What is it going to take?

Another week in America brings with it another fatal shooting at the hands of police. This time the victim was a 17 year old girl in Texas. The details of the incident remain unclear, but what is clear is that this is a story that has become entirely too common in this country. The past year has witnessed much unrest as citizens have protested around the country against the conduct of law enforcement, and the sense that the criminal justice system is incapable of holding officers accountable when they use deadly force against unarmed citizens. Much of this conflict has been viewed through the lens of race, and rightly so, as any honest appraisal of the situation would lead one to conclude that minorities face disparate treatment in our legal system. However, racial injustice is not the only issue at work in these scenarios. Police shootings in this country occur at rates far higher than in other industrialized nations. The reasons for this undoubtedly have to do with numerous factors, with racial profiling of suspects serving as only one (although almost assuredly a dominant) factor. The killing mentioned above was not of a person of color; Kristiana Coignard was a small white girl. However, she did have a history of mental illness, and that factor is consistent with research complied by D. Brian Burghart, which concludes that in less densely populated areas the most frequent victims of police deadly force are the mentally ill.

A separate incident occurred this weekend which serves as some confirmation of another conclusion Burghart has reached—specifically, that black males are the most likely to die due to police action in densely populated areas. In New Haven, Connecticut, a Yale student and the son of New York Times columnist Charles Blow was detained at gunpoint by a police officer responding to a report of a burglary. While the student survived the encounter physically unharmed, the fact that the officer encountered the young college student with his sidearm already drawn underscores the risk that young black men face regardless of socioeconomic status. That we are likely only hearing this story because the student in question just happened to be the son of a celebrated columnist underscores the circumstances faced by others across the country on the daily basis.

Recently, Congress finally took the step of passing legislation requiring states to report the number of deaths of individuals in police custody, including demographic factors such as race and gender. Currently, it is almost impossible to determine how many individuals die at the hands of law enforcement each year, with current estimates ranging from 400 to over 1,000 annually. While the actions of Congress are an important first step, they remain inadequate to the situation. However, how to proceed forward is at best an open question. Particularly since law enforcement remains one of the few institutions in this country that the public retains a modicum of faith in. In New York, the ongoing conflict between the Mayor’s office and the Police Benevolent Association highlights the challenges that can come from attempting even modest reforms of an institution which is viewed favorably (at least by the “right” type of people). 

I honestly don’t have the answer to this question, and I don’t want to come off as completely unsympathetic to police officers, who perform a difficult and unquestionably necessary job, and do so the overwhelming majority of the time with a high degree of professionalism. Maybe the responsibility is ultimately societal-wide? Perhaps we’re living in the police state that we’ve demanded? (If you think characterizing the nation as a police state is overstating the case, I’d like to remind you that we incarcerate more people in raw numbers and as a percentage of population than any country in the developed world.) If that is the case, changing course is going to have to begin with changing what we demand from our shared society.