A new investigation reveals that the number of people being shot — and shot at — by police is troubling.

Jeff Sessions (Credit: flickr/Gage Skidmore)

By Kali Holloway

I n major metropolitan areas around the country over the last half-decade, police have shot — and shot at — people in numbers dramatically higher than previous tallies suggest. A new Vice News investigation finds that between 2010–2016, cops in the 50 largest police departments in the country shot more than 3,630 people, nearly double some previous estimates. Of the 4,381 people cops fired upon in that period — including the 700 people they shot at and missed — two-thirds survived those shootings.

Absent a comprehensive federal database of police shootings, the Vice report offers the most complete picture of fatal and nonfatal police shootings available.

The data analysis also found that police shot black people “more often and at higher rates than any other race,” and “two and a half times more often than white people.” Vice found that cops shot no fewer than 1,664 black people in the period studied, comprising “55 percent of the total and more than double the share of the black population in these communities.” Twenty percent of the African Americans tallied were shot following “relatively innocuous pedestrian or traffic stops,” which was true for just 16 percent of whites shot by police. Those figures are of particular importance considering that studies find black drivers are more likely to be stopped by cops based on less evidence, less likely than their white peers to be spoken to respectfully during those stops, and more likely to be ticketed and arrested than white drivers.

Police shot black people ‘more often and at higher rates than any other race,’ and ‘two and a half times more often than white people.’

While police narratives of shootings studied by Vice suggest the majority of blacks shot by cops were themselves involved in shootings or robberies, the proliferation of cell phone and body camera footage that contradicts police versions of events brings the trustworthiness of those numbers into question. Many videos made public after the fact have illustrated that shootings initially described by police as being self-defensive were in fact extrajudicial executions of African Americans. Unquestionably, some shootings of black citizens result from actual crimes being committed. But the demonstrated fallibility of police accounts shows that in a disturbing number of cases, police officers “shoot first and come up with reasons later.” The Vice News investigation finds that a significant number of people (20 percent) shot by police were unarmed. Among those, 44 percent were African American.

“It is a complex picture, but what’s clear is that black people are more likely to be unarmed, and that more of these sort of low-level incidents escalate to shootings,” Samuel Sinyangwe, data analyst and co-founder of police reform organization Campaign Zero, told Vice.

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America’s problems with gun violence across the board are reflected in its police shooting figures. A 2015 assessment found that 1 out of every 13 people killed by guns every year is killed by police. As the Washington Post notes, that’s roughly one killing “every 9 hours, or 2.5 shootings per day.” Undoubtedly, based on the number of unarmed victims, not every shooting is the result of justifiable safety fears by officers. But few cops are held accountable even for the most extreme mistakes in the field. An investigation by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review last year found that between 1995 and 2015, “[f]ederal prosecutors declined to pursue civil rights allegations against law enforcement officers 96 percent of the time.” It’s notoriously difficult to secure a conviction against cops even in unequivocal cases of police abuse.

“There doesn’t have to be a gun involved. We see these cases where somebody has a cell phone or somebody makes the wrong move,” Bruce Franks Jr., a Missouri activist who went from Ferguson protester to state senator, told Vice. “There’s a million reasons they give so it ends up being justified.”

One of the few positive trends in the numbers Vice examined is a 20 percent downturn in police shootings since 2014, the result of Obama-era reforms in response to Department of Justice recommendations. Of the 10 cities that saw the largest drops in police shootings, seven complied with changes proposed by the federal government.

Cities that voluntarily adopted DOJ-recommended reforms saw a 32 percent decline in officer-involved shootings in the first year. The police departments that were forced to take on reforms through binding agreements with the DOJ saw a 25 percent decline that year, including Baltimore, whose agreement began this year. In Chicago, shootings by cops dropped by more than 50 percent after McDonald’s death, an incident that prompted a DOJ investigation and a package of recommended reforms.

That downturn is likely to end. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has characterized the DOJ’s work with local police departments as “federal intrusion,” and ordered a review of all reform agreements aimed at curbing civil rights violations and police abuses. “It is not the responsibility of the federal government to manage non-federal law enforcement agencies,” Sessions stated in a two-page memo issued earlier this year.

