Radley: Thank you for this series. Incredible, important work. A real service to the discourse of a kind that few people ever make.
There is just one element I wish was not in this latest piece and that is the casual swipes you take against the backlash against DEI.
It sounds from your description like Joye Carter is doing important work. I know for sure that Jennifer Eberhardt at Stanford is doing important work with police departments as well. I am huge fan of Eberhardt. I believe that if everyone in American read her amazing book "Biased" (along Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind") our country would be a far, far better place. Doubtless you have Carter and Eberhardt's type of work in mind when you're pushing back against the criticism of DEI.
But while I share your belief in the importance of this work, my own experience and research about DEI programs in the corporate workplace and everything I have read and heard about them in universities makes me believe that the criticisms of of these programs is warranted and that most of them are at best useless and at worst genuinely harmful.
So I think when you casually defend "DEI" in the way that you did you're making the exact same mistake Rufo did in the opposite direction. Both of you rhetorically combine all DEI programs into a single bucket. When Rufo does it, he is trying to discredit the good along with the bad. When you do it, you're (hopefully unintentionally) defending the bad along with the good. So I would hope going forward you'll be more precise in your defense of constructive DEI initiatives.
Thanks for the comment. I've seen some DEI stuff that I think is overwrought. But even the over-the-top examples I've seen from people like Rufo seem more silly than harmful. That said, it's not an area in which I've done much research, so I take your point. Didn't intend to sound all-encompassing. I just know that the stuff that falls under DEI when it comes to policing, forensics, and other areas of criminal justice tends to focus on correcting inherent flaws and injustices that have been built in to the current system, which seems pretty sensible. And when police groups rail against these policies, they lump it in with the larger DEI backlash.
"So I think when you casually defend "DEI" in the way that you did you're making the exact same mistake Rufo did in the opposite direction. "
This seems pretty straightforwardly not the case. The exact mistake Rufo is making is a bigoted assumption that no changes need to be made to current attitudes toward historically marginalized groups. Whether or not one would defend all of the many specific implementations of DEI, it is quite clear (based on the overwhelming testimony of affected groups and organizations that advocate for and represent the same) that something aiming in the direction of DEI is badly needed in essentially every American institution. To defend these efforts is demonstrably not the same as demonizing them.
I paid for a subscription after I read the first two parts of this series for free. Thank you for excellent work. Some thoughts...
1. You were right to criticize Coleman Hughes. He (and Loury/McWhorter) promoted an obviously biased and flawed documentary. They should be called to account and you did that in a rational, even-handed manner relying on evidence.
2. Roland Fryer got famous a few years ago after he published a paper that found no difference in the incidece of deaths in custody between black and white victims. What I'd love to hear more about is the difference in lower level harrassment for black vs. white citizens in major urban centers. I think this ongoing, low level police mistreatment has a significant affect on the social development and socialization of young, African American males. It contributes to a distrust of authority and reinforces the widely held belief that the lives of young black men are defined and constrained by the color of their skin. I'm sure experts have expounded on the effect of police harrassment in poorer, inner city African American communities. I'd love to read them and hear your opinion about them
Thanks! I'm planning to write on these issues soon. Short take: I think Fryer's study was was flawed, but I also think he's been treated unfairly. I'm also not sure if it's really possible to know if there is racial bias in police shootings. We do know (and Fryer has acknowledged) that there is extensive racial bias in just about every other police interaction, from stops, to searches, to escalation, to use of non-lethal force.
Of all the incredible insight and deeply researched conclusions presented here and in this series, a few things stand out for me:
—why do police often insist on excessive restraint when the suspect is not resisting in any way?
—why do police use tasers or pepper spray or other dangerous tools when there is no risk or bad behavior at issue?
—during the 2020 protests, a Twitter account documented hundreds of video examples of police engaging in violent and/or unnecessary physical responses to apparently harmless protestors - what causes that routine response?
I don’t understand. Just do the job in a logical and professional way. This consistent desire and reflex for some to go too far just boggles the mind, especially with what is at stake for both the victim and the perpetrator.
I think many people think there are a lot of “close cases”, where a situation evolves in an idiosyncratic way. But that is not really the case. I am hopeful we are moving in a positive direction with these behaviors - certainly RB’s work contributes to that likelihood.
I am an oral surgeon and routinely do IV anesthesia in my office. This means that I routinely straddle the line between conscious and unconscious, always ready to step in if we go over into unconscious. So, I am very well schooled in breathing and monitoring for breathing. It is Anesthesia 101 to know that the amount of weight on the chest adversely affects breathing. We are literally taught on day 1 to sit the patient up if they are having trouble breathing solely to get the weight off their chest. We are taught on day 2 to be very reluctant to offer IV anesthesia, without putting a breathing tube in, to people who have a lot of upper body weight. This is because we KNOW that we will have difficulty keeping them breathing while lying them back to work on them specifically because of the excess weight on their chest.
