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darren wilson
WaPo Tallies Police Killings-but Holds Back Some of the Numbers That Count
But it's hard for me to escape the feeling that the Post story--by Kimberly Kindy and Marc Fisher--was framed by the paper to minimize the project's remarkable findings. Take the first paragraph that summarizes the details of the results:
In a year-long study, the Washington Post found that the kind of incidents that have ignited protests in many US communities--most often, white police officers killing unarmed black men--represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings. Meanwhile, the Post found that the great majority of people who died at the hands of the police fit at least one of three categories: They were wielding weapons, they were suicidal or mentally troubled, or they ran when officers told them to halt.
"The kind of incidents that have ignited protests...represent less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings." That sure sounds like an attempt to play down the number. Particularly since the write-up never presents the raw number for fatal police shootings of unarmed African-Americans in 2015--which is 37--or the more comprehensive number of all unarmed civilians shot and killed: 90. Those numbers can be found on a graphic that accompanied the story in the paper's print edition, and in an interactive feature online-but are nowhere to be found in the Post's own article on its project. ("Just 9 percent of shootings involved an unarmed victim," a sidebar accompanying the graphic began--that word "just" indicating that we should read that as "not so many.")
The Post's "meanwhile," juxtaposed against "incidents that have ignited protests," implies that the categories that follow would not inspire protest: those killed "wielding weapons," who were "suicidal or mentally troubled," or who "ran when officers told them to halt."
People very much protest these sorts of police killings, starting with Michael Brown, who ran when Wilson told him to halt. Laquan McDonald, whose death at the hands of Chicago police has resulted in a first-degree murder charge for officer Jason Van Dyke and the ouster of the city's police chief, was "wielding" a three-inch knife when he was shot 16 times, so he would have been counted in the first category--as would Tamir Rice, since the Post made the questionable choice to count "toy weapons" in the same category as knives.
The piece stresses that police killings can result from "a single bullet fired at the adrenaline-charged apex of a chase" and prominently cites the argument of Pennsylvania police union president Les Neri that "officers make split-second decisions" while "their bosses, prosecutors, jurors and the public have the luxury of examining every frame of video." Neri's quote becomes the pull quote in the print edition:
"We now microscopically evaluate for days and weeks what they only had a few seconds to act on," Neri said. "People always say, 'They shot an unarmed man,' but we know that only after the fact. We are criminalizing judgment errors."
With a background in law enforcement, Neri must be aware that people can be prosecuted for judgment errors that result in death; that's why there's a crime called criminally negligent homicide. Yet the piece presents his argument at length as though it were a novel legal concept to hold people criminally responsible when their bad decisions end up killing people.
A sample of how the Guardian puts US police killings in context.
The Post's delicate approach to police killings can be appreciated by comparison with the Guardian's similar project. For one thing, the Guardian contrasts the numbers with statistics on police killings in Europe, so you can see that the rate at which US cops kill people is far out of line with the frequency of such deaths in comparable countries. For example, England and Wales had 55 fatal police shootings in the last 24 years, while the US had 59 in just 24 days. (The higher level of crime in the US explains some but not much of this difference; the US murder rate is about four times the UK's but has a rate of police killings about 70 times as high.)
More viscerally, it's instructive to compare how the two papers visualize the toll of police killings. In the print edition of the Washington Post, those killed by police are represented by what appear to be stylized bullets--with black dots on the ones that represent African-Americans. On the Post website, the dead appear as stereotyped silhouettes:
On the Guardian site, by contrast, the dead are represented, when possible, by actual photos--revealing themselves not as a set of statistics or a collection of weapons wielded but as individuals, each a unique human life lost as the result of a police decision. An appreciation of that fact, more than anything, is what's missing from the Washington Post's tally of fatal police shootings.
Preparing For Injustice vs. Preparing for Justice in Ferguson
- Governor Jay Nixon has declared a state of emergency, and activated the state's National Guard in advance of the decision.