The Vice investigation of the country’s 50 largest police departments was met with some resistance by the forces being scrutinized. Just 47 departments ultimately responded to Vice’s stats request with numbers that offered enough data for proper examination. “Many [law enforcement departments] fought hard to keep the information secret,” Vice claims, “and some responded to our requests only under threat of legal action.”

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Despite dozens of high-profile police killings in recent years, the FBI still doesn’t mandate that local police departments around the country report to a centralized data-keeping mechanism. Just 35 of the 18,000 local police departments in the U.S. participate in the Police Data Initiative, an Obama administration program to increase transparency around policing that will likely also be diminished under the Trump administration and the Sessions DOJ. Yet, this is critical information about the state of justice and civil rights in this country.

“We should know about how often it happens, if for no other reason than to simply understand the phenomenon,” David Klinger, an ex-LAPD officer and professor of criminal justice, told Vice. “How often is it that police are putting bullets in people’s bodies or trying to put bullets in people’s bodies?”

[h/t Vice News]

This article originally appeared on AlterNet. Republished here with permission.

]]> https://theestablishment.co/who-gets-to-have-a-good-death-201c29badb3c/ Thu, 28 Sep 2017 21:33:45 +0000 https://theestablishment.co/?p=2950 Read more]]> A good death is often a privileged one. The bad deaths — violent, patterned deaths — are disproportionately experienced by the marginalized.

In 1973, anthropologist and writer Ernest Becker posited a theory on life. Human civilization, he reasoned, is simply an extravagant and emblematic mechanism against the terrifying knowledge of our own mortality. Living with the fear of inevitable death, we are compelled to achieve greatness, to do something meaningful, in order to preserve a piece of ourselves in history.

As we well know, the quest for “greatness” throughout time has often led to atrocity. Our fear and denial of death have done damage on a global and personal scale, damage that, today, a growing movement is attempting to reverse and quell. Called “death positive,” this movement is an informal amalgamation of activists, historians, writers, artists, and death professionals working within various industries and projects to change our relationship to mortality and, essentially, drive us to accept the inevitability of death.

While death positivity takes many forms, a major tenet of this movement is the advocation for a “good death,” a death that is in line with one’s own individual values. While this means something different for everyone, the basic principle of a good death is that it’s been planned; this means the dying person is aware of their approaching demise, has come to terms with it, has legally prepared for it, has chosen their plans for interment, and can die at peace without pain, easing the mourning process for those left behind.

But it’s not always this simple. It’s true that categorizing any death as “good” is radical in our death-fearing society, but lurking behind this movement is a complicated disparity and dichotomy: A good death is often a privileged one, and the bad deaths — the violent, untimely, unexpected and patterned deaths — are disproportionately experienced by the country’s most marginalized people.

Human civilization is an extravagant survival mechanism against the terrifying knowledge of our own mortality.
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“From so many levels, death is political,” said Sarah Chavez, director and co-founder, respectively, of the death-positive collectives Order of the Good Death and Death and the Maiden, at Death Salon, the annual death positive conference that brings together an interdisciplinary cohort of thinkers on the issue of mortality. (This year’s conference in Seattle occurred the weekend of September 8.) “And I find that the ways that we react to death are very similar to the ways we react to civil rights and social justice issues: Some have the privilege of denying or ignoring death because it has not touched them.”

For those without this privilege, death is a regular fixture of their identity. And these people, of course, more often than not are black, brown, gay, trans, nonbinary, female, and/or poor, and are at a higher risk of being denied a good death.

While the average life expectancy in the U.S. is 79, for black people, it’s 75. A 2012 study by the Center for Disease Control found that white men with 16 or more years of schooling have a life expectancy of 14 years more than black men with fewer than 12 years of education. For white and black women with the same educational differences, that gap is 10 years.

More than that, the incidence of violent death is much higher for marginalized groups. Black people — particularly black men — are three times more likely to die at the hands of police than white people, and eight times as likely as white people to be victims of homicide. And while nearly three women are murdered every day in the U.S. due to domestic violence, black women are murdered at a rate more than twice that of white women.

Additionally, women in the U.S. are more likely to die during or shortly after childbirth than women in any other developed country. But black women in the U.S. die in childbirth at a rate 3.5 times that of white women, and black infants die at twice the rate of white infants.