It is not a huge stretch of the imagination to think that putting a full grown police officer, weighed down with all of his gear, on top of a chest would also lead to the person having trouble breathing. The fact that people who purportedly call themselves doctor suggest that the excess weight of a police officer laden down with equipment is not related to trouble breathing is offensive. Honestly, it would be laughable if people weren't dying.
Another thought to consider is how to safely provide anesthesia to a prone patient. There are times in the operating room that the surgeon needs to work on the back of a patient. This means the patient needs to be upside down (prone). Some of these surgeries are quick and some are very, very long. No matter how long the anticipated procedure is, however, the anesthesia team goes to incredible lengths to flip the patient (after the breathing tube is in!). The monitoring of these patients is extreme because this is long recognized as a dangerous position, especially in people not breathing as they would normally do. For the police to so casually flip people, especially those who may be on drugs (by definition have the potential to have altered breathing) and then hold them with weight on their chest is basically just asking to hurt or kill people.
I found this to be the most convincing and best written of this series. The way to combat misinformation (and outright lying) is with good information. This series proves that point.
As for the larger issue, I agree with many of your points, with some caveats. While racial biases in policing unquestionably exist (& as you say in the comments, the Roland Fryer story supports it, even though many conservatives have misreported it as showing no bias), the BLM narrative is crude and simplistic & creates its own dangers. I remember a NYT op-ed shortly after the George Floyd murder in which the author, a black New Yorker, literally feels every time he leaves home that he may not come back alive because a cop will shoot him. Sorry, but that's insane. (He's far more likely to be fatally hit by a car.) Of course this is partly related to personal experience and cultural history, but a climate that ratchets up such fears to such a degree isn't helping anyone (I would say the same of overwrought claims about women being in constant danger of rape). White women who have called the police (including campus police), rightly or wrongly, over conflicts with black women have been accused of literally trying to murder them. (IIRC, a black woman is about 20 times less likely to be fatally shot by police than a white male.) In some cases, riots happened based on a narrative that turned out to be patently false (e.g. the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin). And you're probably aware of the Travis Campbell study showing that more BLM protests were subsequently correlated with about 200 fewer police homicides but about 3,000 more non-police homicides. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/opinion/black-lives-matter-depolicing-homicides.html I don't think there's a straightforward trajectory of blame, obviously, but it's something to ponder.
Lastly, I think the "systemic racism" perspective is often unhelpful because it fails to look at more specific causes of racial biases in policing and weed out the "bad apples." My guess is that part of the problem is a general tendency among (many) cops to take a cruel, punitive attitude toward civilians they see as either defiant toward police or as "lowlifes" (not only lawbreakers of any kind but people who don't conform to the social order). This attitude is probably often correlated with racism because the "lowlifes" are profiled as disproportionately black. Another part of the problem is straight-up conscious racism, as in your anecdote about the Somali teens. Talk of racism being "baked into" American policing, or being present by design, treats it as almost independent of individual will and agency. It's not, and it can and should be addressed.
I have more thoughts but I'll leave it at that! Thanks again for the series.
Hi Cathy, Bulwark subscriber here! I am a bit confused by your assessment of "systemic racism." Is your main point that instances of police brutality and misconduct should be examined on a case-by-case basis and that having an understanding of the ways in which unconscious bias is imbedded in our institutions is a hinderance to that objective? How is taking a more cursory look at policing at odds with also rooting out specific instances of racially motivated misconduct? Systemic racism, as it applies to policing, is just a framework to understand and address the ways in which people of color are disproportionately affected through every stage of the criminal justice system, despite the evidence that different racial and ethnic groups commit crimes at roughly the same rates. Addressing those material realities is a means to just that. I don't think it's fair to say focusing on the issues ratchets up fear in a disproportionate way when approximately 1 in every 1,000 Black men is killed by police (https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1821204116). When it comes to the murder of George Floyd in particular, I wonder how anyone could watch the video of his death and think anything could justify the manner in which he was killed. I think we sometimes get caught up navigating hypotheticals as part of a semantic exercise when the conclusion of what happened is quite straightforward. We saw the video. We watched him die. We saw him on the ground, in handcuffs, crying out for his mother as he slowly lost consciousness. What perceived threat could he have posed or what possible crime could he have committed that would justify being killed the way he was?
Hi Kate! Sorry about the late reply (working on multiple deadlines). I appreciate your comment and the Bulwark subscription, of course!
