research on police brutality

What works to reduce police brutality

Psychologists’ research is pinpointing the factors that lead to overly aggressive, biased policing—and intervention that can prevent it

Vol. 51, No. 7 Print version: page 30

Physical Abuse and Violence
Forensics, Law, and Public Safety
Racism, Bias, and Discrimination

When the Las Vegas Police Department applied a psychology-informed “hands off” policy for officers involved in foot chases, use of force dropped by 23%. In Seattle, officers trained in a “procedural justice” intervention designed in part by psychologists used force up to 40% less. These are just a few examples of the work the field is doing to address police brutality.

“There’s much more openness to the idea of concrete change among police departments,” says Joel Dvoskin, PhD, ABPP, a clinical and forensic psychologist and past president of APA’s Div. 18 (Psychologists in Public Service).

That shift is backed by support from the public. Since 2016, the share of Americans who say that police use the right amount of force, treat racial and ethnic groups equally and hold officers accountable for misconduct has declined substantially, according to the Pew Research Center ( Majority of Public Favors Giving Civilians the Power to Sue Officers for Misconduct , 2020).

Psychologists have already played a critical role in the reform process—from collecting data on biased police stops, searches and use of force to designing and delivering interventions that reduce the chances that police will rely on stereotypes, for instance by limiting the amount of discretion officers have during searches.

Now, psychologists are promoting those interventions to more police departments, conducting research to determine how well they work and continuing to collect and organize data on police behavior and department culture.

“Criminal justice—police, courts, prisons—has been called an evidence-free zone,” says Tom Tyler, PhD, a professor of psychology at Yale Law School and an expert in the psychology of justice. “People in positions of power tend to make policy decisions based on intuition and common sense—presumptions that we as psychologists recognize are often in error.”

“What’s really needed is an evidence-informed model of criminal justice,” he says. “And a lot of that evidence can come from psychologists.”

Psychological research in action

In 2015, President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing reviewed scientific data on policing, recommending major policy changes at the federal level to improve oversight, training, officer wellness and more ( Final Report of the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing , 2015).

Federal efforts have slowed in recent years, with most changes happening at the local level. But with around 18,000 police departments nationwide, that response has been fragmented and inconsistent ( National Sources of Law Enforcement Employment Data , Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2016).

Still, psychologists have forged ahead with efforts that are making a difference. One key contribution involves spurring policy changes and interventions based on psychological insights.

“One of the most influential approaches coming from psychology is training in procedurally just policing,” says Calvin Lai, PhD, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.

That approach aims to increase the public’s trust in police by drawing on psychological research on justice and fairness. It involves teaching officers strategies such as explaining to citizens why they’ve been stopped and how it will benefit public safety ( Principles of Procedurally Just Policing , The Justice Collaboratory at Yale Law School, 2018).

“We know that the policing model of using force to compel compliance lowers the crime rate but does not build trust,” says Tyler, who has developed and studied models of procedurally just policing. “The crime rate has declined about 75% in the last 30 years, but public trust in the police hasn’t increased at all.”

His research has shown that what community members really want is for police to treat them with respect and to give them a voice—a chance to explain their situation before action is taken. People also want to know that police are sincere, care about the well-being of their community, and act in an unbiased and consistent way—for example, by explaining the rules they use and how they’re applying them.

A study in Seattle randomly assigned officers to receive training in procedurally just policing, leading to a reduction in use of force of between 15% and 40%, depending on the situation (Owens, E., et al., Criminology & Public Policy , Vol. 17 , No. 1, 2018).

“It seems to be doing what we’d hope in terms of promoting better relationships between police officers and community members,” says Lai.

The Center for Policing Equity (CPE), led by psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff, PhD, of Yale University, has also led a number of psychology-driven policy changes in police departments around the country. In an effort to cut down on high-adrenaline encounters—where police officers are more likely to rely on stereotypes—Goff urged the Las Vegas Police Department to bar officers involved in a foot pursuit from handling suspects when the chase ends. The policy led to a 23% drop in use of force at the department, an 11% reduction in officer injury and a simultaneous drop in racial disparities in use of force data. CPE has also pioneered efforts to recruit racially and ethnically diverse officer candidates and to make immigration enforcement more consistent.

Another key area that psychological interventions target is implicit bias, which has been documented across a range of domains and populations ( State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review , Kirwan Institute, 2017). One study led by Jennifer Eberhardt, PhD, professor of psychology at Stanford University, reviewed body camera footage and found that police officers in Oakland, California, treated Black people with less respect than whites (Voigt, R., et al., PNAS , Vol. 114, No. 25, 2017).

Eberhardt and others, including Lorie Fridell, PhD, a professor of criminology at the University of South Florida, have designed and begun to deliver training programs on implicit bias to law enforcement agencies around the country (“ Producing Bias-Free Policing: A Science-Based Approach ,” Springer Publishing, 2017).

Those programs, which typically mix instruction, discussion and role-playing, aim to help agencies reduce high-discretion policing and hold officers accountable for biased practices. But there’s no standardized curriculum—and experts say more research is needed to determine whether implicit bias training has a lasting impact and how such training can work alongside other agency reform efforts.

“There seem to be some forms of training that are effective, but the studies on these interventions are still pretty limited,” says Lai. “We just don’t know that much one way or the other.”

The power of peer intervention

Another intervention that has shown promise for reducing violence among police is known as Project ABLE , or Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement. Based on the work of psychologist Ervin Staub, PhD, an emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and past president of APA’s Div. 48 (Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence), the program promotes a culture of peer intervention. It teaches officers to prevent their peers from perpetrating unnecessary violence, which can save both lives and careers. Developed by the New Orleans Police Department in 2014 and originally named Ethical Policing Is Courageous (EPIC), Project ABLE is now being adopted by all police departments in New Hampshire and Washington state, as well as those in Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, several other cities and the FBI National Academy.

When an officer commits an act of unnecessary violence, his colleagues face a tough choice, Dvoskin says. Report the act and get a reputation as a “rat”—which may mean your next call for backup goes unanswered—or lie, which is a crime.