In 2016, the Human Rights Campaign tracked at least 22 deaths of transgender people in the U.S. due to fatal violence—the most ever recorded—though this year is on track to surpass that: We’ve already seen 20 transgender people fatally shot or killed by violent means in 2017, 14 of whom were trans women of color.

On top of that, the LGBTQ community as a whole is at a disproportionately high risk of suicide. According to the Trevor Project, 40% of transgender adults report having made a suicide attempt, and 92% reported making an attempt before the age of 25. Additionally, the rate of suicide attempts is four times greater for lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth, and two times greater for questioning youth, than that of straight youth.

Bad death is not just defined by the violent or oppressive means by which the death occurred, however. It’s also the potential objectification and/or disdain for the body and the death itself that follows.

“The dead black body is familiar in a particular way,” Angela Hennessy — artist, assistant professor at California College of Arts, and Death Salon speaker — said in an interview. “We know it because we have witnessed it time and time again. It is embedded in the legacy of white supremacy which has fed off the labor, the commodification, the use, the violent abuse, and the subsequent death of black bodies.”

A major way this manifests today is in the sharing and viewing of videos of police brutality against black men — and women — which works to desensitize and normalize the occurrence of violent black death, according to a study from Georgetown’s academic journal, gnovis:

“The recurring images of police brutality portrays it as a normalized practice, which feeds into perceptions that are used to rationalize discrimination. Spreading social awareness in this technologically advanced age has led to the dehumanization of the black body. Sharing these images is not the problem, rather the casual manner in which these representations unconsciously reinforce and perpetuate the ideology that the black body is less than.”

Additionally, trans and nonbinary folks run the risk of being misgendered or having their identities erased after death: Because the law dictates that next of kin gets the right to your body and funeral arrangements after you die (unless you have an advance directive that states otherwise), these people are often turned over to the families that rejected their identities in life and continue to do so in death.

The violent deaths of women, too, are often trivialized. In the case of the highly publicized recent death of Kim Wall, a Swedish journalist whose body washed up on shore days after she went missing after stepping onto a man’s submarine, the news coverage largely focused on the “mad scientist” character who allegedly murdered her, as well as the similarities in Wall’s death to a Danish TV crime series, The Bridge. Many also chastised Wall posthumously for being brazen enough to step onto a man’s submarine alone. In other words, her death was diminished, and the fault was placed on her instead of the man who murdered her.

“When violence against women occurs, the conversation is frequently focused on a woman’s body and her actions rather than the overwhelming threat — serving as a subtle normalization of masculine violence,” journalist Alice Driver wrote in response to the coverage of Wall’s death.

All of which makes it clear: The intersections of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and economic standing conspire to create a society in which “bad” deaths and “good” deaths are largely determined by demographics. In the face of this, it can seem like the idea of death positivity isn’t big enough to fix the underlying issues that cause this disparity.

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How can the societal acceptance of mortality not just teach people to better come to terms with tragic death, but actually stop the unjustified killing of black men, or trans women, or female journalists?

“The idea that death is universal and that we are somehow united in this shared experience at the end of life is somewhat false,” Professor Hennessy says. “Yes — we all die, no doubt. But we do not die for the same reasons or in the same ways, and our deaths signify very different narratives in the history of this country. The risk of these notions of a good death, a natural death, or being death positive, is that many people will be set up for failure.”

Since Becker’s theory on life and subsequent book, The Denial of Death, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974, others have taken his philosophy a step further. In 1986, social psychologists Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski and Sheldon Solomon developed the Terror Management Theory (TMT) as a continuation of Becker’s ideas, which purports that humans “manage” their debilitating terror of death by developing and adhering to cultural worldviews that promise, in some sense, an idea of immortality in the form of either an afterlife, offspring, or the sense of belonging to something greater than the self.

‘Bad deaths’ and ‘good deaths’ are largely determined by demographics.
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All of these things lead to disagreement with and fear of those who aren’t like us. (TMT has been used to explain the rise of Trump and the passing of Brexit.) And this leads, ultimately, to the preservation of one set of ideals by the extermination of another.

“The roots of inequality, racism, and social marginalization are all grounded in our fear of death,” Chavez said.