- St. Louis County Police have ordered $170,000 in new equipment, including riot helmets, shields, teargas, grenades, batons, pepper balls, and CS sting grenades.
- St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson has ordered $325,000 in undisclosed equipment to use on protestors.
- Ferguson police have asked for a no-fly zone over Ferguson, to keep the media out. Only police helicopters and commercial flights will be allowed.
- Gun sales have spiked in Ferguson. One gun shop saw a 700 percent increase in sales.
Speculation over further unrest misses the point that the anger and frustration seen in Ferguson is much bigger than the death of Michael Brown or the indictment of Darren Wilson. As one, young Ferguson protestor put it, Michael Brown was just the final straw.
"We could just say Brown was the final straw; it was the straw that broke the camel's back," said Victoria Donaldson, 26, of St. Louis. "So until they fix that problem where young black men are being shot down or killed -- not even young black men, just black men in general -- are being completely disrespected and being treated like animals till the point of death, until that changes it will continue to be something that just upsets us."
Ferguson was a city of stark racial disparities long before Michael Brown's death.
But the story of how it got that way isn't what we've been told in the media, as Richard Rothstein points out in his report, The Making of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of its Troubles. Media outlets blamed "white flight" for flipping inner-ring suburbs like Ferguson from white to black, and the private prejudices of white homeowners for keeping outer-ring suburbs white. "A more powerful cause," Rothstein writes, "is the explicit intents of federal, state, and local governments to create racially segregated metropolises."
Starting in the Jim Crow era, city planning councils prevented "colored people" from moving into "finer residential districts," and designated areas in, or adjacent to black neighborhoods for industrial development, and using industrial areas as a buffer between back and white neighborhoods. Black neighborhood were denied public services -- like streetlights, garbage collection, access to municipal water. Government policy effectively turned those neighborhoods into slums. White homeowners came to associate blacks with slum dwelling, leading to problems when black families tried to buy homes in white neighborhoods.
Crisis in Levittown, PAThis is a version of the landmark documentary "crisis in Levittown, PA" that I edited down to 10 minutes for my class.
By the 30s and 40s, cities began clearing slums to use for "better and higher purposes," like building waterfront development, highway exchanges, and universities. Meanwhile, the when the New Deal built the first public housing in America, the Public Works Administration's (PWA) "neighborhood composition rule" perpetuated municipal segregationist policies, by stipulating that public housing project could not alter the racial composition of the neighborhoods where they were built. The PWA even segregated its work crews across the country.
Blacks were pushed into areas like Ferguson. Meanwhile, whites moved to outer-suburbs, where restrictive covenants prohibited white homeowners from selling to blacks. These covenants began as private commitments between neighbors, but were soon adopted by real estate boards. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) subsidized the mass production of suburbs, but would not guarantee loans to blacks.
By the 1950s, government policies had depopulated central cities of whites, and blacks replaced whites in public housing projects, like St. Louis' infamous Pruitt-Igoe towers.
It wasn't just housing policy. Rothstein writes that government support of a segregated labor market supplemented racist housing policies, and "prevented most African-American families from acquiring the economic strength to move into middle class neighborhoods," even if they'd been allowed to.
Again, the economic consequences are still with us, as Sherrliyn Ifill pointed out during EPI's "The Making of Ferguson" forum.
None of this is likely to be discussed in the event of unrest after the Ferguson grand jury's decision is announced. It was once well-known history, but it has been conveniently forgotten in favor of easy answers that blame "white flight" and a "culture of poverty" for the disparities that led to despair that exploded into outrage on the streets of Ferguson.
Preparing for outrage and injustice will not save Ferguson, or prevent the next city that's "one dead black teenager away" from becoming "the next Ferguson." Nor will, for that matter, an indictment. Nothing will truly prevent "the next Ferguson" until we decide to prepare for justice, by undoing the damage done by decades of policies that went into the making of Ferguson, and cities like it across the country.
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