To begin with, I completely agree with the last part of your comment. I think the situation with George Floyd's death was fairly clear and as I said in my comment, I thought it was misguided for Coleman Hughes to promote a "debunking." Radley's rebuttal was excellent. Do we have evidence that the murder was racially motivated? I don't know. There was a fairly similar case with a mentally ill white man, Tony Timpa, who suffocated to death while being restrained by cops who not only ignored but mocked his pleas for help thinking that he was simply being hysterical. (No one was punished in that case.) There was also a case in 2005 involving a white man who was having a drug episode and died while a black cop was sitting on his back to hold him down. BUT I agree that given the very real history of racism in American policing, it was totally understandable that the public (especially the black community) reacted with such intensity.
As for my comments on "systemic racism": I certainly don't object to studying racial patterns in law enforcement, my issue is more with blanket claims about racism being "baked into" policing instead of focusing on specific factors that contribute to racial biases. I'm all for looking into those. But with all due respect, your comment shows why the rhetoric around the issue can complicate understanding. You said that "people of color are disproportionately affected through every stage of the criminal justice system, despite the evidence that different racial and ethnic groups commit crimes at roughly the same rates." While there is evidence of disparate treatment, the last part of your statement is mistaken, as this 2021 paper from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics will show: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/revcoa18.pdf Using not just arrests but victim reports to the police and to crime victimization surveys as a measure, black Americans make up 12.5% of the US population but account for 35.5% of nonfatal violent offenses. (Hispanics and especially Asians, on the other hand, are underrepresented among offenders.) Does this justify right-wing hatemongering about "black crime," or even racist claims that black people are innately prone to violence? No, of course not. There are also crime-rate disparities among white ethnic groups in America, and crime rates in various majority-black and majority-white countries show a lot of variation. In the US these patterns have a lot to do with the legacy of racism, above all economic disadvantage. These patterns also don't justify racial profiling, which definitely happens! But we also need to have a clear picture of the facts and data.
Ironically, the study I linked has been cited by Media Matters as showing that "Among the most serious incidents of violent crime (rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault), there were no statistically significant differences by race between offenders." But that sentence is truncated; the full sentence says "between offenders identified in the NCVS and persons arrested per the UCR" (i.e. between crime reports and arrests). What this actually means is that for serious violent crime, the rates of arrest for different groups roughly match their crime rates. However, this study did find that blacks people are disproportionately arrested for minor offenses (i.e. out of proportion for committing them), so yes, racial biases do exist and it's important to understand them.
Lastly - of course all wrongful police killings are terrible! But a 1 in 1000 lifetime chance (which includes not only wrongful killings but being killed in the commission of a violent crime) is fairly low compared to, say, the lifetime risk of being killed in an auto accident (about 1 in 100). Does that mean we're paying too much attention to police killings? No, of course not -- a wrongful killing by an agent of the state is uniquely terrible. It still seems to me that it's important to keep things in perspective. Is the gap between 1 in 1000 and 1 in 2500 (a white male's chance of being killed by police) so great as to justify constant fear?
I hope you don't think I'm minimizing these issues or saying that there's no problem to address. The question is what facts do we start with and what remedies do we need. Thanks for listening!
It was very sweet of you to get back to me at all! Thank you!
My comments were absolutely blanket claims about racism being "baked into" policing, but they were a short hand meant to distill many studies and scholarly articles that support such claims and my personal experiences working on the issue of police and criminal justice reform for many years in Los Angeles. I was trying to be quick and keep things short. I see now I should have gone through the trouble of citing sources at the start. I’m about to go to bed, so I hope you don’t mind, I’ll do that tomorrow.
But before I go, you may have heard the people of Los Angeles County are once again reeling because the police shot and killed a 15 year old black boy named Ryan Gainer. I’ve seen the body camera footage, and I’m sure some may claim the murder was justified. The slight boy was in his pajamas and was coming at the officer with a large gardening tool after all. I am angry, yes, but mostly I am sad. I am sad that this keeps happening. I am said that the police are not properly trained to deal with people having mental health crises (Ryan was autistic) and no matter the circumstances, young black men are more likely to be perceived as a threat.
Something I’ll also get into tomorrow was a run in I had with police in my early 20s while I was in the throes of a manic episode for what was then undiagnosed bipolar disorder. The police treated me with a shocking amount of deference. I will get into the reasons why tomorrow when I thoroughly present my assessment of the problems tomorrow based on years of research and years of work, not lip service and blanket statements.
Until then, I’ll leave you with a video of Ryan talking about why he thinks it’s important to be a good person and spread kindness.
I do not believe this sweet boy needed to die and I do think systemic bias is the reason why. (Bold statements, I know, that I’ll get into tomorrow).