“What if, instead, you can prevent the bad thing from happening in the first place?” he says. “What if you manifested your loyalty to a fellow officer by helping him or her stay out of trouble?”

Staub says minor interventions can be highly effective. During recent protests of confederate monuments in New Orleans, an officer stopped a peer from attacking demonstrators by putting an arm around his shoulder. Trainees also apply strategies taught by the program to themselves. One officer in New Orleans reported using EPIC to avoid retaliating against a protester who had spit in her face.

That sort of behavior requires culture change. Police officers need to get comfortable both giving and receiving such interventions—and that culture must be modeled and supported by the highest levels of leadership within an organization, Dvoskin says.

To test his model of active bystandership, Staub studied examples of group violence, such as genocide, observing how hostility and violence evolve progressively. He has also conducted experimental research to understand how people respond to emergencies depending on the actions of those around them. In one study, participants’ helping behavior in response to a simulated emergency ranged from 25% to 100% of the time depending on a confederate’s response to the emergency. He also found that those who are asked to help once are more likely to volunteer later (Staub, E., “ The Roots of Goodness and Resistance to Evil ,” Oxford University Press, 2015).

Now, Project ABLE has support from Georgetown University and the international law firm Sheppard Mullin, which will help fund free training in active bystandership for any interested U.S. police department—and they’ve had hundreds of inquiries since June. Dvoskin, Staub and their team are now working to standardize lesson plans and policy guidelines.

“If this training is introduced in many police departments and done effectively, I believe that policing in America will be transformed,” Staub says.

Understanding and changing officer behavior

Psychologists are also helping agencies collect, report and understand data on their officers’ behavior—data that can point to further policy changes to reduce unnecessary violence and racial bias.

Simply changing the definition of a “police stop,” for instance, can help identify patterns of racial profiling that might otherwise be missed, says social psychologist Jack Glaser, PhD, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy. Glaser has advised the California attorney general’s office on how to collect policing data, including revising the regulations on police stop reporting.

“Some police-civilian encounters are very casual and are not typically recognized as stops—but they are done with investigatory intent and can escalate to a detention,” he says.

For example, a pedestrian might voluntarily speak with a police officer who says, “Hi, can I ask you a question?”—but that conversation could lead to a search and even an arrest. Those stops typically aren’t reported, so racial bias in such practices could go unchecked.

Glaser has also partnered with CPE for a nationwide effort to aggregate data on police behavior with the National Justice Database , which draws from nearly 100 police departments representing more than a third of the U.S. population. He has worked to standardize and harmonize that data—which includes hundreds of thousands of entries on police stops, searches and use of force and can vary a lot from one agency to the next—so that researchers can start making comparisons and looking for larger trends.

Glaser says reporting officer behavioral data in different ways can paint a very different picture about whether racial disparities exist—so it’s important to get it right. For example, some departments consider officer presence or unholstering a weapon instances of police use of force, while others do not.

Goff, Glaser and their team delved into police use of force data to explore why some researchers, such as economist Roland Fryer, PhD, of Harvard University, have reported no racial differences in officer-involved shootings (Fryer, R.G., Journal of Political Economy , Vol. 127, No. 3, 2019). Their preliminary analysis shows that racial disparities may not exist in all officer-involved shootings, but that there’s a clear bias against African Americans when the victim is unarmed.

“Given that the protest movement is overwhelmingly about unarmed people getting killed by police, that seems to be the most important data point—but it seems to be getting lost,” Glaser says.

One major takeaway from the National Justice Database so far is that police are more likely to display racial bias when they conduct a “high-discretion search”—usually done on a hunch in ambiguous circumstances—versus a “low-discretion search,” a more routine activity, for instance when a person has already been detained for a crime. When the California Highway Patrol banned high-discretion searches, racial disparities began to level off ( Racial & Identity Profiling Advisory Board Annual Report , 2020).

“The obvious implication there is to try and minimize high-discretion searches,” Glaser says. “The tremendous amount of discretion given to police promotes decision-making under ambiguity and uncertainty, which psychologists know is ripe for stereotype influence.”

Screening officer candidates

Other psychologists have worked to adapt the police selection process to address the issue of implicit bias. Portland-based forensic psychologist David Corey, PhD, ABPP, has urged departments to add “cultural competence” as a criterion for screening law enforcement officers. “On the surface, the implicit bias literature is dismally depressing, because it tells us that everybody has automatic stereotypes that operate unconsciously and affect behavior,” says Corey, who also founded the American Board of Police and Public Safety Psychology .

Because of measurement issues, it’s not practical to screen candidates for policing jobs based on their implicit biases. But studies show that some personality dimensions can help officers temper those biases (Ben-Porath, Y.S., “ Interpreting the MMPI-2-RF ,” University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Specifically, people high in executive functioning, emotional regulation skills and metacognitive abilities are better able to prevent implicit biases from affecting their behavior. A capacity for theory of mind formation—the ability to anticipate how others will behave based on their actions or tone of voice—also helps officers learn to bypass their initial instincts.

“Those competencies render implicit bias more malleable,” says Corey. “So, my focus, and that of a growing number of colleagues around the country, is to evaluate applicants for those qualities.”

The Portland Police Bureau, as well as several other agencies in the Pacific Northwest, have added such measures to their selection battery.

Answering more questions

Looking ahead, psychologists are working to address gaps in the data in crucial areas such as use of force, says Shauna Laughna, PhD, ABPP, a Florida-based police and public safety psychologist and chair of APA Div. 18’s Police and Public Safety section. She adds that recruitment, training, discipline and retention of personnel can vary greatly across the 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the United States. That points to a need for more data, standardized measures—for instance, what constitutes excessive use of force—and a comprehensive national database on policing incidents.

“Attempting to generalize from data gathered at one agency to another may not always be prudent,” she says.

As reform efforts continue at the local and state levels, there’s one other essential thing the field can do, says Colby Mills, PhD, a clinical psychologist who works with the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia: Provide more formal training opportunities for police psychologists, including during graduate school and in the form of continuing education. The limited police psychology coursework currently available within forensic psychology programs often does not include adequate training on the culture, ethics and special skills required to do such work, he says.

