Fatal shootings by police appear to be diminishing, even too low in the coronavirus pandemic, and Blacks, Latinos and Indians remain disproportionately affected by deadly police shootings compared to white people, a study released Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Such shootings are “so routine that even during a nationwide pandemic, with far fewer people traveling outside their homes and police departments reducing contact with the public, so as not to spread the virus, police have continued to shoot people dead in. the same rate, far in 2020, as they did in the same period from 2015 to 2019, “according to the report, which was based on data analysis from the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
The data also showed that several states saw an increase in the rate of people being shot dead by police in 2020 in the previous five years.
“We thought maybe the police would delay their killing of people during the pandemic,” said Udi Ofer, director of the ACLU’s Justice Division. “We were wrong.”
From January to June of this year, there were 511 fatal police shootings, according to the report, up from 484 in the same period in 2019. In the first six months of 2018, there were 550 fatal police shootings; in 2017 there were 493; in 2016 there were 498; and in 2015 there were 465.
Investigators examined figures from a database maintained by The Washington Post, which followed deadly police shootings via news accounts, social media messages and police reports in the wake of the 2014 murder of Black teenager Michael Brown by police in Ferguson, Missouri. The database has found that fatal police shootings have remained at a constant of almost 1000 per year since 2015, which the Post says can be explained by a “chance theory” that suggests “the number of rare events in enormous populations tends to be stably absent. social changes remain, such as a fundamental shift in police culture or extreme restrictions on gun ownership. “
Researchers said they wondered whether a once-in-a-century public health crisis that generated increased social isolation would result in a reduction in police killings.
“We want to sound the alarm that even when the nation was locked up in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic … that did not stop police from fatally shooting people at the same rate,” Ofer said. The report does not position why the number of shootings remained at the same level in 2020, although Ofer added that it underscored how police officers went through those months and stressed that not everyone had the opportunity to quarantine at home.
The report only examines fatal shootings on duty and not other types of incidents in which people died during or after a police meeting.
After the United States began reporting coronavirus deaths in early March, the number of fatal shots per week did not decrease compared to the first two months of the year. But investigators knew that in the five weeks following the May 25 murder of George Floyd, a Black man who died after a Minneapolis police officer dug his knee into Floyd’s neck, fatal police words “crashed” from more than 25 per week to less than 15.
Floyd’s death led to a wave of worldwide protests against police brutality, as well as calls for activists for police reform and even the kidnapping or dismantling of police departments. Some states and individual departments, including in Minneapolis and New York City, announced significant changes in police.
Despite a noticeable drop in fatal police shootings in June, the ACLU report said it “can not draw any significant conclusions from data over such a short period of time” and that the figures need to be tracked to “better understand than, in fact, protests, public outrage, and associated policy changes have diminished police shootings. “
The ACLU report also identified seven states – Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Montana and Nevada – as substantially fatal shootings in the first six months of 2020 compared to last year.
Emily Greytak, the director of research at ACLU, said further analysis is needed to determine why. Historically, she said, there has been a lack of both comprehensive national data on police words and analyzes of how racial bias plays out in fatal police meetings.
While fatal police shootings remained relatively unchanged in the first six months of 2020, crime generally fell across major U.S. cities compared to previous years.
That decline could likely be attributed to people staying indoors during the pandemic, said Christopher Herrmann, a former crime analyst supervisor at the New York Police Department and a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
This summer saw a rise in violent crime, including shootings and murders, in cities such as Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. Herrmann said the typical rise of crime in the summer along with the effects of the pandemic, including job losses, are assumed factors.
The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, studied data on crime from 27 cities from January 2017 to June 2020 and found that rates of murder, aggravated assault and assault began to “increase significantly in late May.” Several factors probably explain these trends, including diminished police legitimacy in the wake of Floyd’s assassination. “
“Obviously, all of these things will make police more cautious, less proactive, less productive,” Herrmann said, adding that lower morale among officers and a “COVID effect” in which police are more out of hand due to fears about the virus are related.
Across the country, discussions about the allocation of police funding have heated up in cities like New York, where the city council voted in June to allocate $ 1 billion from the budget of the nation’s largest police department, and Houston, where the city council that same month rejected a proposal to move nearly $ 12 million from the police budget to fund sweeping police reform initiatives, also favored by community advocates, who would rather spend more of the money to improve social and public health care.
After expecting a new class of 74 recruits a week from the police academy, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said others in the community made it clear they did not want less police work, “they want good policing.”
Some cities are making “cuts without actually studying the consequences,” said Acevedo, who is also president of the Association of Major Cities Chiefs this year, which represents about 69 city bureaus for state rights.
The ACLU supports reducing roles and responsibilities for legislation to reduce the number of fatalities. The group says the government should separate from police budgets and instead divert the money to social services and community programs that can help with mental illness and other problems, and put an end to police interactions for “senseless crimes”, including petty riots.
Following Floyd’s death, Steven Casstevens, president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a nonprofit representing legislators, said agencies in recent years have worked to reduce the use of force and maintaining police responsibility.
Casstevens, the Buffalo Grove, Illinois police officer, has urged all agencies to participate in the FBI’s National Use of Force Database, which has been criticized for being incomplete and ineffective for leading police reform, and officers to follow to a use of violent policies that place a value on the preservation of human life.
But simply losing resources or shifting from police departments is not the answer, Casstevens added.
“Change will require both dedicated resources and a continued commitment of police leaders, community members and elected officials,” he wrote in an open letter. “Now is not the time to further limit the capacity of police agencies.”
In Houston, where the homicide rate is up 27 percent from a year ago, Acevedo said the pandemic, along with increased domestic violence, drug and mental health problems, all fuel the bigger problem. Earlier this month, the city saw its 18th fatal police officer shot dead in 2020.
While Acevedo has won praise for marching with activists after Floyd’s assassination, he has also removed criticism from some Protestants who are pushing for more transparency in Houston.
He said Tuesday that his department had been able to halve the number of officer-involved shootings in the past eight years, and that it was necessary to look at why each individual case turned into a mortality.
“Critics of policing only want to focus on the number and the race, but they do not want to look at the individual circumstances,” he said. “Look at the facts, look at the evidence, and then decide as prosecutors if the criminal justice system failed to hold officers accountable. Do not use a broad brush.”
He added that the proliferation of officer body cameras and the dissemination of video for recording public camera meetings are forcing departments to improve their training.
“We have come a long way, but the work never ends,” Acevedo said.
ACLU investigators argue that even as violent crimes rise, the door should not yet open for an increase in deadly police conferences.
“Whether crime goes up or down, whether we’re in a pandemic or not, police continue to kill people,” Ofer said.
