How Academia Failed to Improve Police Practices

Replicating good policing is less interesting to social scientists than promoting political causes in papers

By Robert Maranto. Excerpts:

"none of the top 20 articles or chapters on Black Lives Matter appear to address directly how to reduce police killings of black civilians."

"This misallocation of research puts political activism over empirical problem-solving. Activist academics signal that they care about the disadvantaged, but often the real goal is appealing to peers and funders."

"How might social science tackle the problem of police killings of civilians? First, it is important to avoid sensational images and focus on the facts. One is that just as few African-Americans are criminals, very few cops are killers. In 2015 approximately 1 in 669 American police officers killed someone while on duty. Labeling cops as killers is the textbook definition of fake news.

Second, at 13.2% of the population, African-Americans are overrepresented among those killed by cops (26.2%), particularly among unarmed victims (40.9%), according to data from my study. Yet that alone doesn’t necessarily prove widespread racism. In 2018 at least 39% of all murderers were black, according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Some 95% of those killed by police are male. Yet few view this as proof of sexism.

On the other hand, only recently have we started to track police killings more closely. A legacy of past violence committed by police, along with disproportionate traffic stops of minorities, leads many African-Americans to distrust police. Moreover, the cops who kill without cause are likely to get away with it. Mr. Zimring’s book estimates that only roughly 1 in 200 police officers who kills a civilian is indicted, with about 1 in 1,000 convicted of a felony.

But improvement is possible. Take our paper’s stand-out example of New York. The New York Police Department’s 38,000 officers kill about 10 civilians annually, roughly 90% less than in 1971 and far fewer than police generally. The NYPD’s success keeping crime low without killing reflects hard work recruiting and training officers, and holding precinct commanders accountable for professionalism."