago in “Street-Level Bureaucracy,” like urban teachers, social workers, and others in tough jobs, cops stick together. Too many police departments value loyalty over integrity, covering up wrongdoing. As my friend Musa al-Gharbi observed in The Atlantic, sometimes honest cops who report police brutality risk their jobs and pensions while the perpetrators go unpunished.
We must do policing better, but cannot progress by stereotyping cops as killers.
Robert Maranto (rmaranto@uark.edu) is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and has served in local and national government.