Death, Police, and Guns
Civilian gun violence and excessive use of force by police against
citizens are inextricably linked. America has the highest rate of civilian gun
ownership in the world as well as the highest death rate for police officers among
similarly-situated countries. A plurality of officer deaths are due to gun
violence against officers, which naturally leads police to self-preserve when
on-duty. To reduce the excessive use of force by police we must tackle the
ubiquity of weapons in civilian society and reduce the chance that a weapon
will be used against an officer.
Before getting into the argument, let me start by limiting the scope of this writing. I am not writing about the link between police violence and race, which seems clear to me, has statistical backing,[1] and should have more observational verification but for our nation’s embarrassingly sparse record of police activity.[2] I am also not discounting the benefits that additional training for police might confer. Additionally, I support initiatives by police forces to implement community policing practices and become more integrated with other government social service apparatuses and private organizations to be a productive part of the social safety net. Relatedly, the militarization of police forces is a highly questionable social development. All that said, weapons’ ubiquity in America, and their use against police officers, seems to me to be a significant causal factor in police use of excessive force.
Let’s set the table with background data on how safe it is to actually be an officer. The upshot: it is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, extremely dangerous relative to being a cop in another country, and it is still pretty safe. At no time since 2007 have more than 200 officers died on-the-job nationwide, with the number of deaths often coming in below 150.[3] Law enforcement bounces in-and-out of “America’s 10 Deadliest Jobs,”[4] with death rates ranging from 10 to 20 per 100,000.[5] For comparison, in 2016, Chicago’s homicide rate was 27.9 per 100,000, which was lower than, from highest to lowest: Saint Louis (59.3), Baltimore (51.2), Detroit (45.2), New Orleans (44.5), Cleveland (34.7), Newark (33.4), and Memphis (32.4).[6] Other cities where it is more dangerous simply to live than to be a police officer include: Kansas City (26.6), Atlanta (23.9), Milwaukee (21.8), Cincinnati (20.8), Oakland (20.3), and Washington, D.C. (20.1).[7] The previous comparison is, admittedly, a tad unfair. It is reasonable to assume that police officers who patrol high-homicide metros face a higher risk of on-the-job homicide. The officer who patrols Palo Alto, CA, where violent crime is negligible and gun ownership is low, probably faces a much lower threat of gun violence than one patrolling in the most violent Oakland neighborhoods. And this is exactly the point.
I can understand why an officer working in a gun-rich environment (America[8]) and in a neighborhood where weapons are used against people feels like he or she must have a gun. As nicely laid out in Pacific Standard, the United States has 11 times more police officers than the United Kingdom and yet 130 times more American police officers were killed by gun violence between 2000 and 2014 than English police officers: 788 American cops to 6 British cops.[9] Data on police death rates in specific counties or municipalities was difficult to find, but perusal of the Officer Down Memorial Page, limited to officers fallen by gunfire between 2000 and 2017, shows officers from all of the metropolitan areas mentioned above.[10] This must often be in the forefront of police officers’ minds and is critical background when police officers use lethal force. More training, a common call of American liberals, is fine, but police officers put in harms’ way (or perceived to be in harms’ way) will use the force available to protect themselves.
Now, to wade back into broader social issues once more.
It is not clear that all police officers, even in the most violent areas, need to be armed. Hybrid forces built around community policing and greater integration with other social services might provide an avenue for de-escalation from lethal force in homicide-wracked communities. It is difficult to ask officers to risk their lives in communities where people own guns and are willing to use them against police, without commensurate personal protection. However, when trust between communities and police break down, all actors must take concrete steps to de-escalate. As the authority imbued with coercive physical and legal force, police should be creative, transparent, and forthcoming in their efforts to reduce their use of lethal force.
The racial component cannot be ignored either. For example, all 10 U.S. counties with the highest homicide rates per capita have African-American majorities or pluralities.[11] This fact is, sadly, broadly representative and overlaps with the areas where we find lethal violence by police against civilians and by civilians against police. The deck is rigged against African-Americans in this country. Neighborhoods and schools remain segregated and unequal. Historical economic inequality leaves even African-Americans with similar incomes to Caucasians with significantly less wealth. And this story of gun possession and violent interactions with police is bound up in the (contemporary) history of crack cocaine, fractured families, the school-to-prison pipeline, and The New Jim Crow.[12] For better or worse, gun control, police brutality, and race relations are all bound together in the same bundle of sticks.
