We Can Do Better: Police Professionalism and Black Lives Matter

• In Event: Law Enforcement and Immigration Administration

Abstract

Police fatally shot 987 people in 2017, according to a Washington Post tracking initiative (Sullivan et al. 2018). Social media technologies have increased transparency regarding such tragic events, facilitating Black Lives Matter and thereby putting police killings of African Americans on the public agenda. Yet as then-President Obama said, once activists have highlighted an issue so “people who are in a position to start bringing about change are ready to sit down with you, then you can’t just keep on yelling at them” (Shear and Stack 2016). Here, we argue that increased police professionalism can both reduce homicides (and crime generally) and prevent unnecessary police shootings of civilians. Those improvements would particularly benefit African Americans, who currently fall victim to both at disproportionately high rates.

Accordingly, this paper does five things. First, we outline the difficult history of relations between police and African American communities, and the attendant racial differences in perceptions of police behavior. Second, relying heavily on Zimring (2017), we summarize the state of knowledge regarding the roughly 1,000 annual police killings of civilians in the U.S. Notably, unarmed victims are disproportionately African Americans. Third, we introduce the Police Performance Index ranking the 25 largest U.S. cities based on both their homicide rates and rates of police killings of civilians per capita, controlling for poverty. The PPI rankings indicate that contrary to arguments from the Trump administration and Mac Donald (2016), police need not be brutal to be effective. Fourth, we focus on a positive outlier: the New York Police Department. NYPD reduced homicides by over 80%, and over a longer period, reduced police killings of civilians by roughly 90%. Currently, New York City’s homicide rate is roughly half the national mean, with police killings of civilians roughly three-quarters below the national mean, despite the city’s relatively high poverty. Recently, NYPD cut the number of racially suspect, humiliating “stop and frisk” actions by nearly 98%, while keeping crime low. Relying chiefly on Behn (2014), Maranto and Wolf (2013), Silverman (2001), Zimring (2011) and personal accounts, we show that these improvements did not reflect socioeconomic change. Rather, NYPD personnel and organizational reforms enabled tactical innovation, creating policing practices which both save black (and other) lives, and respect black dignity. Were American police generally to copy NYPD practices, we could see large reductions in both homicide rates and police killings of civilians. Finally, we outline specific national policies encouraging local police reforms, which in practice rather than merely rhetoric would do more to make black lives matter.

References

Behn, Robert D. (2014). The PerformanceStat Potential. Washington: Brookings Institution.

Mac Donald, Heather. (2016). The War on Cops. New York, NY: Encounter Books.

Maranto, Robert and Patrick Wolf. (2013). Cops, Teachers, and the Art of the Impossible: Explaining the Lack of Diffusion of Innovations That Make Impossible Jobs Possible, Public Administration Review 73(2), 230-40.

Shear, Michael D. & Liam Stack. (2016). “Obama Says Movements Like Black Lives Matter ‘Can’t Just Keep on Yelling.’” New York Times, April 23 at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/us/obama-says-movements-like-black-lives-matter-cant-just-keep-on-yelling.html.

Silverman, Eli B. (2001). NYPD Battles Crime: Innovative Strategies in Policing. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Sullivan, John, Zane Anthony, Julie Tate, & Jennifer Jenkins. (2018). “Nationwide, Police Shot and Killed Nearly 1,000 People in 2017.” Washington Post, January 5, retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/nationwide-police-shot-and-killed-nearly-1000-people-in-2017/2018/01/04/4eed5f34-e4e9-11e7-ab50-621fe0588340_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_fatalforce-644am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.9e6c0b22b98a


Zimring, Frederick. (2011). The City that Became Safe. New York: Oxford University Press.

_____. (2017). When Police Kill. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Authors

• Domonic A. Bearfield, Texas A&M University

• Robert Maranto, University of Arkansas

• Patrick J. Wolf, University of Arkansas