In other words, our fear of death is what causes bad death.

With this in mind, the tenets of death positivity and good death could be a step in the right direction towards equalizing access to a good death: Without fear of dying, our world views can open up to include all of humanity. That means simply talking about mortality — getting people to think about and prepare for their own mortal fate — can help put an end to bad death.

Nobody’s Death Is A Blessing

This, of course, is a theory that requires a longview, and may not resonate as we watch the phobias and -isms that cause bad deaths progress. But still, idealistic as it may be, our ability to give everyone a good death ultimately lies in our ability to see each other’s humanity. And as Hennessy believes, death itself can facilitate this compassion.

“If death is a condition of being human, can’t it make us more human in a way that we see and feel the humanity of others, and then make decisions based on that shared humanity?” she asks. “In this way we might recognize the vulnerability of others and understand how we implicate each other in the process.”

M y family patriarch was keen to wave around a pistol whenever someone threatened his inner-city neighborhood corner store. I have a clear memory of running inside and dropping to the floor of my aunt’s Baltimore rowhouse during a suspected drive by. Like most, I have spent many snack-filled nights watching crime-based TV dramas, pretending I wasn’t scared while I switched on all of the house lights. This is the extent of my firearm exposure.

In my adult life I have never seen an actual handgun that wasn’t holstered to the belt of a police officer. So when I found myself alone at the local art park watching a pre-teen pass me by, boasting to his friends that he had a gun and was about to use it to shoot someone, I was quite literally unprepared for what came next.

As the boy and his friends walked past, I wanted to assume his claims were false — that there was no gun. I was quickly proven wrong when they were about a hundred feet away and his intended target arrived with some friends, the firearm came into sight, voices were raised, and curse words flew. Through the uproar, it was clear his friends hadn’t believed he had a gun either.

In my adult life I have never seen an actual handgun that wasn’t holstered to the belt of a police officer.
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I was standing in a wide open space near a large tent under which an oblivious white man ignored his toddler in favor of his smartphone, also tuning out the confrontation that was happening just yards away. I was very aware of how not bulletproof I am and of how intensely my family needed me to make it back home. I was also aware that this man and his daughter probably had a family member like me awaiting their safe return.

I listened intently to the heated conversation of the teens. Seconds dragged like hours as I tried to decipher between the back and forth of typical youthful aggression and the very real potential for danger. More than once, I looked in my camera bag for my phone, my internal dialogue wavering. Should I call the police? Of course, there’s a group of teens with a gun in broad daylight in a public place! What if one of them gets hurt? What if they shoot someone else accidentally? What if they shoot me accidentally? What if someone dies? What if we all die? If there was ever a time to dial 911, this was it, right?

Yet, each time I reached for my phone, I faced the same overwhelming thoughts. These teens were Black — and I couldn’t stop remembering the murder of Tamir Rice.

Black People Feel Lucky To Walk Away Alive From Police Harassment

The grainy surveillance footage of 12-year-old Tamir being shot almost on sight, because he had a toy gun, played over and over in my mind. I would not be the person who put another young boy at risk of murder in the hands of police.

Sure, I could emphasize that I wasn’t sure if this gun was real, and that these were just teens — but in the case of Rice, the person who called the police used the additional descriptors of “toy gun,” “not real,” and “juvenile,” and that was not enough to spare a life. How could I possibly guarantee compassion from the cops, or even a basic confirmation of wrongdoing before the discharging of weapons?

The second thought that slowed my instinct to act was that of my two sons. I can’t fathom the thought of someone’s rush to judgment transforming me into the mother of a dead boy. Because of that, I engaged in this reach and retract pattern with my phone during the entire ordeal, never actually calling for help, but never giving up the idea that help was needed.

When My Cute Black Kid Becomes What You Fear Most

The altercation was intense but short, as many of the teens were working to calm their friend and have the gun put away. I learned their intent by stopping to listen to what they were saying, by responding with humanity instead of fear. Yes, there was one angry kid fired up at the sight of his enemy, but the others were talking him down, pleading for him to use the good sense with which he was born.

