If you seek truly to highlight injustice, that is where to start. It is also important to note that the WaPo’s study selects only those who were shot and killed by police, not all those who died after a confrontation with police. In the StreetCred Police Killings in Context database, an open data set, we can see that, in the first eight months of 2015 there were 125 killings by police of unarmed people—including 69 who were shot. However, Mr. Friedersdorf conflates “unarmed” with “not dangerous.” As we will see below, it is flatly incorrect for him to state that “many police killings have little if anything to do with violent crimes.”
There were 53 unarmed black people, 45 white people and 20 Hispanic people who died after encounters with police (and yes, based on the national census figures, that would seem to be a statistically high sampling of black people even if they are not in the majority of all cases in the database). The issue, however, is in the concept of selection. The accusation is that police are systematically selecting black people to harass and confront. Yet, in fully 75 percent of the cases in the StreetCred Police Killings in Context database, officers arrived after a citizen-initiated call for service.
How could the police target these black people if the police are responding to calls from someone else? They cannot be.
Of 125 incidents in which police killed an unarmed civilian, 25 percent (31) began on traffic stops, but 65 percent (81) began as a response to a 911 call about a violent-crime (robbery, carjacking, domestic violence or assault) or property crime (burglary, car theft or vandalism) in progress. There were 9 people (7 percent) whom 911 callers described as being “crazy,” or “on drugs,” “covered with blood,” and “yelling,” or threatening people. Three people (2 percent) were wanted fugitives in the act of escape — and one was unarmed when he died but was acting as part of a gang of three who were wanted in a recent homicide and were at the time of the incident in the progress of a kidnapping a woman.
There were 26 incidents that involved an assault against another civilian before police arrived, and in two cases, the murder of other civilians, by the decedent. So for Mr. Friedersdorf to portray these decedents as the innocent victims of police violence against black people, or to presume that they had no process, is a grotesque reading of the facts.
Let’s add to this the fact—and our methodology and sources are all available online, as is our data—that in general, in the 51 percent of cases in which there were witnesses, they generally sided with the police’s account. Specifically, in 60 cases (48 percent) within the StreetCred PKIC dataset, some or all witnesses supported the police account of events.
Witnesses exclusively supported the police account in 40 cases (32 percent), and some witnesses supported, and some disputed, the police account in 20 cases (16 percent).
Witnesses disputed the police in a total of 24 cases (19 percent). Witnesses exclusively disputed the police account in just 4 cases (3 percent). And some witnesses disputed, while others supported the police account, in 20 of the cases (16 percent).
Which means that when people see these incidents—as they do in a majority of the cases—they tend to side with the police’s version of events.
None of the people who die without cause or justification at the hands of police should die. The idea that officers are not punished is absurd. This year to date there have been indictments of ten officers in the killing of four black people, and one officer in the killing of a white person.
Perhaps the problem is that the police are being looked at as the cause of problems that are broadly societal and systemic in nature? Whatever is true, I say this: we stand at the greatest opportunity in my lifetime to positively change how police and communities interact. To waste it pointing fingers would be a true tragedy.
* An unarmed person in our database is one who is not holding something that a reasonable person would perceive as a deadly weapon, including toy or replica guns. This would mean that the case this week in Baltimore County, in which a man overtly reached behind his back and snapped his hand forward in the same manner as one would use to “quick-draw” a concealed weapon would be considered, for the purposes of our research, armed. It is important, too, to recognize that ‘unarmed’ does not mean, ‘Not deadly.’