False Equivalency

I've seen several things posted this past week, making a comparison between the shooting of unarmed black men by police officers and in one case, the shooting of police officers in the line of duty, sometimes at traffic stops and in another case, the shooting of a white waitress by three black criminals. The first evidentaly came from a police officer or the family of a police officer making the point that many officers are shot and killed in the line of duty and no one protests; there is little if any media coverage. The writer makes the rhetorical point that maybe cops' lives are viewed as less important than the lives of criminals, or as the writer calls them "low-life scumbags". The other article is a bit more racial in orientation. It refers to a killing of a white waitress by three black men. Similar examples circulated following the killing of Trayvon Martin. The article about the waitress mocked President Obama's comments that if he had a son he would have looked like Martin. The point was that we sensationalize the killing of blacks by whites and somehow the killing of whites by blacks is ignored.

I'll adress the second example first. The majority playing the persecution card is not an unknown phenomenon. The most common example in the United States is the frequency of Christians, the overwhelming cultural and numerical majority in this country, complaining that atheists, a tiny and marginalized minority if there ever was one, are "taking the country away from them". Other countries are not exempt - the huge Hindu majority in India is run by a political party that makes paranoia about Muslims their main policy. The United States is still majority white and its power elites are overwhelmingly white, notwithstanding a half black man in the White House. Yet many white people get enraged when there is news coverage of a white person killing a black person. Examples of black-on-white crime are trotted out as examples of the media conspiracy. But other than the recent focus on police officers and last year's Martin-Zimmerman case, can anyone think of an example where there was extensive media coverage, outside of local coverage, of a white person killing a black person? Can't do it? Me neither, because it's usually not news. The principal reason that Zimmerman's shooting of Martin became news was the highly unusual nature of the shooting. Zimmerman was a neighborhood watch guy, in contact with the police through the 911 operator, who shot an unartrmed teenager who was in his own neighborhood doing nothing but walking home. He was where he was supposed to be and there is good reason to believe that he would not have attracted Zimmerman's attention if he had been blonde, blue-eyed and wering a polo shirt instead of a hooded sweatshirt. Other anomalies can be found here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/blackonwhite-crime-and-th_b_1521775.html

The other issue is the number of police killed in the line of duty versus the number of police killings of unarmed civilians. There is a hint of "suck it up" in this equivalency. But it is a false equivalency. Police know that they will encounter criminals who will resist arrest and try to kill them. It is not a surprise that a criminal will act in a criminal fashion. As the son and brother of police officers, it saddens me whenever I hear of a police officer dying in the line of duty. But it's part of the job. And police kill criminals every day as well. To quote a few figures that I found while researching this issue - there have been between 700 and 800 killings of police officers nationwide since 2009, that's about 130-135 per year; this figure comes from several websites in support of the police (the FBI reports just 27 for 2013). On the other hand, the FBI reports that in 2013 alone there were 461 reported "justifiable homicides" by police. Some estimates put this figure as high as 1000 per year, since many jurisdictions do not report to the FBI. Taking even this low figure for the police on civilain and the high figure for civilain on police there are 3 1/2 times the number killings by police as there are of killings of police. And of those hundreds of police killings, how many made the national news? A handful? Hardly a media conspiracy.

What makes some of these killings newsworthy is when an armed police officer kills an unarmed man, often in situations that suggest racial profiling if not out and out racism. The Michael Brown case, while there was evidently serious provocation from Brown himself, was in the end another example of an officer killing a man who did not have the capacity for deadly force. Other cases are more egregious and do not have the questions that the Brown case did. We expect the police to act with restraint, to ascertain that there is no other alternative before shooting someone. We expect the police to be trained, to know how to handle unruly or dangerous people. We do not expect them to act like the criminals, the thugs, the scumbags that are gunningb their fellow officers down. We expect them to be professionals, not just, as the character Sam Vimes observers in Terry Pratchett's Night Watch, another gang.