The High Cost of Hyperbole About Police Killings of Kids

The Atlantic has an article with the above caption as the HTML web page title. The article headline and subhead are “The Numbers Tell a Different Story About Police Killings of Minors: Exaggerated narratives could yield misguided policy responses—which would endanger many more kids.”

Sensational but rare events have always assumed outsize proportion in popular reaction. That reaction can often lead to wrong policy choices and sometimes disastrous ones. Author Conor Friedersdorf compares the perception to the reality and notes,

false or hyperbolic characterizations of police killings of minors carry a cost: They traumatize members of the public more than the facts justify, unfairly vilify cops, and mislead people about the best way forward.

In 2016, 16 minors were shot and killed by police, compared to 1865 shot and killed by others. (Curiously, he doesn’t say how many juvenile homicide victims were killed by other means.) He runs some numbers to illustrate the folly of the extreme proposal of withdrawing the police from predominantly minority communities:

But suppose that removing the police from all Black and brown communities reduced police killings of minors by 100 percent, while the absence of police and the lack of crime investigation led to an increase in civilian murders of minors by just 5 percent—in my view a very conservative estimate. That would result, in a year such as 2016, in 16 fewer kids killed by police and 93 more kids shot to death by civilians. On net, 77 more children would die.

In my view, “very conservative estimate” is an understatement. The estimate is absurdly low. The proposal is for complete anarchy in areas that already have high crime rates. But whether the increase in minors killed is 77 or 770, the point is the same. Anyone proposing anarchy with any basic knowledge of the facts knows that a lot more innocent people would die, including many teens and children. But compared to scoring an ideological win, apparently, those lives don’t matter.

The article is encouraging not only for what is says, which we have largely seen in other publications all along, but also for where it appears. Traditional media with a leftward tilt is waking up to the reality that the “woke” agenda is dangerous folly. That is a very good sign.