“It takes a lot of courage for a police officer to reach out to a mental health professional, because of the stigmas and the pressures they experience,” Mills says. “But once they do it, we owe it to them to provide a qualified professional who knows what they face and understands their culture.”

Critical incident response

In addition to their involvement with department-wide training efforts, psychologists are also increasingly providing ongoing mental health services, for instance after an officer-involved shooting occurs, says Colby Mills, PhD, a clinical psychologist who contracts with the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia.

Along with peer support officers and the station’s police chaplain, Mills deploys immediately after a critical incident occurs and delivers Stress First Aid, a model developed for the military that can support officers in processing emotions ( Stress First Aid for Law Enforcement , National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, 2016).

“We want to strike a balance where we offer support without implying that an officer will automatically need help to recover,” Mills says.

The Fairfax County Police Department works with about a dozen psychologists who provide critical incident response, therapy, psychoeducation, consultations and pre-employment screenings.

“In general, police and public safety agencies are starting to embrace these sorts of psychological services more and more,” Mills says.

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Police brutality and racism in America

The Schwartzreport tracks emerging trends that will affect the world, particularly the United States. For EXPLORE it focuses on matters of health in the broadest sense of that term, including medical issues, changes in the biosphere, technology, and policy considerations, all of which will shape our culture and our lives.

After getting arrested several times for participating in civil rights demonstrations as I walked down Constitution Avenue, past what were then known as the Old Navy buildings, now long gone, on that warm Wednesday afternoon on the 28th of August 1963, I thought we had reached the turning point. I and thousands of others were moving quietly and peacefully towards the Lincoln Memorial where we were going to hear the Reverend Martin Luther King give what history now knows as the “I have a Dream" speech.

I was walking with a Black friend, a reporter for The Washington Star, an historic paper now long gone. I looked over Richard's shoulder and saw walking next to us two young partners of the then conservative Republican law firm, Covington & Burling. Richard saw where I was looking and turned to watch them as well. To him they were just two more White men; a large proportion of the crowd were White, and men. When I explained who they were he smiled, and I said, “I think we've won.” It was such a happy day; I remember it still.

And a little less than a year later, on 2 July 1964, almost unthinkably, a Southern politician, President Lyndon Johnson, signed into law the bipartisan Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in public places, provided for the integration of public schools, and facilities, and made employment discrimination based on race illegal. It seemed Dr. King's dream was coming true.

Then a year after that when Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discriminatory voting practices, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, I thought all was now well. It had taken a hundred years, since the end of the Civil War, but we were finally throttling the monster of racism.

And yet here I sit, looking day after day at the searing television images of the new civil rights demonstrations, watching videos of White policemen murdering Black men for no reason except they could, thinking they would get away with it, as they had so often in the past. The mass demonstrations with their clouds of tear gas and rubber bullets. The gross misuse of the American military against American citizens. The eight minutes and 46 seconds of video showing four policemen in Minneapolis murdering an unarmed handcuffed Black man, George Floyd, as he lay in the street handcuffed, that has caused, as I write this, 19 days of civil rights demonstrations involving millions all over the world.

It is important to remember also, I think, that this historic event, the murder and everything that has followed from that death is known to us only because of the bravery of one 17-year old girl, Darnell Frazier, who would not be intimidated and kept her phone camera on creating a video record of what was happening. As her hometown paper, the Star Tribune reported, Frazier wasn't looking to be a hero. She was “just a 17-year-old high school student, with a boyfriend and a job at the mall, who did the right thing. She's the Rosa Parks of her generation.” 1 I completely agree. I have written often about the power of a single individual at the right moment. 2 Could there be a clearer example?

What made this event historic, so catalyzing, so emotionally powerful that people all over the world in their millions took to the streets, even though it could mean their life because the Covid-19 pandemic which, in the U.S. alone, had infected over two million people and was still killing a thousand people a day? I think it was because it illustrated the conjunction of two major trends in America: the blatant racism that still infects the country, and the racially biased police brutality which has become outrageous.

George Floyd is one of a thousand police killings that will probably happen in 2020. There were that many last year. The statistics about American law enforcement are astounding when compared to those of other developed nations, like those that make up the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). According to Statistia in the U.S. there have been, “a total (of) 429 civilians ...shot, 88 of whom were Black, as of June 4, 2020. In 2018, there were 996 fatal police shootings, and in 2019 increased to 1004 (see Figure 1). Additionally, the rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 30 fatal shootings per million of the population as of June 2020.” 3

Credit: The Washington Post.

By way of contrast, in Norway, which I pick because it is a nation with high gun ownership, the police in 2019 armed themselves and displayed weapons 42 times, and fired two guns once each, and no one was killed. Few Americans even realize that “A police officer does not have to shoot to kill and, in several countries, a police officer does not even have to carry a gun. In Norway, Iceland, New Zealand, Britain, and Ireland, police officers generally do not carry firearms.” 4

Intermixed with racial brutality on the part of the law enforcement system in the U.S. is the gross misuse of the American military against the American people they are sworn to protect. And then there is the American gulag. It's prisons and jails dot our national landscape holding millions of incarcerated men and women a large majority of them Black and Brown.

Until this June I don't think most Americans really understood how violent and racist policing in America has become. If you are White like me, professional and relatively affluent, you never have any interactions with the police. They don't come to your door, and should it happen that you are stopped for a traffic ticket you don't feel threatened; it is no more than an annoyance that is going to cost you a few dollars for the fine. And even then, how often does that happen? I haven't been stopped since 1973, when a taillight on my car had gone out without my noticing. You see the police, they are there. But it is not an issue.

But if you are Black or Brown you live in another world.

Three weeks before George Floyd was murdered during a traffic stop by four police officers, an exhaustive study carried out by a research team at Stanford University led by Emma Pierson and Camelia Simoiu, was published in Nature Human Behavior Entitled, “A Large-scale Analysis of Racial Disparities in Police stops Across the United States”. It presented the truth of America, and it is horrifying.

