A wise man who’s either Baba Oje or Gurdijeff once said, "When it rains, it pours." If the rain in this idiom was news regarding police brutality, then this week was a monsoon.
With the increased scrutiny that has been placed on policing tactics in recent years, many — such as the federal government and journalists — have sought to obtain hard data and numbers that could help shed light on the day-to-day realities of American policing. The problem is, there are next to none.
As several media outlets covered this week, there is no formalized agency or record-keeping service dedicated to tracking police shootings or homicides. As Leon Neyfakh noted in an article for Slate, a national FBI database for these incidents exists, but the data is culled from police departments who submit such information on a voluntary basis. Neyfakh correctly asserts this renders the database close to useless. It is not as though asking for such information is a nefarious request; data provides insight, insight gives way to strategies and strategies pave the way for reform.
This gross oversight was the subject of several headlines this week, as two separate investigations by media outlets published their long-researched findings. KPCC, an NPR member station in Pasadena, California, created a database of shootings by police officers in Los Angeles County from 2010 to 2014. Likewise, the Daytona Beach News-Journal from — you guessed it — Daytona Beach, Florida, tracked and analyzed officer-related shootings from 2013 to 2014. Unlike the KPCC investigation, the Daytona Beach News-Journal’s research concerned police shootings on a statewide scale.
For anyone who follows the news, the findings should not prove surprising. NPR’s piece on KPCC’s findings summarizes the investigation succinctly: "During those five years… police shot 375 people; no officers were prosecuted." The piece goes on to note, "Of the people shot, about one in four was unarmed… 24 percent of those shot and killed were black, while African-Americans make up 8 percent of the L.A. County population."
The News-Journal’s investigation follows a similar narrative, but the most upsetting details of their findings lie not in the data, but in the human narratives between the numbers. The News-Journal found more than one instance of police fatally shooting unarmed, mentally ill individuals. To make matters worse, these officers had been called to quell the situation, not exacerbate them.
"In one case, an unarmed 24-year-old who had been refusing to take medication for a mental illness was killed after his mother called the police for help," a Slate article on the report says.
What’s mind-boggling about both reports is how few officers were brought to trial — or at the least, formally investigated — for firing their weapons, much less killing unarmed individuals.
These investigations have proved unfortunately prescient, with the murder (because, yes, it WAS murder) of an autistic six year-old boy in Louisiana by two officers. Although they have both been arrested, their circumstances seem to be the exception, rather than the rule.
Putting aside the ongoing culture war over whether police brutality is justified, is it not reasonable to expect police officers to be held accountable as any other civilian for using a weapon on another human being? As detested as bureaucracy is in this country, there needs to be some semblance of a process aimed at gauging whether force was needed, as well as an external system of record keeping. Hiding behind a badge can no longer suffice.
