What critics of defund get so, so wrong about US police

It's not just about fatal encounters.

Police killings of unarmed civilians are statistically rare. According to the National Library of Medicine, 1 in every 1,000 Black men might be killed by police, with the risk highest for men and women of all racial groups between ages 20 and 35. The numbers should be closer to 0 (as they are in Great Britain), but the risk of getting killed by a US police officer is low, say, compared to dying in a car accident, which happens to 1 in 107 people, according to the National Safety Council.

Of course, it’s hard to focus on data after watching the latest atrocity: Patrick Lyoya, an immigrant from the Democratic Republic of Congo, on his stomach, an officer straddling his back, and then shooting him in the head.

Police killings are horrifying to watch, but we watch them anyway. Like mass shootings, they happen again and again and again.

They capture the imagination and often spur calls for serious reform of US police. In individual cases, they’re essential to getting justice for the victims. Before the video of George Floyd’s murder went viral, authorities put out a press release that pinned the blame on Floyd, neglecting the fact that a police officer kneeled on his neck for several minutes. But when the latest outrage fades (that’s the problem with things that happen over and over again), critics of serious police reform point out that fatal encounters with law enforcement are statistically rare. What follows, then, is the argument that given the relatively low risk of getting killed by police, officers should not be reined in, because then crime would rise.

Larry Elder @larryelder

Larry Elder Lays Out the Facts on Police Killings: Rare, and Not Racist | MRCTV mrctv.org/videos/larry-e… #GeorgeFloyd

mrctv.orgLarry Elder Lays Out the Facts on Police Killings: Rare, and Not RacistOn the June 2 Hannity, black radio host Larry Elder upset the liberal “fact checkers” by noting the media leave a false impression that whites must not be victims of police shootings, because the media doesn’t cover it when white people are shot.

But it’s not just about police killings. It’s about every day abuses we don’t see, unless our kids are the ones getting groped by cops trying to meet their quotas. When I went on a ride-along with the founder of New York’s chapter of Copwatch, Jose LaSalle, he told me that he was inspired to start recording cops after his 14-year-old stepson was hassled by police in the Bronx. LaSalle told him to record everything, which is how his stepson captured cops calling him a “dirty fucking mutt”—a not nice way to refer to a Puerto Rican—when he asked why he was being stopped.