The answer to curbing gun violence is, as it always has been, government regulation to keep weapons, and especially certain types of guns, off the market. This has been recognized for generations, even before Congress passed the first federal gun restriction banning the mail-order sale of handguns or other concealable firearms in 1927.[13] That first federal regulation is particularly poignant today. Concealed weapons pose a special danger to officers since, by definition, they cannot be seen. Identifying and reacting to someone with a big automatic rifle is simpler, if not easier, than identifying and reacting to someone with a hidden weapon. To return to an earlier point: America has a lot of guns and some areas where they are used judiciously against people. Many of those guns are concealable. While it is a travesty that a police officer might be primed to suspect that certain people (read: racial and type-cast profiling) are carrying concealed weapons, many undoubtedly are doing just that. This general environment contributes to a situation like the death of Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer after, according to his girlfriend, voluntarily revealing to the officer that he had a concealed weapon in an attempted good-faith disclosure gone horribly wrong.[14] The officer who shot Mr. Castile was acquitted using a defense, similar to what I just articulated, that he was nervous and afraid for his life.[15]
A broader design for domestic gun control and a more thorough rendition of the, what I believe to be overwhelmingly strong, arguments in favor of stricter gun control in this country are beyond the scope of this piece. The point is that those who care about police brutality or police deaths rarely adequately address the topic if the significant contribution of the ubiquity of weapons, and the types of weapons, in our society is not discussed as a part-in-parcel of the issue.
Before getting into the argument, let me start by limiting the scope of this writing. I am not writing about the link between police violence and race, which seems clear to me, has statistical backing,[1] and should have more observational verification but for our nation’s embarrassingly sparse record of police activity.[2] I am also not discounting the benefits that additional training for police might confer. Additionally, I support initiatives by police forces to implement community policing practices and become more integrated with other government social service apparatuses and private organizations to be a productive part of the social safety net. Relatedly, the militarization of police forces is a highly questionable social development. All that said, weapons’ ubiquity in America, and their use against police officers, seems to me to be a significant causal factor in police use of excessive force.
Let’s set the table with background data on how safe it is to actually be an officer. The upshot: it is one of the most dangerous jobs in America, extremely dangerous relative to being a cop in another country, and it is still pretty safe. At no time since 2007 have more than 200 officers died on-the-job nationwide, with the number of deaths often coming in below 150.[3] Law enforcement bounces in-and-out of “America’s 10 Deadliest Jobs,”[4] with death rates ranging from 10 to 20 per 100,000.[5] For comparison, in 2016, Chicago’s homicide rate was 27.9 per 100,000, which was lower than, from highest to lowest: Saint Louis (59.3), Baltimore (51.2), Detroit (45.2), New Orleans (44.5), Cleveland (34.7), Newark (33.4), and Memphis (32.4).[6] Other cities where it is more dangerous simply to live than to be a police officer include: Kansas City (26.6), Atlanta (23.9), Milwaukee (21.8), Cincinnati (20.8), Oakland (20.3), and Washington, D.C. (20.1).[7] The previous comparison is, admittedly, a tad unfair. It is reasonable to assume that police officers who patrol high-homicide metros face a higher risk of on-the-job homicide. The officer who patrols Palo Alto, CA, where violent crime is negligible and gun ownership is low, probably faces a much lower threat of gun violence than one patrolling in the most violent Oakland neighborhoods. And this is exactly the point.
I can understand why an officer working in a gun-rich environment (America[8]) and in a neighborhood where weapons are used against people feels like he or she must have a gun. As nicely laid out in Pacific Standard, the United States has 11 times more police officers than the United Kingdom and yet 130 times more American police officers were killed by gun violence between 2000 and 2014 than English police officers: 788 American cops to 6 British cops.[9] Data on police death rates in specific counties or municipalities was difficult to find, but perusal of the Officer Down Memorial Page, limited to officers fallen by gunfire between 2000 and 2017, shows officers from all of the metropolitan areas mentioned above.[10] This must often be in the forefront of police officers’ minds and is critical background when police officers use lethal force. More training, a common call of American liberals, is fine, but police officers put in harms’ way (or perceived to be in harms’ way) will use the force available to protect themselves.
Now, to wade back into broader social issues once more.
It is not clear that all police officers, even in the most violent areas, need to be armed. Hybrid forces built around community policing and greater integration with other social services might provide an avenue for de-escalation from lethal force in homicide-wracked communities. It is difficult to ask officers to risk their lives in communities where people own guns and are willing to use them against police, without commensurate personal protection. However, when trust between communities and police break down, all actors must take concrete steps to de-escalate. As the authority imbued with coercive physical and legal force, police should be creative, transparent, and forthcoming in their efforts to reduce their use of lethal force.
The racial component cannot be ignored either. For example, all 10 U.S. counties with the highest homicide rates per capita have African-American majorities or pluralities.[11] This fact is, sadly, broadly representative and overlaps with the areas where we find lethal violence by police against civilians and by civilians against police. The deck is rigged against African-Americans in this country. Neighborhoods and schools remain segregated and unequal. Historical economic inequality leaves even African-Americans with similar incomes to Caucasians with significantly less wealth. And this story of gun possession and violent interactions with police is bound up in the (contemporary) history of crack cocaine, fractured families, the school-to-prison pipeline, and The New Jim Crow.[12] For better or worse, gun control, police brutality, and race relations are all bound together in the same bundle of sticks.
