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‘Black lives matter’: it requires more than rhetoric

Everyone agrees that “Black lives matter.” The question that persists and transcends the rhetoric is how to minimize those deaths.
[additional-authors]
November 11, 2015

Everyone agrees that “Black lives matter.” The question that persists and transcends the rhetoric is how to minimize those deaths. A new study is critically important to understanding the events that have animated so many across the country.

Although the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement argues that the problem is inherent police bias and racism, a new paper suggests the real problem is far more complex and that race bias plays little, if any, role in the disproportionate number of African-American deaths at the hands of law enforcement.

Black Lives Matter has purveyed a narrative that “Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.” That belief leads not only to activism but to a rejection of “respectability politics” (their words).

So entrenched has its worldview become that BLM adherents have no compunction about shouting down presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) or Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, both liberals, to evidence their displeasure. One of their spokesmen accused the L.A. mayor of having “neglected, disrespected and abused the Black community for far too long” as it disrupted his presentation at an African-American church.

Ever since the death of Trayvon Martin (which gave birth to the movement) and the later deaths of Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Walter Scott and Michael Brown, there has been virtually universal acceptance of the notion that cops are out to target and kill Blacks — daring to suggest that all lives matter is considered heresy.

If you doubt the pervasiveness of their viewpoint, try convincing a millennial that the situation is more complex than BLM presents it. Try suggesting that anecdotal evidence of six or 10 cases across a country of 350 million people with about 34,000 arrests per day does not tell a complete story — it’s a tough slog.

The reality is that data that would support the claim that law enforcement is targeting Blacks for “demise” are woefully inadequate. Neither the FBI nor the National Center for Health Statistics keeps consistent reliable data; their “totals can vary wildly,” according to The New York Times. As the Times reported in 2014, “Whether or not racial bias is a significant factor in police homicides is very much an open question.”

Despite that uncertainty, the protests continue and the given wisdom remains given.

But recently, Harvard economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan published a thoughtful, data-driven article that seeks to divine what the official data don’t by themselves reveal. He extrapolates from what is known and draws conclusions.

Mullainathan concludes that, indeed, Blacks are being killed by cops at a disproportionately higher rate (about two and a half times their percentage of the population) but it is likely not the result of bigotry on the part of the police.

Although bias may enter the equation, the fact that Blacks have such a disproportionately higher number of encounters with police results in multiple problems. Every police encounter contains a risk: The officer might be poorly trained, might act with malice or simply make a mistake, and civilians might do something that is perceived as a threat. The omnipresence of guns exaggerates all these risks.

Such risks exist for people of any race — after all, many people killed by police officers are not Black. But having more encounters with police officers, even with officers entirely free of racial bias, can create a greater risk of a fatal shooting.

The article reveals that the percentage of Black arrestees (28.9 percent) and the percentage of descriptions (by victims and witnesses) of suspects who are Black (30 percent) is sufficiently close to the 31.8 percent of the police shooting victims who are African-American to suggest that “if police discrimination were a big factor in the actual killings, we would have expected a larger gap between the arrest rate and the police-killing rate.”

He deals with the possibility that Blacks may be arrested disproportionately to other groups because of racism but suggests that the more likely reasons are the higher percentage of descriptions of suspects (noted above) who are Black and the deployment of police to high-crime areas that tend to be poor and disproportionately Black — two reasons not ascribable to racism by individual cops.

Mullainathan does not argue that police bias might not play a role in the death of African Americans at the hands of police but rather that even if one eliminated “the biases of all police officers [it] would do little to materially reduce the total number of African American killings.”

He does not despair that there is nothing that can be done, but rather he asserts that the focus should be on drug laws and their enforcement. Those laws are among the main reasons that Blacks are more frequently arrested.

If the laws did not so heavily target drug sellers and the disparity between the punishment for crack cocaine (more widely used by African-Americans) and powder cocaine (by whites) were reduced, Black arrest and incarceration rates might decline. If society can reduce the number of encounters that occur between cops and Blacks, the likelihood of bad things happening will also be reduced.

Congress, in one of the few areas of bipartisan agreement, is likely to reduce drug crimes and incarceration rates this year in an attempt to make them fairer, more effective and less costly.

Clearly, this is a complex phenomenon with multiple moving parts — there are no simple answers and there is much work to be done. But what seems equally clear from the data is that cops are responding to the laws that are on the books, and the actions they see and that are reported to them — they are not a collection of bigots out to abuse, disrespect and murder the Black community.


David A. Lehrer is the president of Community Advocates Inc., a Los Angeles-based human relations organization chaired by former L.A. Mayor Richard J. Riordan. For 27 years, he served locally with the Anti-Defamation League, as its counsel and regional director. Joe R. Hicks is a political commentator and vice president of Community Advocates Inc.

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