Thanks again for getting back to me. And I’ll follow up soon. Good luck with your deadlines.
I confess that the excited delirium section managed to shock me, even though I thought I was somewhat familiar with the applications for BS exoneration. Good fucking grief.
This has inspired me to subscribe to my first substack. As a retired physician (department chair) I really appreciate the quality of medical knowledge you have acquired and used in these pieces. Before I was a physician I was a Navy Corpsman. I mostly worked on psych wards and then worked in mental health emergency centers to help pay my way through school. I have helped retain hundreds of violent psych patients, many of them on drugs. Even back when i was doing this we knew it was risky to sit on someone's back for very long and we never put a knee in someone's back unless we were overwhelmed and then only until we regained control.
Glad to see that the BS about delirium has finally been dropped by the ED docs. Never believed and have never seen it in all my years. The claims about drug levels have been so transparently false I have been ashamed, but not surprised, that anyone in the medical field would support them.
And, if drugs like Ketamine are used to subdue the patient, they are then monitored! It is insane that there are people in the field apparently giving huge doses of ketamine and then not monitoring these people. Although the paramedic who killed Elijah McClain in this manner was apparently convicted. But the people who set those policies in place were not! I spent 6 weeks in a CPEP (emergency psych ER in NY) and saw many, many people who needed to be subdued either for their safety or ours or both. We have protocols in place to handle this. The police should have similar protocols. We also have a strong culture of reviewing in detail in our morbidity and mortality rounds when something goes wrong. We do this to learn from and to prevent another bad outcome. The entire way police handle bad outcomes needs to be re-visited and revised.
So, Coleman, Bari & Co. have (apparently) opted to abandon this disagreement, and instead lean on something as weak and dubious as, "We invited Radley to be a guest on our podcast but he declined."
Wow. Just wow. It is what it is (I guess).
I recall how quickly Hughes responded to a negative review of his book at currentaffairs.org. He proffered a full-throated, parsed out and lengthy written response--literally the opposite of this--and it only took him a week or so.
Was his response here different because Radley's critique was less serious? Obviously not.
Outstanding work, Mr. Balko. I'm so glad I subscribed. You and your wife are one hell of a reporting duo.
One thing I was reminded about the Michael Brown case when reading this amazes me. His killing was justified once you accept that his walking in the street required a police response. The kid had literally just shoplifted but the police likely would have never even investigated that actual crime. Yet they were very good at harassing folks for walking in the street or other harmless junk. Amazing.
Not quite. According to Wilson (and corroborated by police communications), he initially slowed town to tell Brown & his friend not to walk in the middle of the street, but then realized that they matched the description of suspects in a theft (or arguably a robbery since Brown physically intimidated and shoved the clerk who tried to stop him) which had gone out on the radio.
I have enjoyed being a subscriber since I first caught wind of the The Watch (was it Fall 2023?). As with most if not all the work on The Watch, this series was thorough, shocking, and enlightening. Thank you.
Thank you so much for the work you do! I feel like the oppression and abuse of marginalized people does not get the attention from the media that it should. Your continued focus on these concerns is so important!
Thanks for doing this series. I just subscribed because of it. I feel silly making a formatting request in the comment section of an important topic, but... is it possible for you to tweak the layout so that links are underlined or the link-color is lighter? I have red-green color deficiency, and it is hard for me to find the dark red links in the text.
Thank you Radley for this 3 part series. Saved parts 2, 2 update, and 3 for a Saturday morning to give my full attention. You need a tip jar for subscribers like myself who think this kind of work justifies more. Maybe I missed it.
As for the DEI drawing some rebuke, I would be interested in seeing data on whether the criticisms come more from non-marginalized folks. It seems that way, but it could be confirmation bias. I read a quote once about decentering is not discrimination.
Radley: Thank you for this series. Incredible, important work. A real service to the discourse of a kind that few people ever make.
There is just one element I wish was not in this latest piece and that is the casual swipes you take against the backlash against DEI.
It sounds from your description like Joye Carter is doing important work. I know for sure that Jennifer Eberhardt at Stanford is doing important work with police departments as well. I am huge fan of Eberhardt. I believe that if everyone in American read her amazing book "Biased" (along Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind") our country would be a far, far better place. Doubtless you have Carter and Eberhardt's type of work in mind when you're pushing back against the criticism of DEI.
But while I share your belief in the importance of this work, my own experience and research about DEI programs in the corporate workplace and everything I have read and heard about them in universities makes me believe that the criticisms of of these programs is warranted and that most of them are at best useless and at worst genuinely harmful.