The answer to curbing gun violence is, as it always has been, government regulation to keep weapons, and especially certain types of guns, off the market. This has been recognized for generations, even before Congress passed the first federal gun restriction banning the mail-order sale of handguns or other concealable firearms in 1927.[13] That first federal regulation is particularly poignant today. Concealed weapons pose a special danger to officers since, by definition, they cannot be seen. Identifying and reacting to someone with a big automatic rifle is simpler, if not easier, than identifying and reacting to someone with a hidden weapon. To return to an earlier point: America has a lot of guns and some areas where they are used judiciously against people. Many of those guns are concealable. While it is a travesty that a police officer might be primed to suspect that certain people (read: racial and type-cast profiling) are carrying concealed weapons, many undoubtedly are doing just that. This general environment contributes to a situation like the death of Philando Castile, who was shot by a police officer after, according to his girlfriend, voluntarily revealing to the officer that he had a concealed weapon in an attempted good-faith disclosure gone horribly wrong.[14] The officer who shot Mr. Castile was acquitted using a defense, similar to what I just articulated, that he was nervous and afraid for his life.[15]
A broader design for domestic gun control and a more thorough rendition of the, what I believe to be overwhelmingly strong, arguments in favor of stricter gun control in this country are beyond the scope of this piece. The point is that those who care about police brutality or police deaths rarely adequately address the topic if the significant contribution of the ubiquity of weapons, and the types of weapons, in our society is not discussed as a part-in-parcel of the issue.
[1]
Timothy Williams, Study Supports
Suspicion That Police Are More Likely to Use Force on Blacks, The New York
Times (July 7, 2016), https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/study-supports-suspicion-that-police-use-of-force-is-more-likely-for-blacks.html?mcubz=0.
[2]
U.S. Dept. of Justice, National Data
Collection on Police Use of Force (Apr. 1996) (stating that the “basic
problem is the lack of routine, national systems for collecting data on
incidents.”); Matt Apuzzo and Sarah Cohen, Data
on Use of Force by Police Across U.S. Proves Almost Useless, The New York
Times (Aug. 11, 2015), https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/12/us/data-on-use-of-force-by-police-across-us-proves-almost-useless.html?mcubz=0.
[3]
National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, Officer Fatality Data (updated Apr. 12, 2017), http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.html.
[4]
Jacquelyn Smith, America’s 10 Deadliest
Jobs, Forbes (Aug. 22, 2013), https://www.forbes.com/sites/jacquelynsmith/2013/08/22/americas-10-deadliest-jobs-2/#dfacaf7424b2.
[5]
Timothy Roufa, How Dangerous Is a Law
Enforcement Career?, The Balance (Feb. 3, 2017), https://www.thebalance.com/how-dangerous-is-a-law-enforcement-career-974538;
Daniel Bier, By the Numbers: How Dangerous
Is It to Be a Cop?, Foundation for Economic Education (Aug. 19, 2014), https://fee.org/articles/by-the-numbers-how-dangerous-is-it-to-be-a-cop/.
[6]
Francesca Mirabile, Chicago Still Isn’t
the Murder Capital of America, The Trace (Jan. 18, 2017), https://www.thetrace.org/2017/01/chicago-not-most-dangerous-city-america/.
[7]
Id.
[8]
The Washington Post, Gun homicides and
gun ownership by country (listing United States ‘Guns per 100 people’ at
88.8, eclipsing #2 Yemen at only 54.8), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/nation/gun-homicides-ownership/table/.
[9]
Jay Livingston, Cops: Killing and Being
Killed, Pacific Standard (Apr. 16, 2015), https://psmag.com/news/cops-killing-and-being-killed.
[10]
Officer Down Memorial Page, Find a Fallen
Officer, https://www.odmp.org/search?cause=Gunfire&from=2000&to=2017&o=50.
[11]
Alex Bryant, 10 U.S. counties with the
highest murder rate, Policeone.com (June 5, 2017), https://www.policeone.com/ambush/articles/370416006-10-U-S-counties-with-the-highest-murder-rate/.
[12]
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow:
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The New Press (2010).
[13] Stephanie
Pappas, 5 Milestones in Gun Control
History, Live Science (Jan. 14, 2013), https://www.livescience.com/26252-milestones-gun-control-history.html.
[14]
Christina Sterbenz, Former police
officers explain how cops typically handle concealed weapons, Business
Insider (Jul. 7, 2016), http://www.businessinsider.com/how-police-handle-concealed-weapons-castile-shooting-2016-7.
[15]
Ralph Ellis and Bill Kirkos, Officer who
shot Philando Castile found not guilty on all counts, CNN (June 16, 2017), http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/16/us/philando-castile-trial-verdict/.
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