@deasag2
No reason to explain a montage of videos showing police officers doing their job. How they were doing it is videoed so we have an insight & verbal explanation now as to how not doing it correctly happens.
Not as exciting & no videos this article makes sense to me.
https://psmag.com/social-justice/black-cops-are-just-as-likely-as-whites-to-kill-black-suspects
Not surprisingly, they found a huge racial disparity when it comes to who gets killed by officers. "While only about 13 percent of the American population is black," they write, "28 percent of people killed by police are black."
The victims were overwhelmingly male (95.5 percent), and less than 1 percent were unarmed at the time of the incident. "The gun could been in the car, or on them, but it was there at the time they were killed," Menifield noted.
The majority of officers in these situations were white. But this reflects the fact that America's police forces are disproportionately made up of whites, who account for approximately three-quarters of all officers.
***I think this part has some bearing on what the media doesn't focus on.***
Crunching the numbers, the researchers report "white police officers actually kill black and other minority suspects at lower rates than we would expect if killings were randomly distributed among officers of all races."
In contrast, "we find that nonwhite officers kill both black and Latino suspects at significantly higher rates than white officers," they write. "This is likely due to the fact that minority police officers tend to be assigned to minority neighborhoods, and therefore have more contact with minority suspects."
But if individual-level racism isn't the issue, what is? Menifield and his colleagues make a strong argument that the fundamental problem is one of institutional culture.
"We believe that the disproportionate killing of black suspects is a downstream effect of institutionalized racism ... within many police departments," they write. At least in part, "disproportionate killing is a function of disproportionate police contact among members of the African-American community."
In other words, if a certain percentage of such encounters between the police and public end in tragedy, and cops are more likely to come into contact with black citizens (for instance, ordering African-American drivers to pull over at higher rates than whites), it stands to reason that black civilians are at greater risk of ending up dead.
Blaming racist cops for this problem is emotionally satisfying (it presents a clear villain) and suggests an easy fix (weed them out). But this research suggests the real problem is the entrenched set of biases and assumptions that pervade police forces, influencing the attitudes and actions of cops of all colors.
POLICEBIASRACISMCOPSQUICK STUDIESAFRICAN AMERICANS
Tom Jacobs
BY TOM JACOBS
Tom Jacobs is a senior staff writer at Pacific Standard, where he specializes in social science, culture, and learning. He is a veteran journalist and former staff writer for the Los Angeles Daily News and the Santa Barbara News-Press.