While walking further away in a futile attempt to provide my own protection, I strained against the bombardment of expletives and mayhem to find the voices of reason in the fray. Even if I were to call the cops, the teens seemed to be self-regulating and dispersing in peace. After a few minutes, they all walked away unharmed, as did everyone else at the park that day.

I did make it home safely, but not unbothered. A number of uncertainties circled in my head. I will never know if that gun was real; I gathered from the way the disagreement fizzled out that it wasn’t, but I could be wrong. I will never know if that angry, immature young boy with a gun, maybe even only 10 or 11 years old, went elsewhere and shot someone.

Or, if his actions had invited someone to shoot him in retaliation. I will never know if any of their parents had a clue what happened that evening, if their mothers were up that night dishing out consequences, if their fathers were worried sick about the path on which they were headed. Nearly two months later, I continue to question if the kids would be safe or if this was just one chapter in a novel of potentially negative life-altering choices.

However, what I do know is valuable.

I know that none of those boys and girls were turned into an R.I.P. hashtag that day. Each one of them went home to someone, somewhere, and had the normalcy of sleeping in their own homes, hearts beating, lungs inhaling and exhaling.

I know that none of those boys and girls were turned into an R.I.P. hashtag that day.
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None of them were threatened or intimidated or roughed up by an under-trained overzealous officer intent on taking his bad day out on some poor young “thugs.” None of them were subjected to the brutality of a police force that is statistically proven to disproportionately condemn the black children who have the misfortune to cross their path.

In recent years, the biggest disparity in arrests of white versus black juveniles in the city where I live, Charlottesville, Virginia, occurred in 2011. Although the small city is overwhelmingly white, records indicate 71% of teens arrested were black. In the past five years, black kids accounted for 75% of stop and frisk incidents. And these racial disparities don’t just exist within the city limits; Charlottesville resides in Albermarle County, where African-Americans make up 10% of the population but 30% of the arrests.

And let us not forget that the city, county, and state police forces provided security for the KKK rally and counter-protest in Charlottesville. The end result: The police used tear gas on protesters of the KKK, while the white knights remained unscathed.

How We Learn To Love ‘Good’ White Men With Guns

Choosing to check the privilege of my suburban, mostly middle-class upbringing, assessing my own media-fueled prejudices, and stopping to think about the potential consequences to these young people was the right thing to do, even if it was the wrong thing to do.

How did we, as a nation, get here, to this state of unrest in which one needs to stop and pause when faced with the seemingly mandatory task of calling the police when there is high probability of a violent crime? Or have we always been here?

As a kid, one of my white friend’s moms had to hide my sister and I in the back of her car so their town’s racist police wouldn’t see us at a checkpoint. As a young 20-something, after being pulled over because of my lapsed registration, I inched my car up just a bit to make sure I’d left the officer space to park behind me — and he responded with a commanding yell and a hand on his holster, threatening me to stop my vehicle or else.

I have my own ignorant optimism to blame for not sooner equating the threat of racist cops to the theft of black lives. There are millions of stories to tell me otherwise, but my moral barometer was still inherently leaning toward police interference as a first line of defense — until it came time to literally make the call.

Stopping to think about potential consequences was the right thing to do, even if it was the wrong thing to do.
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If my son were to find himself an angry pre-teen in this same scenario, would I want a passerby to make the fast assumption that he was carrying a real weapon? Would I want her to believe he and his friends weren’t as capable of resolving the situation as local law enforcement would be? Maybe. But, probably not. What I saw that day at the art park among a brilliant blue sky and the warmth of spring’s end shook me — causing me to question the cloudy landscape of my own values.

I don’t agree with teenagers having access to firearms and waving them around in public, and I don’t believe it was safe for them to be there navigating a very mature situation on their own. I even think I made the wrong choice by not calling the police. Yet, somehow, I’m still glad I made it.

I remember the first time a man let me know that he could kill me if he chose to. I was 19 years old. My fiancé and I had just finished an argument. I had flinched at his rage. He noticed my fear, and he told me a story.

“My ex told her family that she thought I was going to kill her,“ he said, “I mean, I’m really strong. I could hurt people really bad if I wanted to. I’ll punch holes in walls if I have to.” He pulled a sword off of the wall and casually twirled it around while he looked at me, “But I wouldn’t have hurt her. I wasn’t abusive. She should see what real abuse is.”

