No, Police Racism Isn’t an Epidemic

The data don’t show racial bias in police use of deadly force. A few viral videos don’t prove otherwise.

By Jason Riley. Excerpts:

"In the first half of the 20th century, when black poverty was significantly higher than it is today, and it was not uncommon for police officers in the Deep South to belong to the Ku Klux Klan, black crime rates and incarceration rates were significantly lower than what they would become in later decades.

The criminologist Barry Latzer has noted that the homicide rate for black men fell by 18% in the 1940s and another 22% in the 1950s. It’s probably not a coincidence that black poverty declined by 40 percentage points over the same period, and black incomes grew at faster rates that white incomes. Safer neighborhoods help facilitate upward economic mobility, which is something that the “defund the police” crowd might keep in mind.

In the second half of the 20th century, these trends reversed. In the 1960s, violent crime rates doubled, and they continued to increase sharply until the early 1990s, when better policing and more incarceration helped bring crime under control. In his 2007 book, “The Great American Crime Decline,” Franklin Zimring describes violent crime as a “regressive tax whereby the poor pay much more” and observes that “because both victims and offenders are concentrated among the same disadvantaged populations, a major crime decline might produce a double benefit—fewer victims as well as fewer offenders arrested and punished for serious crimes.” Between 1990 and 2016 the overall homicide rate fell by 34%, and among black men it fell by 40%. Had the black homicide rate remained at 1990 levels through that period, tens of thousands of black men wouldn’t be alive today."

"There is no epidemic of black suspects dying in police custody, and a few viral videos don’t prove otherwise."

"In a 2015 Gallup poll taken after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Mo., a majority of black respondents said police treat them fairly, and far more blacks (38%) than whites (18%) said they “want a greater police presence in their local communities.” Another Gallup survey, published last year, asked black and Hispanic residents of low-income neighborhoods about policing and found that these groups “aren’t averse to law enforcement—in fact, they are particularly concerned about crime in their neighborhoods.” Fifty-nine percent of both blacks and Hispanics said that “they would like the police to spend more time in their area than they currently do, making them more likely than white residents (50%) to respond this way.”"

"Police shootings have fallen precipitously since the 1970s. Upward of 95% of black homicides in the U.S. don’t involve law enforcement. Empirical studies have found no racial bias in police use of deadly force, and that the racial disparities that do exist stem from racial differences in criminal behavior."