A Unique and Thoughtful View on Race and Policing

Jim Copland of the Manhattan Institute has something to teach us from a personal perspective.  He begins his article:

We can’t talk about policing in the United States without talking about race. It’s personal to me. I’m white. But I’m married to a black woman, and we’re the proud parents of a biracial son who, as he grows up and navigates American life, will face challenges that I never had in my own youth. He’s nine years old now and only barely beginning to wrestle with questions of race and identity. Yet as he matures into adulthood, he’s more likely to have encounters with police than I have been. These encounters are more likely to include some police use of force than if he were white.

But Jim’s perspective leads him to think and not just emote.

Jim notes, for example:

[Legislative proposals before Congress] focus on race as it relates to policing is appropriate — something that may seem counterintuitive to those who, like me, think we should strive for a color-blind America, at least in terms of legal rights and remedies.

Here’s why [I think the focus on race is appropriate in this context]: African-American men are the principal beneficiaries of good, proactive policing in the U.S.; but black men in America also disproportionately bear policing’s cost. Black people broadly understand that. Last year Gallup surveyed African-American residents of “fragile communities” on the importance of policing; 52 percent said they “would like the police to spend more time in their area than they currently do” — a higher percentage than white respondents.

But there’s a cost to that policing, too. A black female friend recently wrote to me, “Every black man that I know, regardless of class or education, has had a negative interaction with the police.”…

That policing places unique burdens on black men doesn’t mean it isn’t essential. Effective, proactive policing is a principal cause of the most remarkable public-policy success in America’s last three decades: the sizeable reduction in violent crime. Between 1993 and 2018, American violent crime fell from 747 crimes per 100,000 to 369, a drop of 51 percent. That’s more than a million fewer instances, each year, of horrible crimes such as rape, robbery, and assault. Homicides also fell by more than half from their peak (1991) to their trough (2014): from 24,808 to 12,278. That’s thousands of lives saved annually.

And most of those lives are black. It’s sad but true that even though only 13 percent of Americans self-identify as black, black Americans constitute more than 52 percent of murder victims. Among males (who are 77 percent of homicide victims), that share rises to 57 percent. That staggeringly high murder-rate burden borne by black American men suggests we should be extraordinarily cautious about a pullback in the proactive policing that reduces violent crime. Recent research by Harvard scholars has shown that reduced policing intensity in the wake of federal investigations of police departments scandalized by “viral” deadly-force incidents led to substantial upticks in the commission of homicides and other violent crimes.

But if we need policing, especially to protect black men, we also must grapple with the fact that black men are especially burdened by proactive policing practices. Police departments that do their jobs well pay particular attention to neighborhoods with higher crime patterns — which are, as the above data imply, more heavily populated by black residents. The people who live in high-crime areas thus have more interactions with police.

I won’t repeat the entire article here, but I think I’ve quoted enough for readers to see that it’s well worth their while.  The bottom line  is that Congress would do well to adopt Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-SC) bill on police reform rather than the broad-brush House alternative, and that one of the most helpful reforms we could undertake is to add more police and, in particular, more black police officers.