Mark Robison

mrobison@rgj.com

The claim

Police brutality toward black people today is rare.

The background

Former Las Vegas Review-Journal publisher Sherman Frederick tweeted this past week:

"Escalated police brutality toward blacks today are (sic) rare, not commonplace. Residual fear of a bygone era."

Determining if something is rare is a difficult thing because one must decide rarity in comparison with something else.

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And there's also the matter of defining police brutality. Wikipedia has a good explanation: "unwarranted infliction of excessive force" by police.

Killing unarmed people would seem to fit this definition. Examples are easy to find.

In 2005, the Bartholomew family was walking back from a grocery store after Hurricane Katrina when New Orleans police opened fire with assault rifles and a shotgun. The police killed a 17-year-old family friend named James Brissette and wounded four others. A developmentally disabled man named Ronald Madison ran when the shooting started. Police chased him down in a car. An officer fired a shotgun from the vehicle's backseat, killing Madison. All of the victims were unarmed and black.

The next year, a young black man named Sean Bell was celebrating with friends at a bar the night before his wedding. As he drove home, five New York Police Department officers unloaded 55 shots at them. Bell was killed and two friends injured. They were unarmed.

In 2009, another young black man, this one named Oscar Grant, was lying face down in an Oakland train station when a BART police officer shot him in the back, killing him.

In 2011 in White Plains, New York, former Marine Kenneth Chamberlain accidentally triggered his Life Aid medical alert necklace, causing police to be sent to his door. He said he was fine and didn't need help. Police called him the N-word, broke down his door, tasered him and shot him to death.

Anyone who follows such news could give many more examples: Malice Green, Amadou Diallo, Abner Louima (who was not shot but raped with a broom handle by police), Prince Jones, Henry Glover, Ramarley Graham, Shem Walker, Kendrec McDade…

The problem with past cases is they can seem more common than they really are because of a psychological trick where the ability to recall examples causes the brain to overestimate their frequency.

So let's look at the past few weeks at incidents involving unarmed black men:

• Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York police officer concerned that Garner was selling untaxed, loose cigarettes.

• John Crawford was standing on the toy aisle of an Ohio Wal-Mart holding an air rifle he'd picked up off a shelf when police arrived and shot him dead.

• Ezell Ford was shot by an LA police officer and killed.

• Dante Parker, who was riding a bicycle in Southern California, was tasered to death by police who tried to arrest him after hearing about a robbery suspect on a bike.

• Michael Brown was shot by police in broad daylight on a Ferguson, Missouri public street. The protests surrounding this case are what prompted Frederick's tweet.

How common are such occurrences?

A 2007 investigation by Colorlines and The Chicago Reporter looked at media accounts of police shootings and found that "African-Americans were overrepresented among police shooting victims in every city the publications investigated. The contrast was particularly noticeable in New York, San Diego and Las Vegas. In each of these cities, the percentage of black people killed by police was at least double that of their share of the city's total population."

A Bureau of Justice Statistics report in 2008 found that black people were almost three times more likely than white people to be subjected to force or threatened with it by police.

Similar disparities show up across other police actions. Take drugs. (Ha!)

Multiple studies have found white and black people use marijuana at similar rates. Given there are 6.5 times as many white people in America, equality of policing would lead one to expect white people to be arrested 6.5 times as much. Not true.

As a 2013 New York Times story put it: "Black Americans were nearly four times as likely as whites to be arrested on charges of marijuana possession in 2010, even though the two groups used the drug at similar rates, according to new federal data."

An even bigger disparity is seen in Brown's hometown. The International Business Times reported that, based on Missouri government figures, black residents of Ferguson are arrested at four times the rate of white residents.

USA Today examined justifiable homicide reports sent to the FBI. It found that over the seven years ending in 2012, a white police officer killed a black person on average twice a week. That number is based on data from only four percent of law enforcement agencies.

A poll by YouGov asked people if they thought the Brown shooting was "an isolated incident or part of a broader pattern in the way police treat black men." Forty percent of white respondents said it was an isolated case while 35 percent said it was part of a broader pattern. Black respondents? Six percent said it was an isolated case and 76 percent said it was part of a broader pattern.

The verdict

It is very possible that when the Brown evidence comes out, it will show the officer who shot him was justified. That's irrelevant for this verdict.

A large majority of black people report a pattern of police brutality toward the black community today; they experience higher rates of force when in contact with police; they experience higher rates of arrest for crimes committed at similar levels to white people; and examples of excessive force are rampant, with five unarmed black men killed by police in just the past few weeks.

Maybe racially charged police brutality isn't as overt and accepted as it was in a "bygone era," but to claim it's a rarity is not true.

Last month, in Aurora, Colorado — site of a 2012 mass shooting at a movie theater — 18-year-old Steve Lohner was confronted by police as he held a loaded shotgun after buying cigarettes. He refused to cooperate and taunted police. He was not killed or even arrested. He is white.

Would the chances of a bad outcome have increased if he'd been black? It seems so.

On the other hand, a black police officer shot and killed a reportedly unarmed white man named Dillon Taylor in South Salt Lake, Utah earlier this month.

The reverse happens. It would've been more accurate to call police killings of unarmed white suspects rare.

Truth meter: 1 (out of 10)