This is a very sad, and a very disturbing article. There were two things in the story that really surprised me. First, is that there are no real stats kept on police shootings!
“The Florida Department of Law Enforcement can say how many purse snatchings there were in any given year, but not how many times officers fired on citizens. The FBI’s statistics on police shootings aren’t much better. No one keeps accurate count.
“Embarrassing and ridiculous,” FBI director James B. Comey called the lack of data.
“Unacceptable,” former Attorney General Eric Holder called it.
For the past three years, shootings of unarmed black men caught on video have sparked outrage. But they are anecdotes. Without data, there’s no scope.
“How can we fix what we can’t measure?” asked Vanita Gupta, who headed the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division…”
The second thing that really surprised is the extent of police forfeiture and what a driving factor it is. I had read about this before, but this stat surprised me.
“Cook believes police violence stems from the militarization of police, and the spread of SWAT teams after the Watts riots in the mid 1960s. Police agencies use grants to buy military-grade equipment such as Bearcat armored vehicles, M-16 rifles and night-vision goggles. These programs grew at the same time Washington launched the war on drugs and passed laws to let police take cash and property from suspected criminals without even pressing charges. It’s called “civil asset forfeiture,” and its use has grown rapidly. In 2014, for the first time ever, police took more from American citizens than burglars did, according to economist Martin Armstrong, who used statistics from the FBI and Institute for Justice. Police departments use the money, cars and homes seized through civil asset forfeiture to support their budgets.”
It seems like police shootings are happening more, but as the article stated you need to measure. I personally believe that the militarization of our police is a big part of the issue. In a past job I worked with various levels of law enforcement. For the most part I found the officers to be professional if somewhat jaded. However, as you stepped down in level the professionalism tended to decrease also. The fact that there is all this fire power in their hands scares the holy bejeebers out of me. Anecdotally, I get the impression that many police feel it is them against us. As police chief Chitwood said in the story,
‘“I think most shootings that we see are because we the police put ourselves in a position that we don’t need to be in,” he said. “Today, for some reason, we’ve switched out of the guardian mentality and we’ve become warriors. And that’s not what American policing was founded on.”’
I am supplying three links. The first is to the Tampa Bay Times article. The other two links are to two episodes of one my favorite podcasts Radiolab. In conjunction with the Tampa Bay Times they did a two part story on this.
Why Cops Shoot – Tampa Bay Times article
Why Cops Shoot – Radiolab Episode 1
Why Cops Shoot – Radiolab Episode 2
There are obviously multiple points of view on this subject, but perhaps the one point of view that should prevail is that it is an issue we should be gathering stats on and studying. Anecdotal evidence just does not cut the mustard in this case.
And so it goes.
What are we to expect when we arm the police with military weaponry, train them in military tactics, if they haven’t already spent time in combat? The police no longer serve and protect, they hunt.