So I think when you casually defend "DEI" in the way that you did you're making the exact same mistake Rufo did in the opposite direction. Both of you rhetorically combine all DEI programs into a single bucket. When Rufo does it, he is trying to discredit the good along with the bad. When you do it, you're (hopefully unintentionally) defending the bad along with the good. So I would hope going forward you'll be more precise in your defense of constructive DEI initiatives.
Thanks for the comment. I've seen some DEI stuff that I think is overwrought. But even the over-the-top examples I've seen from people like Rufo seem more silly than harmful. That said, it's not an area in which I've done much research, so I take your point. Didn't intend to sound all-encompassing. I just know that the stuff that falls under DEI when it comes to policing, forensics, and other areas of criminal justice tends to focus on correcting inherent flaws and injustices that have been built in to the current system, which seems pretty sensible. And when police groups rail against these policies, they lump it in with the larger DEI backlash.
"So I think when you casually defend "DEI" in the way that you did you're making the exact same mistake Rufo did in the opposite direction. "
This seems pretty straightforwardly not the case. The exact mistake Rufo is making is a bigoted assumption that no changes need to be made to current attitudes toward historically marginalized groups. Whether or not one would defend all of the many specific implementations of DEI, it is quite clear (based on the overwhelming testimony of affected groups and organizations that advocate for and represent the same) that something aiming in the direction of DEI is badly needed in essentially every American institution. To defend these efforts is demonstrably not the same as demonizing them.
This whole series was so well done that I had to become a subscriber and support your work.
Just paid up as well for the same reason.
Subbed for the same reason!
Me, too!
Ditto
I paid for a subscription after I read the first two parts of this series for free. Thank you for excellent work. Some thoughts...
1. You were right to criticize Coleman Hughes. He (and Loury/McWhorter) promoted an obviously biased and flawed documentary. They should be called to account and you did that in a rational, even-handed manner relying on evidence.
2. Roland Fryer got famous a few years ago after he published a paper that found no difference in the incidece of deaths in custody between black and white victims. What I'd love to hear more about is the difference in lower level harrassment for black vs. white citizens in major urban centers. I think this ongoing, low level police mistreatment has a significant affect on the social development and socialization of young, African American males. It contributes to a distrust of authority and reinforces the widely held belief that the lives of young black men are defined and constrained by the color of their skin. I'm sure experts have expounded on the effect of police harrassment in poorer, inner city African American communities. I'd love to read them and hear your opinion about them
Thanks for an excellent series.
Thanks! I'm planning to write on these issues soon. Short take: I think Fryer's study was was flawed, but I also think he's been treated unfairly. I'm also not sure if it's really possible to know if there is racial bias in police shootings. We do know (and Fryer has acknowledged) that there is extensive racial bias in just about every other police interaction, from stops, to searches, to escalation, to use of non-lethal force.
Of all the incredible insight and deeply researched conclusions presented here and in this series, a few things stand out for me:
—why do police often insist on excessive restraint when the suspect is not resisting in any way?
—why do police use tasers or pepper spray or other dangerous tools when there is no risk or bad behavior at issue?
—during the 2020 protests, a Twitter account documented hundreds of video examples of police engaging in violent and/or unnecessary physical responses to apparently harmless protestors - what causes that routine response?
I don’t understand. Just do the job in a logical and professional way. This consistent desire and reflex for some to go too far just boggles the mind, especially with what is at stake for both the victim and the perpetrator.
I think many people think there are a lot of “close cases”, where a situation evolves in an idiosyncratic way. But that is not really the case. I am hopeful we are moving in a positive direction with these behaviors - certainly RB’s work contributes to that likelihood.
I am an oral surgeon and routinely do IV anesthesia in my office. This means that I routinely straddle the line between conscious and unconscious, always ready to step in if we go over into unconscious. So, I am very well schooled in breathing and monitoring for breathing. It is Anesthesia 101 to know that the amount of weight on the chest adversely affects breathing. We are literally taught on day 1 to sit the patient up if they are having trouble breathing solely to get the weight off their chest. We are taught on day 2 to be very reluctant to offer IV anesthesia, without putting a breathing tube in, to people who have a lot of upper body weight. This is because we KNOW that we will have difficulty keeping them breathing while lying them back to work on them specifically because of the excess weight on their chest.
It is not a huge stretch of the imagination to think that putting a full grown police officer, weighed down with all of his gear, on top of a chest would also lead to the person having trouble breathing. The fact that people who purportedly call themselves doctor suggest that the excess weight of a police officer laden down with equipment is not related to trouble breathing is offensive. Honestly, it would be laughable if people weren't dying.
