By Eugene Robinson
Michael Brown’s death was part
of a tragic and unacceptable pattern: Police officers in the United States
shoot and kill civilians in shockingly high numbers. How many killings are
there each year? No one can say for sure, because police departments don’t want
us to know.
According to the FBI’s Uniform
Crime Report, in 2013 there were 461 “justifiable homicides” by police —
defined as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement officer in the line of
duty.” In all but three of these reported killings, officers used firearms.
Eugene Robinson writes a
twice-a-week column on politics and culture, contributes to the PostPartisan
blog, and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at
The Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign
correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant
managing editor in charge of the paper’s Style section.
The true number of fatal police
shootings is surely much higher, however, because many law enforcement agencies
do not report to the FBI database. Attempts by journalists to compile more complete
data by collating local news reports have resulted in estimates as high as
1,000 police killings a year. There is no way to know how many victims, like
Brown, were unarmed.
By contrast, there were no
fatal police shootings in Great Britain last year. Not one. In Germany, there
have been eight police killings over the past two years. In Canada — a country
with its own frontier ethos and no great aversion to firearms — police
shootings average about a dozen a year.
Liberals and conservatives
alike should be outraged at the frequency with which police in this country use
deadly force. There is no greater power that we entrust to the state than the
license to take life. To put it mildly, misuse of this power is at odds with
any notion of limited government.
I realize that the great
majority of police officers never fire their weapons in the line of duty. Most
cops perform capably and honorably in a stressful, dangerous job; 27 were
killed in 2013, according to the FBI. Easy availability of guns means that U.S.
police officers — unlike their counterparts in Britain, Japan or other
countries where there is appropriate gun control — must keep in mind the
possibility that almost any suspect might be packing heat.
But any way you look at it,
something is wrong. Perhaps the training given officers is inadequate. Perhaps
the procedures they follow are wrong. Perhaps an “us vs. them” mentality
estranges some police departments from the communities they are sworn to
protect.
Whatever the reason, it is hard
to escape the conclusion that police in this country are much too quick to
shoot. We’ve seen the heartbreaking results most recently in the fatal shooting
of 28-year-old Akai Gurley, an unarmed man who was suspected of no crime, in
the stairwell of a Brooklyn housing project, and the killing of 12-year-old
Tamir Rice, who was waving a toy gun around a park in Cleveland.
Which brings me to the issue of
race. USA Today analyzed the FBI’s “justifiable homicide” statistics over
several years and found that, of roughly 400 reported police killings annually,
an average of 96 involved a white police officer killing a black person.
Two years ago, D. Brian
Burghart, the editor and publisher of the Reno (Nev.) News & Review,
launched FatalEncounters.org, an ambitious attempt to compile a comprehensive
crowd-sourced database of fatal police shootings. Reports of the October 2012
killing of a naked, unarmed college student by University of South Alabama
police made Burghart wonder how many such shootings there were; the fact that
no one knew the answer made him determined to find it.
Burghart recently summed up
what he has learned so far: “You know who dies in the most population-dense
areas? Black men,” he wrote on Gawker. “You know who dies in the least
population-dense areas? Mentally ill men. It’s not to say there aren’t
dangerous and desperate criminals killed across the line. But African-Americans
and the mentally ill people make up a huge percentage of people killed by
police.”
Burghart and others who have
attempted to count and analyze police shootings shouldn’t have to do the FBI’s
job. All law enforcement agencies should be required to report all uses of
deadly force to the bureau, using a standardized format that allows comparisons
and analysis. Police departments that have nothing to hide should be eager to
cooperate.
A 12-year-old boy said to have
been waving a fake semi-automatic pistol in an Ohio playground dies after he
was shot by police. (Reuters)
The Obama administration has
been laudably aggressive in pressing cities with egregiously high rates of
police shootings, such as Albuquerque, to reform. But no one can really get a
handle on the problem until we know its true scope.
The Michael Brown case presents
issues that go beyond race. An unarmed teenager was shot to death. Whatever his
color, that’s just not right.
