Anyone who has experienced what America’s ghettos are actually like will know that popular depictions of cops as racist oppressors are distortions and caricatures. These myths and the statistics that belie them are worth exploring in some detail.
Are black people in the United States disproportionately subject to excessive force, including killings, by the police? American liberals certainly think so, and have repeatedly used the slogan, “Black lives matter.” On October 22 last year President Barack Obama said:
I think the reason the organisers use the phrase “Black Lives Matter” is not because they are suggesting nobody else’s lives matter. Rather, what they were suggesting is that there is a specific problem that is happening in the African American community that is not happening in other communities … The African American community is not just making this up.
But he also added, with greater wisdom, that those who make this claim should “back it up with data, not anecdote”.
Support for this contention has been fanned by two recent incidents in the United States in which unarmed black men were allegedly killed at the hands of the local police. Both incidents led to demonstrations and violence throughout America and to enormous media publicity around the world. The first occurred in Ferguson, Missouri (a suburb of St Louis), on August 9, 2014, when eighteen-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson. The second took place on April 12, 2015, in west Baltimore, Maryland, where a twenty-five-year-old black man, Freddy Gray, was arrested for possessing an illegal switchblade; while being transported to the local police station, he fell into a coma in the back of a police van and died. Both incidents and their consequences were widely reported in the Australian media, generally as open-and-shut examples of police brutality and racism, with little or nothing in the way of balance or nuance.
Anyone who has studied these events, or who has real experience of what the black slum areas of America’s cities are actually like, will know that the popular depictions of these events are distortions and caricatures. They are worth exploring in some detail, as are the realities of race and crime in the United States which lie behind them.
Ferguson, Missouri, a largely depressed suburb of St Louis, has a population of 21,000. In 1970 it was 99 per cent white; today it is 67 per cent black. In 1900 St Louis was the fourth-largest city in America, but its population has declined from 857,000 in 1950 to only 317,000 today, and it is now fifty-eighth.
Shortly before he was shot dead, and accompanied by a friend, Michael Brown robbed a local convenience store, grabbing and repeatedly threatening the store clerk. He then stole several packages of cigarillos (often used to wrap marijuana). Officer Darren Wilson had received word of the robbery and attempted to arrest the two men. Brown was six feet four inches (1.93 metres) tall and weighed 210 pounds (95 kilos). He was indeed unarmed, but was actively engaged in rectifying this deficiency, attempting to grab Wilson’s gun through the window of his police car (his DNA was found on the gun and inside the police car). The two robbers fled, with Wilson in pursuit. Brown stopped, turned towards Wilson and moved towards him. Wilson then shot him twelve times, the last shot being fatal.
A Grand Jury, appointed in the wake of the killing and subsequent rioting, deliberated for twenty-five days and completely exonerated Wilson. Many eyewitnesses, most of them local blacks, fully backed up Wilson’s account of the shooting. Nevertheless, almost immediately after the killing, hundreds of protesters gathered to throw bottles at the police, followed by the widespread looting of local shops and violent clashes with the police. These attracted worldwide publicity. Amnesty International sent a thirteen-strong contingent of human rights activists to monitor the local scene. (Amnesty is the body which has issued more reports critical of human rights violations in South Korea than in North Korea.) At the behest of the Obama administration, forty FBI agents were sent to interview potential witnesses; in addition, Obama’s Attorney-General sent his own set of lawyers to investigate further. Again, these investigations completely exonerated Wilson.