Another thought to consider is how to safely provide anesthesia to a prone patient. There are times in the operating room that the surgeon needs to work on the back of a patient. This means the patient needs to be upside down (prone). Some of these surgeries are quick and some are very, very long. No matter how long the anticipated procedure is, however, the anesthesia team goes to incredible lengths to flip the patient (after the breathing tube is in!). The monitoring of these patients is extreme because this is long recognized as a dangerous position, especially in people not breathing as they would normally do. For the police to so casually flip people, especially those who may be on drugs (by definition have the potential to have altered breathing) and then hold them with weight on their chest is basically just asking to hurt or kill people.
I found this to be the most convincing and best written of this series. The way to combat misinformation (and outright lying) is with good information. This series proves that point.
Radley, I really appreciate this series (and just subscribed). Don't know if you've seen but I also wrote about it recently in my Newsday column. https://www.newsday.com/opinion/columnists/cathy-young/woke-anti-woke-derek-chauvin-george-floyd-i0un1yec (unpaywalled link: https://archive.is/u6kb0) As someone who has found Coleman Hughes's work interesting and smart in the past, I'm really disappointed in his response. (Loury and McWhorter really set the standard for how to respond to criticism.)
As for the larger issue, I agree with many of your points, with some caveats. While racial biases in policing unquestionably exist (& as you say in the comments, the Roland Fryer story supports it, even though many conservatives have misreported it as showing no bias), the BLM narrative is crude and simplistic & creates its own dangers. I remember a NYT op-ed shortly after the George Floyd murder in which the author, a black New Yorker, literally feels every time he leaves home that he may not come back alive because a cop will shoot him. Sorry, but that's insane. (He's far more likely to be fatally hit by a car.) Of course this is partly related to personal experience and cultural history, but a climate that ratchets up such fears to such a degree isn't helping anyone (I would say the same of overwrought claims about women being in constant danger of rape). White women who have called the police (including campus police), rightly or wrongly, over conflicts with black women have been accused of literally trying to murder them. (IIRC, a black woman is about 20 times less likely to be fatally shot by police than a white male.) In some cases, riots happened based on a narrative that turned out to be patently false (e.g. the Jacob Blake shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin). And you're probably aware of the Travis Campbell study showing that more BLM protests were subsequently correlated with about 200 fewer police homicides but about 3,000 more non-police homicides. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/opinion/black-lives-matter-depolicing-homicides.html I don't think there's a straightforward trajectory of blame, obviously, but it's something to ponder.
Lastly, I think the "systemic racism" perspective is often unhelpful because it fails to look at more specific causes of racial biases in policing and weed out the "bad apples." My guess is that part of the problem is a general tendency among (many) cops to take a cruel, punitive attitude toward civilians they see as either defiant toward police or as "lowlifes" (not only lawbreakers of any kind but people who don't conform to the social order). This attitude is probably often correlated with racism because the "lowlifes" are profiled as disproportionately black. Another part of the problem is straight-up conscious racism, as in your anecdote about the Somali teens. Talk of racism being "baked into" American policing, or being present by design, treats it as almost independent of individual will and agency. It's not, and it can and should be addressed.
I have more thoughts but I'll leave it at that! Thanks again for the series.
Hi Cathy, Bulwark subscriber here! I am a bit confused by your assessment of "systemic racism." Is your main point that instances of police brutality and misconduct should be examined on a case-by-case basis and that having an understanding of the ways in which unconscious bias is imbedded in our institutions is a hinderance to that objective? How is taking a more cursory look at policing at odds with also rooting out specific instances of racially motivated misconduct? Systemic racism, as it applies to policing, is just a framework to understand and address the ways in which people of color are disproportionately affected through every stage of the criminal justice system, despite the evidence that different racial and ethnic groups commit crimes at roughly the same rates. Addressing those material realities is a means to just that. I don't think it's fair to say focusing on the issues ratchets up fear in a disproportionate way when approximately 1 in every 1,000 Black men is killed by police (https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1821204116). When it comes to the murder of George Floyd in particular, I wonder how anyone could watch the video of his death and think anything could justify the manner in which he was killed. I think we sometimes get caught up navigating hypotheticals as part of a semantic exercise when the conclusion of what happened is quite straightforward. We saw the video. We watched him die. We saw him on the ground, in handcuffs, crying out for his mother as he slowly lost consciousness. What perceived threat could he have posed or what possible crime could he have committed that would justify being killed the way he was?
Hi Kate! Sorry about the late reply (working on multiple deadlines). I appreciate your comment and the Bulwark subscription, of course!
