Police Killings Rise Slightly, Though Increased Focus May Suggest Otherwise
By MICHAEL WINES and SARAH COHENAPRIL 30, 2015
Their names have become both a litany and rallying cry: Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Eric Garner. Walter L. Scott. And now Freddie Gray.
Since Mr. Brown was fatally shot in an encounter with a Ferguson, Mo., police officer in August, so many unarmed black males have died in police confrontations that even President Obama noted this week that “it comes up, it seems like, once a week now, or once every couple of weeks.” Calling such encounters “a slow-rolling crisis, he added, “This is not new and we should not pretend it is.”
But determining the prevalence of such killings is no easy matter. The use of force by the police — against minorities and whites alike — is so poorly monitored that there is no precise accounting of how many citizens are killed, much less their ethnicity or other crucial details.
What official data exists suggests that the number of killings by police officers has crept upward only slowly, if at all, in recent years. Since 2009, one regular if incomplete measure, the F.B.I.’s account of justifiable homicides by police officers, ranged from 397 to 426 deaths annually before jumping to 461 in 2013, the latest reporting year.
Federal experts have long acknowledged that that estimate is too low, and a handful of more recent, unofficial reports — online databases compiled and fact-checked by volunteers — place the toll much higher, at about 1,100 deaths a year, or three a day. Yet they do not suggest that the pace of police killings or the racial composition of victims as a group has changed significantly in the last two years or so.
A number of criminologists believe police homicides are near their nadir. In New York City, for example, 91 people were fatally shot by police officers in 1971 — and a record-low eight in 2013, the last year for which figures are available. In Los Angeles, officers used “categorical” force — gunfire, chokings and other violence that could lead to death — in 84 of nearly 149,000 arrests in 2012, down 17 percent in seven years.
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That data suggests that any perception that higher numbers of unarmed African-Americans are being killed by the police in recent months is driven by citizens’ postings of unsettling cellphone videos and pictures, like that of police officers dragging Freddie Gray, his legs apparently not working, into a van.
“People are shocked by all these shootings,” said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who is an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York. “But they’ve always been there.”
But it also means that lethal force by the police is a steady problem that is causing police departments across the country to debate whether they need to change procedures and training.
At the riot-scarred intersection of Pennsylvania and West North Avenues in Baltimore on Tuesday, Robert Wilson, a Baltimore high school graduate, said the frustrations that sparked civil disorder there spread well beyond those who took to the streets this week.
Continue reading the main story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/u...creased-focus-may-suggest-otherwise.html?_r=0
By MICHAEL WINES and SARAH COHENAPRIL 30, 2015
Their names have become both a litany and rallying cry: Michael Brown. Tamir Rice. Eric Garner. Walter L. Scott. And now Freddie Gray.
Since Mr. Brown was fatally shot in an encounter with a Ferguson, Mo., police officer in August, so many unarmed black males have died in police confrontations that even President Obama noted this week that “it comes up, it seems like, once a week now, or once every couple of weeks.” Calling such encounters “a slow-rolling crisis, he added, “This is not new and we should not pretend it is.”
But determining the prevalence of such killings is no easy matter. The use of force by the police — against minorities and whites alike — is so poorly monitored that there is no precise accounting of how many citizens are killed, much less their ethnicity or other crucial details.
What official data exists suggests that the number of killings by police officers has crept upward only slowly, if at all, in recent years. Since 2009, one regular if incomplete measure, the F.B.I.’s account of justifiable homicides by police officers, ranged from 397 to 426 deaths annually before jumping to 461 in 2013, the latest reporting year.
Federal experts have long acknowledged that that estimate is too low, and a handful of more recent, unofficial reports — online databases compiled and fact-checked by volunteers — place the toll much higher, at about 1,100 deaths a year, or three a day. Yet they do not suggest that the pace of police killings or the racial composition of victims as a group has changed significantly in the last two years or so.
A number of criminologists believe police homicides are near their nadir. In New York City, for example, 91 people were fatally shot by police officers in 1971 — and a record-low eight in 2013, the last year for which figures are available. In Los Angeles, officers used “categorical” force — gunfire, chokings and other violence that could lead to death — in 84 of nearly 149,000 arrests in 2012, down 17 percent in seven years.
Advertisement
That data suggests that any perception that higher numbers of unarmed African-Americans are being killed by the police in recent months is driven by citizens’ postings of unsettling cellphone videos and pictures, like that of police officers dragging Freddie Gray, his legs apparently not working, into a van.
“People are shocked by all these shootings,” said Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer who is an assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at City University of New York. “But they’ve always been there.”
But it also means that lethal force by the police is a steady problem that is causing police departments across the country to debate whether they need to change procedures and training.
At the riot-scarred intersection of Pennsylvania and West North Avenues in Baltimore on Tuesday, Robert Wilson, a Baltimore high school graduate, said the frustrations that sparked civil disorder there spread well beyond those who took to the streets this week.
Continue reading the main story:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/u...creased-focus-may-suggest-otherwise.html?_r=0