Statistics don't support the idea of systemic racism by police . . . but that's not the whole story

If you’re in the mood for some good news on the matter of policing and race relations, I’ve got some for you. A lot, actually.

But before I share it, I need to say at the outset that the statistics you’re about to see – while encouraging – don’t get to the heart of the real issue here.

Even so, we want people to be less afraid than they are, and one way to do that is to show them that things aren’t as bad as they think. In today’s Wall Street Journal, Heather MacDonald cites a myriad of statistics to show that the notion of systemic racist violence by police is not backed up data:

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019.

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A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

What accounts for the perception that white-cop-on-black-suspect shootings are so widespread when multiple studies like these say otherwise? Some of it has to come from the media’s propensity to hype the racial angle every time something happens.

Yet these statistics don’t prove there is no disparity at all. When blacks represent 25 percent of those shot by police – compared to a share of the population that’s closer to 12 percent – these incidents are clearly disproportionate. MacDonald attempts to dismiss that by tying the rate to crime rates, but in a way she’s stumbling backwards into the issue I think she’s trying to avoid.

The fact of the matter is that black Americans – again, disproportionately – find themselves in situations and environments that give them reasons to fear an encounter with the police. How much of this is perception compared to reality is a matter we could debate endlessly.

But if you listen to black people expressing the honest experience of living in this country – with the legacies of slavery, segregation and poverty – you’ll quickly recognize that they carry a burden of historical trauma that shouldn’t be dismissed by people who have no frame of reference to understand it.

The response to this, too often, is to tell people to “stop living in the past” or to “get over it”. It’s easy for one person to tell another to get over their generational burdens, when many of the same people haven’t gotten over trauma in their own lives. It’s true that we all carry burdens and we’ve all had struggles. It seems to me that should lead us to empathy and compassion, rather than to a dismissive attitude that says, “Hey, I’ve dealt with my issues! Deal with yours!”

If you’ve really dealt with your issues (have you?), then you should be in a better position to help someone else who is struggling with theirs.

It’s good news that, statistically, police violence against black people is not as systemic and widespread as some would have us believe. But that doesn’t change the fact that black Americans see what happens to the likes of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, and wonder why these incidents never seem to stop coming.

You can’t relegate these men to the obscurity of statistical noise. They were among God’s people, and they had value. The system that was supposed to protect them instead took their lives.

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It’s not enough to say, look, the statistics say there’s no problem. When people are divided by fear and distrust, there is a problem. As welcome as these statistics are, we’d make a huge mistake if we treated them as the end of the story.