To begin with, I completely agree with the last part of your comment. I think the situation with George Floyd's death was fairly clear and as I said in my comment, I thought it was misguided for Coleman Hughes to promote a "debunking." Radley's rebuttal was excellent. Do we have evidence that the murder was racially motivated? I don't know. There was a fairly similar case with a mentally ill white man, Tony Timpa, who suffocated to death while being restrained by cops who not only ignored but mocked his pleas for help thinking that he was simply being hysterical. (No one was punished in that case.) There was also a case in 2005 involving a white man who was having a drug episode and died while a black cop was sitting on his back to hold him down. BUT I agree that given the very real history of racism in American policing, it was totally understandable that the public (especially the black community) reacted with such intensity.
As for my comments on "systemic racism": I certainly don't object to studying racial patterns in law enforcement, my issue is more with blanket claims about racism being "baked into" policing instead of focusing on specific factors that contribute to racial biases. I'm all for looking into those. But with all due respect, your comment shows why the rhetoric around the issue can complicate understanding. You said that "people of color are disproportionately affected through every stage of the criminal justice system, despite the evidence that different racial and ethnic groups commit crimes at roughly the same rates." While there is evidence of disparate treatment, the last part of your statement is mistaken, as this 2021 paper from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics will show: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/revcoa18.pdf Using not just arrests but victim reports to the police and to crime victimization surveys as a measure, black Americans make up 12.5% of the US population but account for 35.5% of nonfatal violent offenses. (Hispanics and especially Asians, on the other hand, are underrepresented among offenders.) Does this justify right-wing hatemongering about "black crime," or even racist claims that black people are innately prone to violence? No, of course not. There are also crime-rate disparities among white ethnic groups in America, and crime rates in various majority-black and majority-white countries show a lot of variation. In the US these patterns have a lot to do with the legacy of racism, above all economic disadvantage. These patterns also don't justify racial profiling, which definitely happens! But we also need to have a clear picture of the facts and data.
Ironically, the study I linked has been cited by Media Matters as showing that "Among the most serious incidents of violent crime (rape or sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated assault), there were no statistically significant differences by race between offenders." But that sentence is truncated; the full sentence says "between offenders identified in the NCVS and persons arrested per the UCR" (i.e. between crime reports and arrests). What this actually means is that for serious violent crime, the rates of arrest for different groups roughly match their crime rates. However, this study did find that blacks people are disproportionately arrested for minor offenses (i.e. out of proportion for committing them), so yes, racial biases do exist and it's important to understand them.
Lastly - of course all wrongful police killings are terrible! But a 1 in 1000 lifetime chance (which includes not only wrongful killings but being killed in the commission of a violent crime) is fairly low compared to, say, the lifetime risk of being killed in an auto accident (about 1 in 100). Does that mean we're paying too much attention to police killings? No, of course not -- a wrongful killing by an agent of the state is uniquely terrible. It still seems to me that it's important to keep things in perspective. Is the gap between 1 in 1000 and 1 in 2500 (a white male's chance of being killed by police) so great as to justify constant fear?
I hope you don't think I'm minimizing these issues or saying that there's no problem to address. The question is what facts do we start with and what remedies do we need. Thanks for listening!
Hi Cathy,
It was very sweet of you to get back to me at all! Thank you!
My comments were absolutely blanket claims about racism being "baked into" policing, but they were a short hand meant to distill many studies and scholarly articles that support such claims and my personal experiences working on the issue of police and criminal justice reform for many years in Los Angeles. I was trying to be quick and keep things short. I see now I should have gone through the trouble of citing sources at the start. I’m about to go to bed, so I hope you don’t mind, I’ll do that tomorrow.
But before I go, you may have heard the people of Los Angeles County are once again reeling because the police shot and killed a 15 year old black boy named Ryan Gainer. I’ve seen the body camera footage, and I’m sure some may claim the murder was justified. The slight boy was in his pajamas and was coming at the officer with a large gardening tool after all. I am angry, yes, but mostly I am sad. I am sad that this keeps happening. I am said that the police are not properly trained to deal with people having mental health crises (Ryan was autistic) and no matter the circumstances, young black men are more likely to be perceived as a threat.
Something I’ll also get into tomorrow was a run in I had with police in my early 20s while I was in the throes of a manic episode for what was then undiagnosed bipolar disorder. The police treated me with a shocking amount of deference. I will get into the reasons why tomorrow when I thoroughly present my assessment of the problems tomorrow based on years of research and years of work, not lip service and blanket statements.
Until then, I’ll leave you with a video of Ryan talking about why he thinks it’s important to be a good person and spread kindness.
I do not believe this sweet boy needed to die and I do think systemic bias is the reason why. (Bold statements, I know, that I’ll get into tomorrow).
Thanks again for getting back to me. And I’ll follow up soon. Good luck with your deadlines.
