U. S. ROCKED BY GRAPHIC VIDEO
A search for answers in S. Carolina
As cellphone video often is, the footage of Walter Scott’s last moments is shaky and amateurishly framed.
What it depicts, though, is clear as a bell: a white police officer in North Charleston, S. C., shooting eight times toward the back of a portly, middle- aged black man as the suspect — pulled over because of his car’s broken tail light — runs away.
Thanks to those unambiguous images, the latest in a string of highly publicized white- on- black police shootings in the U. S. leaves little room for debate about whether the officer, Michael Slager, was in the right.
Arguably, it has also called into question police treatment of black America as a whole like no such incident yet.
What that will mean for the country’s chronically strained race relations, and the future of its vast law- enforcement apparatus is not so certain.
Experts say a lack of good data means too little is known about the hundreds of incidents each year in which U. S. police kill suspects, and there is even debate about whether white police disproportionately gun down black men, as frequently alleged.
Both the root cause and solutions may lie in systemic ills; whether Americans have the patience to address those less- sensational issues amid the racially- tinged furor is unclear.
“If we point to the officer and say, ‘ You did something wrong,’ we all feel a lot better, and it’s concrete,” said Marcia McCormick, a criminal law professor at St. Louis University. “But when the problem is the system — you have racism without racists. ... It doesn’t seem as harmful, and ( is) so abstract that we have a hard timing figuring out how to fix it.”
A string of sensational incidents, including Brown’s death, has sometimes left the impression it is open season on unarmed black men among U. S. police. The deaths of Eric Garner, suffocated as officers tried to arrest him for illegally selling cigarettes on New York’s Staten Island, and Tamir Rice, a 12- yearold shot after waving a toy gun at passersby, were among the most troubling.
But few analysts are willing to guess whether the rate is climbing.
“We don’t know, because the data is so crappy,” Peter Moskos, a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former Baltimore cop himself, said Wednesday.
A federal report suggested recently, in fact, that official statistics leave out half of the police homicides yearly because of spotty reporting by law enforcement.
But one of the most- cited sources — the U. S. Justice Department’s arrest-related deaths report — offers some hint of the racial breakdown. It reported 1,215 white people and 932 blacks died at police hands from 2003 to 2009.
Factor in the differences in demographics — blacks make up just 13 per cent of the U. S. population — and that means African Americans were four times as likely to be killed by police.
Still, Moskos is not convinced that means black people are being disproportionately targeted, arguing that blacks are five times as likely as whites to kill police officers, and that much of the policing in America focuses on black street crime.
“The narrative that cops are out gunning for unarmed black people is just not supported by the data,” he said. “Cops tend to shoot a lot of white people too, it just tends not to make the news.”
Moskos is worried that the focus on race is distracting attention from what he considers the real issues. Those include the “criminalization of poverty” and the aggressive police enforcement of relatively minor offences, such as traffic violations and failure to make support payments, the transgression that relatives say made Scott run from police.
Then there are the policies that govern police use of force, and seem to exaggerate the threat in some instances, said the criminologist. Meanwhile, the people giving officers firearms training are particularly conservative, “gun- loving” sorts, he said.
Eugene O’Donnell, another criminologist at John Jay, also rejected the notion that racism is propelling police to shoot black men. He adds that black officers are no more or less trigger happy than their white counterparts, pointing to the recent acquittal of an African- American officer in the shooting death of a 95- year- old, Chicago- area war veteran.
But the incident in South Carolina points to a concerning mentality, he said. The officer appears to have taken steps to make his actions seem legal, until the video blew the story apart.
“It raises the question of whether there is not a culture in some parts of the country of, ‘ We can do anything we want and get away with it,’ ” he said. “I worry that at least some of the many police forces in the country work in a culture like that.”
Even if blacks are not lopsided victims of police force, a larger issue emerged in Ferguson, and again at protests in North Charleston on Wednesday: the widespread sense among law- abiding African Americans that they are in a sense harassed by officers.
While Brown’s shooter was not prosecuted, a stinging Justice Department report concluded the Ferguson justice system was deeply flawed, with black people feeling the brunt of the problems. As well as blatant civil- rights violations, it cited evidence that African- American drivers were twice as likely to be searched during traffic stops, more likely to then be arrested — and yet 26 per cent less likely to be found with contraband.
McCormick points to psychological research that suggests white Americans tend to reflexively view blacks as more threatening, and suggests that fuels some inappropriate conduct.
Cops tend to shoot a lot of white people too, it just tends not to make the news.