Police War on Poverty

People Misunderstand What is Happening with Police.  They aren't picking on blacks.  They are picking on poor people.

Peter Sage Introduction of a Guest Post

Frequent Guest Post writer Thad Guyer sent a long, detailed post, challenging readers to soldier through it.   I will introduce it with a few bullet points.

1.  Guyer spent some fifteen years practicing law in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Oregon representing inmates in police brutality cases as the most visible part of his practice.  He represented plaintiffs--people who got excessively roughed up.  He earned high praise for his skill. Sheriff deputies who later got into trouble of any kind themselves turned around and hired Guyer to represent them.   But Guyer lost every single excessive force case.  Police always had some sort of excuse for the force they meted out.  Jurors could always find something wrong with the guy who got beaten by the police or the woman who "voluntarily" had sex with her jailers.  

2.  Guyer appears frustrated with the progressive team's analysis of the problem, not because he fails to recognize racism, but because focusing on police-on-black misses the wider problem.   Police are brutal against poor people.  Poor people are disproportionately black and Hispanic, but Guyer knows from experience that "white trash" populations are subject to the same kinds of profiling, suspicion, close policing, and quick readiness to use extreme force lest they be caught off guard.

3.  Guyer appears frustrated because insofar as the problem is defined as race it falls into the racial-team paradigm pushed by both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: a race war.  This encourages and enhances racial resentment politics which further fractures the country and points to electoral defeat for Hillary.   It expands the "Reagan Democrat" blue collar base for Republicans because white voters want to believe in their police.  Worse, it proves to swing voters that liberal "Can't we all get along" policies don't work, and if Obama-Clinton cannot govern they will try some new candidate.

4.  If the problem is poverty and the nature of policing of poor people and often blighted neighborhoods then it is not a race war and solutions are possible.  American cannot "cure race" but we can address poverty and the disfunction of addiction, bad housing, bad schools, truancy, and crime.  The problems are intractable, but they are not impossible.  There is opportunity for progressive hope and change.

Guest Post by Thad Guyer

America’s Self-Delusional “Race War

Thad Guyer

America’s frenzied social media churns a culture wars narrative that cops kill blacks disproportionately. Black Lives Matter is the new boogeyman of the conservative right, and the face of a new racial injustice narrative by the left. The most deceptive statistic now being writ large is that blacks make up 30 percent of the people dying from police violence, but are just 13 percent of the population. See, US Census, “Quick Facts” (https://goo.gl/oDl7jT). This single-axis racial demographic is meaningless. Instead the comprehensive data support a single conclusion—cops disproportionately kill the poor, and the poor disproportionately kill the cops. Poor blacks are 26.2% of the poverty population, and 30% of all people killed by police. 
 
Of police who are murdered, 40% are murdered by poor blacks, and 50% are murdered by whites, Hispanics and Asians, who together constitute 45.7% of America’s total poverty population. See, C-Span, Washington Journal Heather MacDonald Ferguson (June 27, 2016 http://goo.gl/lYyJfW); see also crime statistics reported in Daily Wire, “5 Statistics You Need To Know About Cops Killing Blacks” (http://goo.gl/1Rschi). In my years as a criminal defense lawyer, the strongest association we saw was between poor people (regardless of race), and police stops of old cars with broken tail lights, expired tags, drivers without seat belts, and drug dealing.

The US Census found in 2014 that 14.8% of the general population lived in poverty.  Some10.1% of whites are in poverty, 12.0% of Asians, 23.6% of Hispanics , and 26.2% of blacks. (Wikipedia, https://goo.gl/Ki2WdT). As a review of crime statistics unsurprisingly shows, “poor urban blacks had rates of violence similar to poor urban whites.  So, generally speaking, rates of violence for people in poverty are largely the same across racial lines”. See, Daily Kos, “The problem isn't ‘black on black’ crime, it's poor on poor victimization” (Oct 2015, http://goo.gl/B22zBn).

The statisticians at the popular left website FiveThirtyEight.com have been evaluating the case for blacks being disproportionately killed by police. They cannot make that case, but instead show that arrests are the key statistic, concluding that “the reality is that the proportion of arrests that are of African-Americans is close to the proportion of killings by police that are of African-Americans.” (April 2015, http://goo.gl/y7GhrD). These in turn are close to the percentage of blacks in poverty. 

More recently, FiveThirtyEight has considered whether non-combative or unarmed blacks are killed by police more often than non-combative or unarmed whites. This it turns out is tiny subset, because almost everyone killed by police is armed or resisting arrest. (including all three black men shot is Ferguson, Baton Rouge and Minnesota). See, Heather Ferguson’s new book, “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe” (Amazon, https://goo.gl/7G1z0x), 

FiveThirtyEight concluded that FBI and DOJ “counts don’t all track whether people killed [by police] are unarmed, and that can be disputed or hard to categorize.” (“Police Are Killing People As Often As They Were Before Ferguson”, July 7, 2016, http://goo.gl/vk1GjD). As "community policing" deploys more non-white police, blacks are increasingly being shot by non-white officers. 

In my view, the lack of credible data that police kill poor blacks disproportionately to poor whites, Hispanics and Asians will continue to keep America’s delusional “race wars” narrative exactly where it has been stuck for the past eight years— nowhere. Hillary will urge greater enlightenment for “white people”, Trump will warn us about Mexicans, but like Obama, neither will do anything other than “listen” and argue about guns. 

Our polarized culture does not care about the facts. We will continue to ignore “inconvenient truths” about cops, hope our tweets and videos go viral, and denounce the “other side” as we, the viewers, judge the validity of police shootings from our arm chairs.