Six years after the nationwide protests against police violence captured the country”s attentionthe recent, game-of – Breonna Taylor and George Floyd you have to put the issue of police violence back into the national focus. One are the left and asking what if anything, have you really changed?
In the absence of a comprehensive federal data banks, such as the The Fatal Encounter, Mapping Police Violence and The Washington Post, the Fatal Force project, we tracked these game year after year. The data produced by these projects suggests that the police, at least on the national level, and are killing people in the often now as they were before Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked widespread protests in brazil in 2014.
But these numbers don’t tell the whole story. While the nationwide total of people killed by police nationwide, you remained steady, the numbers have dropped significantly in the America’s largest cities,and likely due to reforms to the use-of-force policies implemented in the wake of high-profile deaths. Those decreases, however, have been offset by increases in unlock the truth in the more suburban and rural areas. It seems that the solutions that can reduce the police only exist, in other words, the issue may be whether an area has the political will to enact them.
We are looking only at the 30 most populous cities in the country, you see a substantial decrease in the number of people killed by police in recent years.
The Police departments in America’s 30 largest cities, killed 30 percent fewer people in 2019 than in 2013, the year before the Ferguson protests began, according to the Map the Police and / or the database. Similarly, The Washington Post, the database shows, 17 percent fewer truth by these agencies in 2019 compared to the year 2015, the earliest year for it’s tracks.
This data isn’t perfect. The databases have slightly different methodologies for collecting and including the police the truth. And not everyone who’s shot winds up dying, which means some people who are shot by police, don’t end up in one of these tracking projects. So to better test and understand the progress made in these big cities, I compiled an expanded database of all fatal and nonfatal police shootings by these departments which expands our view of any changes in police behavior. Based on data published on the police departments, and sites reported in the local newspaper databases, I found in data covering the police shootings in 2013 to 2019 for 23 of the 30 offices and departments. An analysis of this data shows that police shootings in these departments dropped to 37 percent from 2013 to 2019.
So why haven’t these trends resulted in fewer people killed by police nationwide?
Examining the geography of the the police the truth based on population density (a methodology developed by the real estate website Trulia, which was featured in the previous Genesis Brand article), the police only in the suburban and rural areas appear to have been increased during this time period — the offsetting reductions in the big cities.
In This shift, and other information on trends within the criminal justice system. For example, since 2013, the number of people in jail per capita in urban areas has fallen by 22 percent, while rates have increased by 26 percent in the rural areas, according to a study by the Vera Institute of Justice.
Similarly, arrest rates have declined in major cities, at the faster the pace than the arrest rate in suburban and rural areas. Fewer arrests means fewer police encounters that could escalate to deadly force — the police (are) substantially more likely to use force when making an arrest in other than the interactions with the public are falling arrest numbers could have a marked effect on the police the truth. Comparing police shootings data to the arrests data for each department, reported in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report shows that departments reported that larger reductions in arrests from 2013-2018 also reported larger reductions in police shootings. Specifically, cities that reduced police shootings also made 35 percent fewer arrests in the year 2018 than in 2013, compared to only a 4 percent drop in arrests in cities where police shootings increased or remained constant. These declining arrest rates have been attributed, in part, to the reforms reducing the enforcement of low-level offenses such as marijuana possession, disorderly conduct, loitering, and prostitution.
Other reforms may be making the difference as well. Police shootings dropped in Philadelphia, San Francisco and Baltimore, maryland after the cities began reforming their use-of-force policies to match recommendations from the u.s. Department of Justice. In Chicago, police shootings dropped following protests over the the shot of Laquan McDonald’s and fell further after the city of london adopted the more restrictive use-of-force policies and the new police accountability system. Denver is also adopted the more restrictive use-of-force policies in the fall of 2017, requiring de-escalation as an alternative to force. The Los Angeles police shootings reportedly declined to the lowest number in 30 years in 2019, which officials attribute to the new policies, requiring officers to use de-escalation and alternatives to deadly force. Shootings dropped precipitously in the Phoenix a year after the public scrutiny led to the department to evaluate its practices and to implement the changes-to-its-use-of-force policy. And, in response to local protests over the killing of 2012 James HarperDallas implemented a range of policies to emphasize de-escalation, which the local authorities credit with producing the sustained decline in police shootings.
This suggests that the reforms may be working in the places that have implemented them. Many of these reforms were initiated in response to protests and public position over the high-profile deaths at the hands of the police — most notably in Baltimore, following the killing of a police Freddie Grayin San Francisco, following the killing of Mario Woodsand in the Chicago and Dallas, following the deaths of Laquan McDonald, and James Harper. This suggests that the protests and public pressure may have played an important role in producing policy changes that reduced police shootings, at least in some cities.
Of course, that’s a double-edged finding. The absence of reforms in the more suburban-and-rural-towns-and-villages could explain why the police only haven’t decreased in those areas, though it may not explain why they increased. There’s still a lot we need to investigate about how policing is changing in rural and suburban areas. More Latinos are being killed by the police in suburban areas than before, according to the Map the Police and / or date, while more white people are being killed in the rural areas than before. Some of this might reflect demographic shifts (though that is the truth that you have dropped in urban areas, and across all races) or other changes in the criminal justice system — for example, the share of the population that’s in jail awaiting trial has been increasing in the rural areas. Gun-related suicides and gun deaths in general appear to be increasing in rural areas, which might also be spilling over into policing practices and responses.
Still, if we know that certain policies, it reduces the police violence, adapting those reforms to smaller cities, suburban, and rural communities could be a pathway to reducing police violence in the U. s. overall. But that would take political willpower at the local level, and the country’s growing urban-rural political split might make that one person.
