The Myth of Murderous Police

           Have you ever asked a small child to guess how much you make in salary? The answers you get are just insane. One kid will say you make at least a million dollars a month and the next kid will guess a thousand dollars a year. You get these extremes because small children have no real point of reference. They don't work, or buy things themselves, so they have nothing to base their guesses on. They might know what the word rent means, but they don't know if rent is more expensive than dinner at McDonald's. Why am I starting a blog titled "The Myth of Murderous Police" by talking about how young children view money? Because the same concept applies, and is, in my opinion, the greatest reason why police-involved killings (and a great number of other things) have been blown way out of proportion over the past few years.

       In many ways, we are all children in the social media age. In the span of just a few years, cable/satellite television and the internet has turned the whole planet into our hometown. We simply are not yet accustomed to dealing with the scale. What do I mean by this? Thirty years ago, if a police officer in Portland, Oregon shot someone on duty, it would have probably been front page news in the local Portland newspaper, but would never have been heard about in Atlanta or Houston. This meant that unless you lived in a huge city such as New York or Chicago, you might go months, or even years without hearing about an officer-involved death. Now, however, with CNN, and Facebook, and Twitter your local news is basically everything that happens anywhere in the country. Our brains, however, can't grasp the numbers involved when you are talking about the entirety of the United States, so all it really grasps is that it used to never hear about officer-involved killings, and now it hears about them seemingly all the time.

        It is understandable that people believe this is a huge problem if they hear about these events almost daily, but one needs to step back and look at the scale. Official statistics are almost non-existent, but for the past few years the Washington Post has been keeping track of all officer involved shooting deaths in the country, and the average is just under one thousand per year. Now, if it were 1000 of these in your neighborhood, that would absolutely be an issue. This number, however, encompasses the entire country. To put it in perspective, in 2015, a little more than 2.7 million people died, of which 995 where at the hands of a police officer. That is 0.03% of the deaths attributable to police shootings. If you died in 2015, you were 35 times more likely to die in a car crash than you were to be killed by a law enforcement officer.

           To add a bit more perspective, there were 468 murders in the same year, in Chicago alone (a city with some of the strictest gun laws in the nation, but that is an argument for another day). Take it a bit further, there were almost eleven million arrests made in 2015 nationally (not counting traffic violations). So in 2015, if you were arrested (and any arrest situation is potentially a very dangerous situation for any law enforcement officer), you stood a 0.009% chance of being killed by the officer. There aren't any statistics on how many arrests are physically resisted, but there is a good chance that it is thousands of times more than 0.009% of them. Racism has also been attributed to officers in regard to officer involved shootings, but again, the same types of numbers can be found. The same Washington Post database shows that in 2015, of the 995 officer-involved shooting deaths, 259 of those killed were black while 497, or nearly twice as many, were white. The numbers were nearly identical in 2016 and 2017.

          So why are so many people so vocal about this problem? As I mentioned before, the numbers they are dealing with are foreign to them. If we are going to live in this new world, this new information age, we need to get better at looking at the big picture. Imagine if you were on a reality show with cameras following you 24 hours a day 7 days a week. If the director decided to show your worst 15 minutes every week, and nothing else, what do you thing you'd look like? That is what social media and the 24 hour news cycle does. Every time a police-involved shooting occurs that is even remotely close to questionable, it is broken down, scrutinized, and judged (usually by people in a nice, safe, stress free area, viewing it in slow motion, over and over again). What you don't see is the thirty or forty thousand other arrests that occurred, problem-free since the last borderline-questionable event.

          In a perfect world, law enforcement officers would never have to kill anyone, black, white, or any thing in between. As we all know, however, the world is far from perfect, and there is a reason why we give our law enforcement officers the authority to use deadly force when necessary. They are vigorously trained on the proper use of force, with regular refresher training, and are heavily scrutinized whenever they use force of any kind (not just deadly force). Do they get it wrong sometimes? Of course. Are those mistakes sometimes egregious, even criminal? Yes. No system is perfect. Is it something we should always keep an eye on and try to improve? Without question, lives are at stake. Is it the plague that the media has portrayed it as? No, not even close.