My heart pounded out of my chest until he put the sword back on the wall and smiled.

“I’m glad you know I’d never hurt you,” he said.

I remember the first time a man let me know that he could kill me if he chose to.
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I haven’t thought about that moment in years. It’s been replaced with new fears. What will kill me now is not that man. What will kill me now could be a man I reject on the street, a future partner, or a cop.

Every day that I get behind the wheel, I am aware that there are men out there with guns on their hips and the authority to take my life at any moment. Like that abusive relationship, the signs of how precarious my situation is are everywhere. The cops are watching, never smiling. Pulling me over because I merged a little too quickly, went one mile over the speed limit — there’s always some guise of a reason. There’s always a way I brought it on myself.

I don’t question them anymore, they’ve conditioned me to no longer do that.

“Is there going to be a problem here?” They ask.

“I could arrest you. But I’m going to just give you a ticket.” They let me know, benevolently. Their guns at my eye level.

I see videos of people who look like me dead in the street and I know what the alternative to this ticket really could be.

Every day that I get behind the wheel, I am aware that there are men out there with guns on their hips and the authority to take my life at any moment.
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A few months ago when I was walking to the store with my teenage son, a cop followed us on a busy highway, at a walking pace, all the way to the store. He stared at us coldly the entire time. When we entered the store parking lot he followed us in there too. Driving slowly behind us, all the way to the entrance of the store. He stayed there until we went in.

My son was shaking with fear the entire time. “Don’t say anything,” I said quietly, “Don’t make any sudden moves, don’t look at him. Just walk. We’ll be okay soon.”

“I shouldn’t have to be this afraid, Mom,” my son said, his voice wavering.

“I know, baby,” I said.

We entered the store feeling grateful to be alive and aware that if the police officer had decided otherwise, we would not have been.

Today, when I saw this video which has gone viral these past few days as a “feel-good” cop story, I finally made the connection. The video is of a black woman being pulled over by police. There is terror on her face as the officer walks up to her car. His gun is at her eye level. But the officer doesn’t reach for the gun — instead, he reaches for two ice cream cones to hand over to her and her passenger. Her terror gives way to the almost tearful relief that she is not going to come to harm at the hands of these officers. At least not today.

This fear is what they want.

My Friends Would Rather Have Their Guts Cut Open Than Be Like Me
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Watching this video, I was suddenly 19 again, trying not to cry while my boyfriend toyed with a sword and told me that I was lucky he’d never hurt me. And I was also the scared mother I was a few months ago, flooded with relief that the cop who followed my baby and I had let us get to the store alive. Watching this video I understood what these “feel-good” video and picture campaigns put on by police departments really are — abuse. They are designed to remind us that they are in charge, and that they are capable of taking our lives in an instant — but if we are good and they are feeling benevolent, they won’t.

These videos, combined with the countless videos of black men and women and children shot dead by cops, serve to remind us that we should both fear and love them if we want to survive. And if we don’t survive, we have nobody to blame but ourselves — see how capable of not killing us they can be?

Anybody who has been in an abusive relationship will recognize this behavior. It’s a raised hand that might be a slap but then lowers for a pat on the shoulder. It’s a friendly warning that — this time — they aren’t going to get really mad. A reminder that what you are experiencing right now isn’t reallyabuse — you know what real abuse looks like.

These ‘feel-good’ video and picture campaigns put on by police departments are abuse.
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The woman in this video was pulled over and terrorized just to let her know that they could. And she was given ice cream to let her know that she should be grateful. And the video was broadcast so that we would all know that we should feel the same.

It’s disgusting.

The time and money spent terrorizing citizens with ice cream cones could have been spent retraining the police force on how to confront their implicit biases and deescalate potentially dangerous situations. Or it could have been spent doing anything other than pulling over unsuspecting black women and scaring the shit out of them for laughs.

Just as abusive relationships don’t end with flowers, abusive police systems don’t end with ice cream. Anything short of commitment to justice for those abused and killed by police and commitment to fundamental change in the criminal justice system is all part of the abuse cycle — designed to keep us afraid and grateful for the ability to be.

We must reject anything short of the change that will make us safe from the murderous whims of our criminal justice system.