What do regular folks think about police presence?

Far too often, loud people identified as “activists” are treated as representatives, speaking for the people they claim to be concerned about. That is a major mistake. The activists typically have not been elected by anyone. The way to find out what the regular folks think is to ask them. If you can’t ask them all, ask a validly selected representative sample.

Listening to activists, one might think that the people living in certain communities, variously called “poor,” “disadvantaged,” “fragile,” or some other term, want a reduced police presence or even want to abolish the police altogether. As Bill noted earlier, this NYT op-ed by Mariame Kaba, identified as an “organizer,” called for exactly that.

What do regular folks think about that? Last year Gallup published its second report on the State of Opportunity in America. This is a survey of “fragile communities,” defined as a census tract in the bottom quartile of three out of four criteria: employment, poverty, education, and a composite score of well-being.

Several questions in the survey addressed the criminal justice system. Residents were asked, “How fairly or unfairly do you think local police treat people like you?” Results are available for the total and categorized by White, Black, and Hispanic residents. Substantial majorities in all three categories said people like themselves were treated very fairly or fairly. To be sure, the percentage of those reporting unfair treatment was larger in the minority groups: 35% for Blacks and 28% for Hispanics. This is surely a matter of concern, but it is a far cry from the common impression of uniform distrust of and hostility to the police.

Do minority residents of fragile communities think they will be treated more fairly when cases move from the police to the courts? Guess again.

[A]lmost half of black residents (46%) and more than a third of Hispanics (35%) say the legal system treats people like them unfairly, vs. 19% of white residents.

The finding that black and Hispanic FC [fragile community] residents are more likely to feel people like them are treated unfairly by the legal system than by their local police may surprise some. Incidents involving alleged mistreatment of minorities by the police are more likely to draw media coverage, but minority residents, especially blacks, are more likely to be worried about being treated unfairly in other aspects of the criminal justice system such as pretrial procedures, bail requirements, sentencing and parole.

And how do minority FC residents feel about reducing police presence?

Minority residents of FCs aren’t averse to law enforcement — in fact, they are particularly concerned about crime in their neighborhoods. Most black and Hispanic FC residents (59% in each case) say 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. Just 5% of blacks and 6% of Hispanics in FCs would like the police to spend less time in their area.

Crime and disorder in FCs put many residents at risk. As in 2017, they are much more likely to say crime in their area has increased (46%) than decreased (11%) in the last few years. More than one-third of FC residents (37%) say they have witnessed a situation in which someone was seriously injured or killed, or in which they feared they themselves would be seriously injured or killed. This proportion is somewhat higher among black residents (41%) than white residents (33%).

Most regular folks want more policing. Very few want less. Regular folks are very well aware that regular criminals present a far greater danger to their lives and well-being than the few rogue cops.

We should not minimize the adverse impact of the perception of unfair treatment. We should not ignore that there is a kernel of truth in the perception. Racial prejudice has not disappeared, and we must recognize that. (Though there is no need to distort the problem by proclaiming every incident of prejudice to be “racism.”) Bad apples in police departments do exist, and we need to do a better job of culling them out.

One thing we do not need is the exaggeration of the prejudice problem created by all the bleating about “disparities” in statistics based on the Fallacy of the Irrelevant Denominator. Comparisons of the demographics of Statistic X with the general population are irrelevant if offending rates are not uniform across the demographic groups in question, which they rarely are. Do the police ticket more men than women for speeding? Of course they do, because a greater percentage of men speed. That statistic does not establish or even indicate discriminatory enforcement unless one establishes that speeding men are more likely to be ticketed than speeding women. The general population is an irrelevant denominator. The people who commit the offense in question make up the relevant denominator. And so it is for criminal justice statistics generally.

There are two things that journalists could do to help with the situation:

First, learn to recognize faulty statistical arguments. If a study proclaims a “disparity” while committing the Fallacy of the Irrelevant Denominator, it is not news. Don’t report it.

Second, stop treating activists as representatives. They are not. Stop amplifying their already loud voices. Pay more attention to what regular folks think.