Independent Reporting Shows Cops Are Still Killing People At An Alarming Rate

Legal Issues

from the us-vs.-them-means-they-still-get-to-kill-us-with-impunity dept

Law enforcement agencies have no interest in tracking how often officers kill people. Despite all the talk about police reform, very few states require accurate reporting on deadly force deployments.

Even the DOJ doesn’t care. The federal face of law enforcement has been required to compile this data for over two decades. It has yet to provide an accurate account of US law enforcement deadly force use. Part of that isn’t the DOJ’s fault. It can’t mandate reporting due to the US Constitution, which limits how much direct intervention the federal government can engage in when dealing with state and local level issues.

The other factor in this perpetual under-reporting is due to the DOJ’s disinterest in obtaining accurate force deployment stats. Doing the job correctly would just turn local agencies with a predilection for killing against the DOJ, which means less cooperation when things the DOJ actually considers important (drug busts, forfeitures, etc.) are on the line.

This means that, for years, the private sector has been forced to do the government’s work for it. Multiple efforts have been mounted to accurately track killings by police officers, utilizing open-source data and public record requests to provide a fuller picture than the DOJ — with all of its billions in funding — has continually failed to provide.

What’s treated as “official” by government agencies is a massive misrepresentation of the actual facts. The private sector doesn’t need billions to accomplish what governments won’t. All it needs is people interested in reporting the truth.

And the uncomfortable truth is that law enforcement at all levels hasn’t been reformed, at least not noticeably. The tally for last year outpaces the years leading up to the supposed law enforcement reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Here’s Trone Dowd, reporting for Vice News:

Mapping Police Violence’s 2022 tracking found that 1,176 people died during encounters with police last year, the highest number the organization has ever recorded. Samuel Sinyangwe, the creator of the project, said the number includes anyone who was killed by police, be it by shooting or other forms of force. According to Mapping Police Violence,  police killed the equivalent of 3.2 people per day in 2022—and there were only 12 days in the whole year when a deadly police encounter was not reported. 

Suppose you were an idiot. You might respond to this by saying something like, “Well, cops routinely deal with violent and dangerous people, so it’s no surprise they’ve killed [this year’s death total].”

Well, let’s talk about the “danger” and “violence” you (a rhetorical idiot) might present as a supposedly valid counterpoint. Here’s more data… again not collected, compiled, reported, collated, documented, or distributed by any actual government-powered clearinghouse.

More than a third of those killed by police encountered the authorities during a traffic stop, a mental health and welfare check, or a non-violent offense. 

Cops turn routine stops into dangerous encounters by engaging in pretextual stops predicated on minor moving violations that soon escalate into full-blown, warrantless, ad hoc criminal investigations that convert “routine stops” into Ralph-Wiggum-on-the-bus without any assistance from those being pulled over.

When you create the danger, you can’t use that danger to excuse your actions. I mean, theoretically. In practicality, it happens all the time. So, if traffic stops turn deadly, it’s probably because officers are engaging in fishing expeditions, rather than getting to the alleged point of the stop.

The other cases are the unhealthy side effects of sending cops out to “help” people. That’s not their job and it’s certainly nothing they’re trained to do. Most training involves securing scenes and neutralizing threats. Mental health issues present cops with people behaving unpredictably. And their training mandates they treat unexpected behavior as a threat to their safety. Consequently, people in need of mental health assistance are often helped to death by officers whose mental health toolkit is composed of bad information and bullets.

The same thing can be said about welfare checks. Cops see welfare checks as an opportunity to happen upon other criminal activity. People in need of a welfare check seldom expect police to react with violence to a secondhand cry for help. Case in point: Ft. Worth police officer Aaron Dean, who was recently convicted of manslaughter for shooting a woman through the window of her house while performing a “welfare check” that involved him walking around in the dark outside of Atatiana Wilson’s home without announcing his presence and shooting her within one second of spotting her through her window.

It’s all broken. And all the efforts to reform police haven’t changed a thing. It’s still the way it’s always been. Cops can kill. With impunity.

According to the data, 98.1 percent of officers involved in the death of a citizen between 2013 and 2022 faced no charges. Less than 0.3 percent of officers were convicted.

There’s a lot that needs to be fixed. Unfortunately, after decades of neglect and rot, a lot of this seems irreparable. But if we could just stop cops from killing people they were asked to help, we might finally see a drastic reduction in annual “killed by cops” numbers. But if cops don’t even want to be honest about killings they assert are always justified, what hope do we have that reform efforts that ignore the root of the problem (entrenched law enforcement culture) will ever succeed?

Filed Under: deadly force, police, police killing, police violence