“We assessed racial disparities in policing in the United States by compiling and analysing a dataset detailing nearly 100 million traffic stops conducted across the country. We found that black drivers were less likely to be stopped after sunset, when a ‘veil of darkness’ masks one's race, suggesting bias in stop decisions. Furthermore, by examining the rate at which stopped drivers were searched and the likelihood that searches turned up contraband, we found evidence that the bar for searching black and Hispanic drivers was lower than that for searching white drivers. Finally, we found that legalization of recreational marijuana reduced the number of searches of white, black and Hispanic drivers—but the bar for searching black and Hispanic drivers was still lower than that for white drivers post-legalization. Our results indicate that police stops and search decisions suffer from persistent racial bias and point to the value of policy interventions to mitigate these disparities.” 5

Some years ago I was on the board of a foundation to help children in medical distress. Also on the board was the then Deputy Chief of Police of the Los Angeles Police Department. We became friendly and one night went out to dinner together after a board meeting. This was not long after the 1992 riots that occurred when Rodney King, a Black man, was savagely beaten by police in a traffic stop. I asked the Deputy Chief, who had told me he had risen through the ranks and been a sworn officer for almost 30 years, how many police officers would participate in something like the King beating? I have never forgotten his answer. He said, “About 15% of police are heroes, the very best you could ever ask for. Another 15% are thugs and bullies who become police because they think they can act out without fear of punishment. The remaining 70% go with the flow. If they are with heroes, they behave heroically; if they are assigned to work with thugs, well bad things happen.” He explained that what he was trying to do was identify the thugs before they were hired. And to break through the “Blue Wall” if they were hired. He told me it was not easy, and one of the problems was the police union which protected its members at all cost.

How bad is it? I mean real numbers, not just the conjecture and political commentary that fills the airwaves. It turns out that it is very hard to get this information. Because of the power of the police unions and the racism of the U.S. Congress under the last four presidents, both Democrats and Republicans — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barrack Obama, and Donald Trump — as police violence has grown worse each year, creating a real federal data base on police violence has proven almost impossible.

Congress passed H.R. 3355 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. 6 It provided funds for local and state law enforcement entities and the State Attorney Generals to “acquire data about the use of excessive force by law enforcement officers” across the nation and to “publish an annual summary of the data acquired.” It didn't go well. In 1996, the Institute for Law and Justice and the National Institute of Justice on behalf of the DOJ, in a carefully worded report, described the failure to do what was mandated two years earlier. “Systematically collecting information on use of force from the Nation's more than 17,000 law enforcement agencies is difficult given the lack of standard definitions, the variety of incident recording practices, and the sensitivity of the issue.” 7

So in 2020, do we know any more? We do, although still far from enough. In 2019, a research team led by Frank Edwards of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, published a report, “Risk of being killed by police use-of-foce in the U.S. by age, race/ethnicity, and sex.” They reported:

“We use novel data on police-involved deaths to estimate how the risk of being killed by police use-of-force in the United States varies across social groups. We estimate the lifetime and age-specific risks of being killed by police by race and sex. We also provide estimates of the proportion of all deaths accounted for by police use-of-force. We find that African American men and women, American Indian / Alaska Native men and women, and Latino men face higher lifetime risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. We find that Latino women and Asian / Pacific Islander men and women face lower risk of being killed by police than do their white peers. Risk is highest for Black men, who (at current levels of risk) face about a 1 in 1000 chance of being killed by police over the life course. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Risk peaks between the ages of 20 and 35 for all groups. For young men of color, police use-of-force is among the leading causes of death.” 8

Just to put that in a little finer focus, what they are saying is: “African American men were about 2 1 / 2 times more likely than White men to be killed by police. Men of color face a non-trivial lifetime risk of being killed by police” 9

The Washington Post looked into this issue and tuned the data even finer: “Although half of the people shot and killed by police are white, black Americans are shot at a disproportionate rate. They account for just 13 percent of the U.S. population, but more than a quarter of police shooting victims. The disparity is even more pronounced among unarmed victims, of whom more than a third are black.” 10

And if you are Black or Brown, while being murdered is the worst case scenario it is not the only misery that awaits any interaction with America's racist police. A study carried out by Megan T. Stevenson and Sandra Mayson that was published in 2018 in The Boston University Law Review described the reality of being a Black person on the streets of America. In doing their research Stevenson and Mayson discovered first that the hysteria about crime built up in America by conservative politicians and commentators, who are overwhelmingly White, is unfounded. “the number of misdemeanor arrests and cases filed have declined markedly in recent years. In fact, national arrest rates for almost every misdemeanor offense category have been declining for at least two decades, and the misdemeanor arrest rate was lower in 2014 than in 1995 in almost every state for which data is available.” 11

But they also found, “there is profound racial disparity in the misdemeanor arrest rate for most—but not all—offense types. This is sobering if not surprising. More unexpectedly, perhaps, the variation in racial disparity across offense types has remained remarkably constant over the past thirty-seven years; the offenses marked by the greatest racial disparity in arrest rates in 1980 are more or less the same as those marked by greatest racial disparity today.” 12

The truth that almost none of us who are White get is that 57 years after Martin Luther King's I Have a Dream speech, 56 years after the Civil Rights act of 1964, and 55 years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965, if you are Black or Brown, and particularly if you are a young Black man, for you America is like living in an occupied country where any interaction with the police is to be avoided. It can send you to prison for a trivial offense at the least, and may, and often does, result in your murder at the hands of those whose supposed but not actual job is to “serve and protect.”

Speaking as a White man, I am fed up with that, and I think that this November all of us who are White and who believe the function of the state should be to foster wellbeing at every level, for everyone, need to check off our ballots only for candidates who are willing to do that, and vote out of office all politicians not so committed. What do you think?

