OK, riots, building burning, and looting are bad. They are not justifiable ways to respond to abusive police behavior. And I realize that the facts of the Ferguson, Missouri shooting are still hazy and we dont know what happened. But can we please recognize that our country has a serious problem with police violence? And that its more than just a false perception created by social media and the prevalence of video cameras? Heres one disconcerting issue: The 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, passed by Congress, mandates that the Attorney General collect data on excessive force used by police and present an annual report on it. It is my understanding that no such report has ever been published. In 1996, the Bureau of Justice Statistics published a report that basically says, Its really hard to get that information. And that, I think, put the matter to rest. Ive contacted Scott Rigells office about it. Well see. Heres a quick excerpt from Wikipedia: reliable estimates of the number of justifiable homicides committed by police officers in the United States do not exist.[6] A study of killings by police from 1999 to 2002 in the Central Florida region found that the national databases included only one-fourth of the number of persons killed by police as reported in the local news media. This is mind-blowing, but there is no way of knowing how many people are killed by the police in a given year. Not justifiable homicides. Not unjustified homicides. And I was unable to find any data on what consequences police officers face after unjustified homicides. Police keep that data mostly confidential. How can that data be kept hidden?! Police are obviously more militarized than ever before. Reasonable estimates are that SWAT team raids take place between 50,000 and 80,000 times per year in America. In the 1970s (when S.W.A.T. was a hit TV show), there were only a few hundred. Please think about those numbers. 33 police officers were tragically killed by gunfire in the line of duty in 2013. I do not make light of this number, but thats (thankfully) the fewest since 1887, when our population was 1/4 what it is now. Meanwhile estimates (because thats all weve got) are that 500-1000 people lose their lives by gunfire at the hands of police each year. It shouldnt take riots and looting to alert us to a national crisis, but we have one.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 17:23:55 +0000
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