The recent killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, by police officers has once again brought the injustice in our justice systems to the forefront while sparking unprecedented levels of protests throughout the nation and throughout the world. Since its inception, the institution that claims to “protect and serve” has condoned police brutality that disproportionately targets people of color, specifically African American constituents. The lack of accountability in the police force has only enabled these murders to continue.
Inequality and injustice
In the United States, the color of your skin determines whether you have a target on your back. Data from Mapping Police Violence highlights that African Americans are roughly three times more likely to be killed by the police than their Caucasian counterparts, despite being 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed. In the same vein, of the recorded 1,098 people killed by police in 2019, 24% of those killed were African American, even though African Americans make up only 13% of the U.S. population. A separate study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that about 96 in 100,000 black men and boys will be killed by police during their lifetime while white men and boys face a lifetime risk of about 39 per 100,000. Deadly use of force by the police transcends race, presenting a problem in and of itself, but more often than not it’s the African American communities that are burdened with these malpractices.
The issue of racial bias lends itself to the continued abuse of African Americans by the police. A study by Mark Hoekstra and Carly Will Sloan, in which over two million 911 calls in two cities were analyzed, “found that white officers use force 60 percent more often than black officers on average, and use gun force more than twice as often.” The same source further reports that “white officers use gun force five times as often in neighborhoods that are 80+ percent black.” These findings suggest that both the race of the officer and the race of the constituency play a role in the use of force by police.
Murderers in blue walk free
The police officer that strangled Eric Garner, who’s dying words were “I can’t breathe,” was not indicted. The police officer who shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 walks free today. Alone, these incidents in which police use lethal force for non-lethal circumstances while facing little to no consequences are already disturbing. However, such narratives are not the outliers, but rather are the norm for many cases involving police brutality. Dr. Philip Stinson with Bowling Green State University finds in 2017 that since 2005, only 82 police officers in the U.S. have been charged with murder or manslaughter as a result of an on-duty shooting. Of those 82 charges, only 29 officers have been convicted.
One reason that may help to explain the small number of charges and the even smaller number of convictions is, as Stinson explains, that “jurors are often very reluctant to second-guess the split-second life-or-death decisions of an on- duty police officer involved in a potentially violent street encounter with a citizen.” Essentially, it is hard to prosecute an officer if the officer can credibly claim that they feared for their life.
In addition, prosecutors typically have strong ties to police departments, making it so that prosecuting an officer may go against the prosecutor’s interests. A report from the Guardian highlights that 85% of all killings by police that were ruled justified in 2015 were handled by a prosecutor familiar with the officer’s department, while only 12.5% of killings by police were ruled as justified when handled by an independent party. This disparity in rulings, in which it appears that prosecutor familiarity affects the verdict, suggests a conflict of interest issue that is seen throughout our justice system. Reforming the relationship between prosecutors and police departments would change the current narrative in which justice is rarely seen.
Police unions against police reform
Money talks, and while calls for police reform are being heard around the nation, police unions are digging deep into their pockets to stop any such change. Over the last two decades, police unions throughout the nation have spent roughly $87 million on the local and state levels, with the proportion of money that funnels into lobbying having increased over the past decade. And it’s the union’s deep pockets that translates to shallow punishments for officers. An investigation by Reuters explains how police union power has led to a decrease in department transparency and accountability, citing contracts between unions and cities that call for departments to erase disciplinary records and to allow officers accused of misconduct to forfeit sick leave or vacation time rather than serve suspensions (the list of afforded privileges to police officers continue beyond the aforementioned benefits). Proponents of such protections argue that these policies secure due process for officers while critics claim that it is these very privileges that protect officers from scrutiny. For instance, in erasing disciplinary records, sometimes in a matter of just six months, it becomes more difficult to fire an officer with a history of abuses.
Similarly, it is that same money that has stalled reforms over the past years. Look to a 2014 attempt by San Antonio City Manager Sheryl Sculley to reform police union contracts that allowed for prior misconduct erasure, in which the San Antonio Police Officers Association, a police union, responded with a $1 million dollar smear campaign. The attempted reforms came in the wake of rape accusations directed at a San Antonio police officer who had a record of prior sexual misconduct complaints. Because of police union power, however, these reforms never came to fruition.
The current system that protects police officers from punishment is the same system that harms the constituents it swore to protect. There will always be good and bad officers, but in the status quo, the “few bad apples” are held above the law making it so that a badge is now a license to kill. The burden of such a system sadly falls on America’s communities of color, in which an officer is as often a threat as they are a savior.
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