Scientist, futurist, and award-winning author and novelist Stephan A. Schwartz , is a Distinguished Consulting Faculty of Saybrook University, and a BIAL Fellow. He is an award winning author of both fiction and non-fiction, columnist for the journal EXPLORE, and editor of the daily web publication Schwartzreport.net in both of which he covers trends that are affecting the future. For over 40 years, as an experimentalist, he has been studying the nature of consciousness, particularly that aspect independent of space and time. Schwartz is part of the small group that founded modern Remote Viewing research, and is the principal researcher studying the use of Remote Viewing in archaeology. In addition to his own non-fiction works and novels, he is the author of more than 200 technical reports, papers, and academic book chapters. In addition to his experimental studies he has written numerous magazine articles for Smithsonian, OMNI, American History, American Heritage, The Washington Post, The New York Times, as well as other magazines and newspapers. He is the recipient of the Parapsychological Association Outstanding Contribution Award, OOOM Magazine (Germany) 100 Most Inspiring People in the World award, and the 2018 Albert Nelson Marquis Award for Outstanding Contributions.

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Updated 06/10/2024

Mapping Police Violence

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Police killed 1,158 Victim people in Location the U.S. in Years 2020 .

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There were 18 days in Victim 2020 when police did not kill Victim people in Location the U.S. .

Killings by police in 2020.

Police killed 4 people on January 01, 2020

Police killed 6 people on January 02, 2020

Police killed 0 people on January 03, 2020

Police killed 2 people on January 04, 2020

Police killed 6 people on January 05, 2020

Police killed 4 people on January 06, 2020

Police killed 2 people on January 07, 2020

Police killed 3 people on January 08, 2020

Police killed 6 people on January 09, 2020

Police killed 1 people on January 10, 2020

Police killed 5 people on January 11, 2020

Police killed 1 people on January 12, 2020

Police killed 2 people on January 13, 2020

Police killed 1 people on January 14, 2020

Police killed 5 people on January 15, 2020

Police killed 3 people on January 16, 2020

Police killed 1 people on January 17, 2020

Police killed 0 people on January 18, 2020

Police killed 4 people on January 19, 2020

Police killed 4 people on January 20, 2020

Police killed 6 people on January 21, 2020

Police killed 3 people on January 22, 2020

Police killed 6 people on January 23, 2020

Police killed 3 people on January 24, 2020

Police killed 2 people on January 25, 2020

Police killed 0 people on January 26, 2020

Police killed 4 people on January 27, 2020

Police killed 5 people on January 28, 2020

Police killed 2 people on January 29, 2020

Police killed 4 people on January 30, 2020

Police killed 0 people on January 31, 2020

Police killed 3 people on February 01, 2020

Police killed 3 people on February 02, 2020

Police killed 3 people on February 03, 2020

Police killed 5 people on February 04, 2020

Police killed 1 people on February 05, 2020

Police killed 1 people on February 06, 2020

Police killed 3 people on February 07, 2020

Police killed 2 people on February 08, 2020

Police killed 5 people on February 09, 2020

Police killed 3 people on February 10, 2020

Police killed 0 people on February 11, 2020

Police killed 3 people on February 12, 2020

Police killed 5 people on February 13, 2020

Police killed 4 people on February 14, 2020

Police killed 0 people on February 15, 2020

Police killed 5 people on February 16, 2020

Police killed 2 people on February 17, 2020

Police killed 2 people on February 18, 2020

Police killed 1 people on February 19, 2020

Police killed 5 people on February 20, 2020

Police killed 3 people on February 21, 2020

Police killed 2 people on February 22, 2020

Police killed 1 people on February 23, 2020

Police killed 3 people on February 24, 2020

Police killed 8 people on February 25, 2020

Police killed 6 people on February 26, 2020

Police killed 4 people on February 27, 2020

Police killed 2 people on February 28, 2020

Police killed 6 people on February 29, 2020

Police killed 4 people on March 01, 2020

Police killed 2 people on March 02, 2020

Police killed 4 people on March 03, 2020

Police killed 2 people on March 04, 2020

Police killed 5 people on March 05, 2020

Police killed 4 people on March 06, 2020

Police killed 2 people on March 07, 2020

Police killed 6 people on March 08, 2020

Police killed 3 people on March 09, 2020

Police killed 2 people on March 10, 2020

Police killed 2 people on March 11, 2020

Police killed 2 people on March 12, 2020

Police killed 8 people on March 13, 2020

Police killed 5 people on March 14, 2020

Police killed 5 people on March 15, 2020

Police killed 6 people on March 16, 2020

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Police killed 5 people on October 06, 2020

Police killed 0 people on October 07, 2020

Police killed 5 people on October 08, 2020

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Police killed 0 people on October 11, 2020

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Police killed 4 people on October 15, 2020

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Police killed 1 people on November 06, 2020

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Police killed 3 people on November 09, 2020

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Police killed 6 people on November 13, 2020

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Police killed 2 people on November 24, 2020

Police killed 1 people on November 25, 2020

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Police killed 0 people on November 28, 2020

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Police killed 4 people on December 03, 2020

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Police killed 5 people on December 05, 2020

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Police killed 1 people on December 07, 2020

Police killed 3 people on December 08, 2020

Police killed 3 people on December 09, 2020

Police killed 6 people on December 10, 2020

Police killed 3 people on December 11, 2020

Police killed 0 people on December 12, 2020

Police killed 4 people on December 13, 2020

Police killed 1 people on December 14, 2020

Police killed 5 people on December 15, 2020

Police killed 3 people on December 16, 2020

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Police killed 5 people on December 18, 2020

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Police killed 8 people on December 28, 2020

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Police killed 4 people on December 30, 2020

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Black people are 2.9x more likely to be killed by police than white people in Location the U.S. .

Police killings per 1 million people in the u.s., 2013–2024.

Race and ethnicity population data from the 2020 Decennial Census

Police killed 49 more Victim people in Location the U.S. in Year 2020 compared to the previous year.

Police killed victim people in 49 states and the district of columbia in year 2020 ..

Fewer police killings

More police killings

Sage Journals

The threshold for being perceived as dangerous, and thereby falling victim to lethal police force, appears to be higher for White civilians relative to their Black or Hispanic peers.

The threshold for being perceived as dangerous, and thereby falling victim to lethal police force, appears to be higher for White civilians relative to their Black or Hispanic peers. - Sage Journals

Protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African Americans and Latinos (but not for Whites)

Protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African Americans and Latinos (but not for Whites) - SSRN

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NEWS FEATURE
04 September 2019

What the data say about police shootings

Lynne Peeples 0

Lynne Peeples is a science journalist in Seattle, Washington.