Best,
Kate
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLNQKX5F/
THANK YOU for all the work writing this series.
I confess that the excited delirium section managed to shock me, even though I thought I was somewhat familiar with the applications for BS exoneration. Good fucking grief.
This has inspired me to subscribe to my first substack. As a retired physician (department chair) I really appreciate the quality of medical knowledge you have acquired and used in these pieces. Before I was a physician I was a Navy Corpsman. I mostly worked on psych wards and then worked in mental health emergency centers to help pay my way through school. I have helped retain hundreds of violent psych patients, many of them on drugs. Even back when i was doing this we knew it was risky to sit on someone's back for very long and we never put a knee in someone's back unless we were overwhelmed and then only until we regained control.
Glad to see that the BS about delirium has finally been dropped by the ED docs. Never believed and have never seen it in all my years. The claims about drug levels have been so transparently false I have been ashamed, but not surprised, that anyone in the medical field would support them.
Steve
And, if drugs like Ketamine are used to subdue the patient, they are then monitored! It is insane that there are people in the field apparently giving huge doses of ketamine and then not monitoring these people. Although the paramedic who killed Elijah McClain in this manner was apparently convicted. But the people who set those policies in place were not! I spent 6 weeks in a CPEP (emergency psych ER in NY) and saw many, many people who needed to be subdued either for their safety or ours or both. We have protocols in place to handle this. The police should have similar protocols. We also have a strong culture of reviewing in detail in our morbidity and mortality rounds when something goes wrong. We do this to learn from and to prevent another bad outcome. The entire way police handle bad outcomes needs to be re-visited and revised.
I'm a paid subscriber now. Solely because of one hell of a series entitled "The Retconning of George Floyd".
A few smart-ish people have attempted to debunk this debunker--they have failed thus far.
Like *seriously* failed.
So, Coleman, Bari & Co. have (apparently) opted to abandon this disagreement, and instead lean on something as weak and dubious as, "We invited Radley to be a guest on our podcast but he declined."
Wow. Just wow. It is what it is (I guess).
I recall how quickly Hughes responded to a negative review of his book at currentaffairs.org. He proffered a full-throated, parsed out and lengthy written response--literally the opposite of this--and it only took him a week or so.
Was his response here different because Radley's critique was less serious? Obviously not.
Sad. Just sad.
You guys debated? I cannot wait to hear this.
Hang on, where did you get that info?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_iOCKMAzIA
Outstanding work, Mr. Balko. I'm so glad I subscribed. You and your wife are one hell of a reporting duo.
One thing I was reminded about the Michael Brown case when reading this amazes me. His killing was justified once you accept that his walking in the street required a police response. The kid had literally just shoplifted but the police likely would have never even investigated that actual crime. Yet they were very good at harassing folks for walking in the street or other harmless junk. Amazing.
Not quite. According to Wilson (and corroborated by police communications), he initially slowed town to tell Brown & his friend not to walk in the middle of the street, but then realized that they matched the description of suspects in a theft (or arguably a robbery since Brown physically intimidated and shoved the clerk who tried to stop him) which had gone out on the radio.
https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/doj_report_on_shooting_of_michael_brown_1.pdf
I have enjoyed being a subscriber since I first caught wind of the The Watch (was it Fall 2023?). As with most if not all the work on The Watch, this series was thorough, shocking, and enlightening. Thank you.
Amazing work as always.
just for fun-
'The aphorism they’re butchering is “one bad apple spoils the bunch.” If you don’t remove the bad apples, the rot spreads.'
Perhaps they are instead remembering Donny Osmond who told us, "one bad apple dont' spoil the whole bunch, girl!"
Thank you so much for the work you do! I feel like the oppression and abuse of marginalized people does not get the attention from the media that it should. Your continued focus on these concerns is so important!
Thanks for doing this series. I just subscribed because of it. I feel silly making a formatting request in the comment section of an important topic, but... is it possible for you to tweak the layout so that links are underlined or the link-color is lighter? I have red-green color deficiency, and it is hard for me to find the dark red links in the text.
Thank you Radley for this 3 part series. Saved parts 2, 2 update, and 3 for a Saturday morning to give my full attention. You need a tip jar for subscribers like myself who think this kind of work justifies more. Maybe I missed it.
As for the DEI drawing some rebuke, I would be interested in seeing data on whether the criticisms come more from non-marginalized folks. It seems that way, but it could be confirmation bias. I read a quote once about decentering is not discrimination.
Thank you again.
The polling I've seen shows that only a small minority of people oppose DEI programs, across nearly every demographic, and for most demographics, a majority think they're a good thing. See here: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2023/05/17/diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-the-workplace/