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Protesters march after a fatal shooting by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2016. Credit: William Widmer/New York Times/eyevine

On Tuesday 6 August, the police shot and killed a schoolteacher outside his home in Shaler Township, Pennsylvania. He had reportedly pointed a gun at the officers. In Grants Pass, Oregon, that same day, a 39-year-old man was shot and killed after an altercation with police in the state police office. And in Henderson, Nevada, that evening, an officer shot and injured a 15-year-old suspected of robbing a convenience store. The boy reportedly had an object in his hand that the police later confirmed was not a deadly weapon.

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Nature 573 , 24-26 (2019)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-02601-9

Edwards, F., Lee, H. & Esposito, M. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 116 , 16793–16798 (2019).

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Johnson, D. J. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 116 , 15877–15882 (2019).

Nix, J., Campbell, B. A., Byers, E. H. & Alpert, G. P. Criminol. Public Policy 16 , 309–340 (2017).

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Wheeler, A. P., Phillips, S. W., Worrall, J. L. & Bishopp, S. A. Justice Res. Policy 18 , 48–76 (2017).

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June 4, 2020

A Civil Rights Expert Explains the Social Science of Police Racism

Columbia University attorney Alexis J. Hoag discusses the history of how we got to this point and the ways that researchers can help reduce bias against black Americans throughout the legal system

By Lydia Denworth

Protester holds sign during a demonstration in honor of George Floyd on June 2, 2020, in Marin City, Calif.

Justin Sullivan Getty Images

In a now infamous event captured on video, on May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man, was killed by a Minneapolis police officer outside of a corner store. Derek Chauvin kneeled on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds while two other officers helped to hold him down and a third stood guard nearby. Nearly a year later, in April 2021, a jury convicted Chauvin of second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. He could face decades in prison (sentencing was expected on June 25). In a highly unusual development, other police officers, including the Minneapolis chief of police, testified against Chauvin.

The three other officers involved, Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao, were indicted on a range of state and federal charges, including violating Floyd’s constitutional rights, failing to intervene to stop Chauvin, and aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Their trial is scheduled for March 2022.

The 2014 shooting death of Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., sparked a renewed emphasis on racism and police brutality in the U.S.’s political and cultural conversation. In the past few years many names have been added to the list of Black people killed by police. Despite some efforts to acknowledge and grapple with systemic racism in American institutions, anger and distrust between law enforcement and Black Americans have remained high. But Floyd’s death sparked a new level of outrage. Protests erupted in hundreds of cities around the U.S. in the summer of 2020. Most demonstrations were peaceful. But some turned violent, with police using force against protesters and a small percentage of people setting fire to police cars, looting stores, and defacing or damaging buildings. By July the demonstrations were thought to be the largest protest movement in American history, with some 15 million to 26 million people estimated to have taken part.

In addition to the criminal charges against the officers, Floyd’s death has prompted U.S. Justice Department investigations into the practices of the Minneapolis Police Department. And Democrats in Congress are hoping to pass criminal justice reform legislation named for Floyd. Both reflect the interests of the new administration since Joe Biden took office in January 2021.

In June 2020, at the height of the protests, Scientific American spoke with civil rights attorney Alexis J. Hoag. Hoag is the inaugural practitioner in residence at the Eric H. Holder, Jr., Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University. She works with both undergraduates and law school students at Columbia to introduce them to civil rights fieldwork (which she describes as “real issues, real clients, real cases”). Hoag was previously a senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Scientific American asked her to share her perspective on the history that has brought the U.S. to a breaking point—and her ideas for how to make substantive improvements in how law enforcement and courts treat Black people in the country.

Why are we seeing this level of protest now?

I think it’s a combination of things. COVID-19 [has had a] disproportionate impact on Black people because of long-standing structural inequalities. Black people are more likely to live in hypersegregated low-income areas that are underresourced. And Black people are more prone to the very preexisting conditions that make people vulnerable to COVID-19 because of structural inequality and lack of access to health care. We’ve all been cooped up for 10 to 11 weeks. Forty million people [in the U.S.] are unemployed. And there was something egregious about the video that circulated of George Floyd being executed for the suspicion of tendering a counterfeit $20 bill. And I want to stress “suspicion” because we still don’t know. That became a death sentence for him.

The violence that has been rendered against Black bodies has gone on for centuries. Now it’s out there for everyone to see. And the response, which is hopeful and heartening to me, is that people—not just Black Americans—in this country are really disturbed and appropriately so.

What are the important historical factors that have led up to this point?

I lean so heavily on the unique history of this country and the fact that we enslaved people, Black people. To hold people in bondage as property, you had to look at them as less than human. You see that continuing to happen today in [what] I refer to as the criminal legal system, not the justice system, because it is not just. We are not there yet. As an appellate attorney, I read a lot of transcripts of trials. And the level of dehumanization that prosecutors use to refer to Black criminal defendants is striking. It’s the verbiage used, that the defendant was “circling” and “hunting” the victim. What hunts and circles? Animals. When you can dehumanize an individual, of course, you can put the person away for a long time, you can sentence him or her to death. And of course, you can put your knee on somebody’s neck for nine minutes because you see them as less than human. It’s a combination of the dehumanization of Black people with the presumption of dangerousness and criminality.

Is racism getting worse? Or has the ubiquity of cell phones and video recordings simply made us more aware of it?

These issues are getting amplified; they’re getting recorded. I think back to the early 1990s and Rodney King’s videotaped beating. That really galvanized people around this issue—an issue that many Black Americans were intimately aware of already—and put it out there for the world to see. Then the response after those officers were acquitted was public demonstrations in 1992 in Los Angeles. I think people would not have been as engaged if we didn’t have that image. Now we walk around with [cameras] in our pockets.

How does the seeming increase in white nationalism fit in?

I don’t know that I would call it an increase. White nationalists, known earlier as white supremacists, first rallied [more than] 150 years ago to violently limit the freedom of newly emancipated Black Americans. Despite federal legislation extending the benefits of citizenship to Black people, white supremacists passed state laws codifying inequality and used violence and intimidation to curtail any Black exercise of freedom. What’s happening now [in June 2020] is that we have [a presidential] administration that welcomes and encourages white nationalist views and activities.

Have events in Ferguson and other cities, and the Black Lives Matter movement as a whole, had any effect on policing?

Ferguson was a massive wake-up call. There was a brief glimmer of hope. There was a mechanism in place: the Law Enforcement Misconduct [Statute]. It [is] a federal law the Department of Justice could rely on to investigate Ferguson, to investigate police misconduct in Baltimore [where Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man, died while being transported in a police vehicle in what was ruled to be a homicide]. That law was grossly underutilized by Attorney General William Barr. Who the administration is and who the chief law-enforcement officer of this country is—the attorney general of the U.S.—makes a difference. We’ve seen a massive rollback in the responsiveness of the [Trump] administration [in taking] a hard look at injustice and at rampant police misconduct.

The other step back that the country has taken is to characterize officers involved in misconduct as “a few bad apples.” I think we all need to admit that it’s not a few bad apples; it’s a rotten apple tree. The history of policing in the South [was driven in part by] slave patrols that were monitoring the movement of Black bodies. And in the North, law enforcement was privately funded [and often involved protecting property and goods]. The police got started targeting poor people and Black people.

What would you like to see happen now?

I think there needs to be a really hard conversation nationally and within law enforcement. To use force, police officers have to reasonably believe that their lives are in danger. What is it about Black skin that makes law enforcement feel threatened for their lives? In addition, there are legal mechanisms that need to be examined. “Qualified immunity” as a defense to police misconduct was judicially created in 1982. It shields government officials from being sued for discretionary actions that are performed within their official capacities unless the action violates clearly established federal law. Somebody who is suing an officer for tasing someone while they’re handcuffed has to find a case from the U.S. Supreme Court or the highest court of appeals in their jurisdiction that says that exact act—being handcuffed and tased—is unconstitutional. This is a massive hurdle for a plaintiff.

What are social scientists and researchers doing to help?

Data are currency. We can create a national database of officer misconduct. You have officers such as Derek Chauvin, who had 18 complaints against him and [was] still allowed to operate within the [Minneapolis Police] Department.

The data collection that happens within police departments enabled experts in the stop-and-frisk litigation [against] the [New York City Police Department] to shine a spotlight on gross disparities: the rate of stops and searches of Black and brown men and boys [coupled with] the low rate of actually acquiring contraband. They found that the rate of securing contraband from white individuals who had been stopped and frisked was so much higher because the police were actually using discretion.

There’s powerful data collection that happens in our criminal courts. Studies show that, all factors being equal, judges are rendering longer and harsher sentences for Black defendants. These judges are setting higher bail. You can isolate all these other factors, but race is the difference. That’s very powerful—to be able to document and publish those findings.

There has also been some really good social science research on implicit bias and the way that it operates. We could all take [implicit association tests] on our computers. You could do a training with your employees. To start with, there is this recognition, this acknowledgment, that we all have implicit bias.

And how do we use that information and not just let people off the hook?

Let’s talk about it. Social science research shows that when there’s recognition that we harbor implicit bias, that awareness can help mitigate [such] bias impacting our daily interactions and decisions.

What about people’s decision to protest during the pandemic? Are you worried that protesters will get sick and spread COVID-19?

Of course. I worry that there will be a second wave of infections. But I think that also speaks to how pressing the issue is and how strongly people feel about it—that they are risking their lives to bring attention to the rampant and lethal mistreatment of Black and brown bodies at the hands of law enforcement.

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Research & Reports

Protecting Against Police Brutality and Official Misconduct

Amendments to the criminal civil rights law could provide the federal government with a powerful tool to pursue law enforcement accountability.

Eric H. Holder Jr.
Download Report
Download Annotated Proposal

The protest movement sparked by George Floyd’s killing last year has forced a nationwide reckoning with a wide range of deep-rooted racial inequities — in our economy, in health care, in education, and even in our democracy — that undermine the American promise of freedom and justice for all. That tragic incident provoked widespread demonstrations and stirred strong emotions from people across our nation.

While our state and local governments wrestle with how to reimagine relationships between police and the communities they serve, the Justice Department has long been hamstrung in its ability to mete out justice when people’s civil rights are violated.

The Civil Rights Acts passed during Reconstruction made it a federal crime to deprive someone of their constitutional rights while acting in an official capacity, a provision now known as Section 242. Today, when state or local law enforcement are accused of misconduct, the federal government is often seen as the best avenue for justice — to conduct a neutral investigation and to serve as a backstop when state or local investigations falter. I’m proud that the Justice Department pursued more Section 242 cases under my leadership than under any other attorney general before or since.

But due to Section 242’s vague wording and a series of Supreme Court decisions that raised the standard of proof needed for a civil rights violation, it’s often difficult for federal prosecutors to hold law enforcement accountable using this statute.

This timely report outlines changes to Section 242 that would clarify its scope, making it easier to bring cases and win convictions for civil rights violations of these kinds. Changing the law would allow for charges in cases where prosecutors might currently conclude that the standard of proof cannot be met. Perhaps more important, it attempts to deter potential future misconduct by acting as a nationwide reminder to law enforcement and other public officials of the constitutional limits on their authority.

The statutory changes recommended in this proposal are carefully designed to better protect civil rights that are already recognized. And because Black, Latino, and Native Americans are disproportionately victimized by the kinds of official misconduct the proposal addresses, these changes would advance racial justice.

This proposal would also help ensure that law enforcement officers in every part of the United States live up to the same high standards of professionalism. I have immense regard for the vital role that police play in all of America’s communities and for the sacrifices that they and their families are too often called to make on behalf of their country. It is in great part for their sake — and for their safety — that we must seek to build trust in all communities.

We need to send a clear message that the Constitution and laws of the United States prohibit public officials from engaging in excessive force, sexual misconduct, and deprivation of needed medical care. This proposal will better allow the Justice Department to pursue justice in every appropriate case, across the country.

Eric H. Holder Jr. Eighty-Second Attorney General of the United States

Introduction

Excessive use of force by law enforcement, sexual abuse by public officials and others in positions of authority, and the denial of needed medical care to people in police or correctional custody undermine the rule of law, our government, and our systems of justice.

When public officials engage in misconduct, people expect justice, often in the form of a federal investigation and criminal prosecution. In 2020 alone, instances of police violence, including the killings of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake, led to demands for increased police accountability and federal civil rights investigations. footnote1_d7iNeJB2Vz3v 1 See Rashawn Ray, “How Can We Enhance Police Accountability in the United States?,” in Policy 2020 , Brookings Institution, 2020, https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/how-can-we-enhance-police-accountability-in-the-united-states/ [ https://perma.cc/8Z9S-GRCU ]; and Elliot C. McLaughlin, “Breonna Taylor Investigations Are Far from Over as Demands for Transparency Mount,” CNN, September 24, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/24/us/breonna-taylor-investigations-remaining/index.html [ https://perma.cc/4SR6-FG85 ]. See also, e.g., U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, “Federal, State and Local Law Enforcement Statement on the Death of George Floyd and Riots,” press release, May 31, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/pr/federal-state-and-local-law-enforcement-statement-death-george-floyd-and-riots [ https://perma.cc/V69J-49JR ]; and U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin, “Statement Regarding Federal Civil Rights Investigation into Shooting of Mr. Jacob Blake,” press release, January 5, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edwi/pr/statement-regarding-federal-civil-rights-investigation-shooting-mr-jacob-blake [ https://perma.cc/5GCM-WJ7H ].

For almost all incidents involving violence by law enforcement, there is one federal criminal law that applies: 18 U.S.C. § 242. Unlike nearly all other criminal laws, the statute does not clearly define what conduct is a criminal act. It describes the circumstances under which a person, acting with the authority of government, can be held criminally responsible for violating someone’s constitutional rights, but it does not make clear to officials what particular actions they cannot take. footnote2_ijZv1tfVMpAe 2 Throughout this report, people who could be charged under § 242 are most often referred to as “public officials” or “law enforcement.” The Supreme Court has held, however, that § 242 may also be used to prosecute private actors whose authority to act in a given situation is derived from the state, such as a guard at a privately run prison. United States v. Price, 383 U.S. 787, 794 (1966), https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/383/787.html [ https://perma.cc/V6FU-ZQR6 ] (“To act ‘under color’ of law does not require that the accused be an officer of the State. It is enough that he is a willful participant in joint activity with the State or its agents.”).

It need not be this way. The federal government must renew our national commitment to civil rights by enacting a criminal statutory framework that protects the fundamental constitutional rights of people who come into contact with public officials, including those who are being arrested or are in custody. footnote3_xSEdoXOS2fBp 3 This report proposes changes to federal criminal civil rights laws that would apply to any public official who is acting with governmental authority, including police, prosecutors, judges, correctional officials, and more. Even though the law would apply to any public official who violated it, this report frequently uses the term “law enforcement” or “police” instead of “public officials” in discussions of violence and use of force since law enforcement officers — including police, correctional officials, sheriffs and their deputies, and federal agents — are the public officials most frequently involved in these incidents.

Recent instances of racialized police violence have made this matter all the more urgent. In 2020 alone, police killed more than 1,100 people. footnote4_qbKb1JcDg74S 4 Mapping Police Violence, last accessed February 5, 2021, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ . Black Americans are three times more likely to be killed by a police officer than white Americans and nearly twice as likely to be killed as Latino Americans. footnote5_eqjuHUbyiVEa 5 Mapping Police Violence. See also Timothy Williams, “Study Supports Suspicion That Police Are More Likely to Use Force on Blacks,” New York Times , July 7, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/study-supports-suspicion-that-police-use-of-force-is-more-likely-for-blacks.html (“African-Americans are far more likely than whites and other groups to be the victims of use of force by the police, even when racial disparities in crime are taken into account.”). Police killing is a leading cause of death for Black men in the United States — one in every 1,000 Black men will die at the hands of police. footnote6_uKnoSonQ0hEJ 6 Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee, and Michael Esposito, “Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race-Ethnicity, and Sex,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 116, no.34 (2019): 16793, 16794, https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/34/16793.full.pdf [ https://perma.cc/8W88-XWR9 ]. In 2019, Black people represented 24 percent of those killed, despite making up only 13 percent of the population, and although Black people are 3 times more likely to be killed by the police than white people, they are 1.3 times more likely than whites to be unarmed in such incidents. footnote7_uOHDJN2lvMPS 7 Mapping Police Violence. These disparities have led unprecedented numbers of Americans to demand justice for victims of police violence and changes to our criminal justice system. footnote8_mOepxumbglNy 8 Associated Press–NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, “Widespread Desire for Policing and Criminal Justice Reform,” June 15, 2020, https://apnorc.org/projects/widespread-desire-for-policing-and-criminal-justice-reform/ [ https://perma.cc/HYU2–8J9R ].

In addition to law enforcement brutality, other types of official misconduct shock the conscience. These include sexual misconduct by public officials; officials’ failure to provide medical treatment to people who are under arrest or in jail or prison; and pervasive violence by correctional officers in jails and prisons, where excessive force against incarcerated people is often shielded from public view. footnote9_f0Ncpl9Uop4H 9 Lauren Brooke-Eisen, “The Violence Against People Behind Bars That We Don’t See,” Time , September 1, 2020, https://time.com/5884104/prison-violence-dont-see/ [ https://perma.cc/GLP4-Y9XP ]. The “shocks the conscience” standard is the long-established test for a Fourteenth Amendment violation under Rochin v. California , 342 U.S. 165 (1952), https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/342/165 [ https://perma.cc/ZJ6S-UEDZ ]. Yet cases are rarely prosecuted under § 242. footnote10_gEsMAp5hjcHQ 10 TRAC Reports, “Police Officers Rarely Charged for Excessive Use of Force in Federal Court,” June 17, 2020, https://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/615/ [ https://perma.cc/9LTD-VN9N ] (reporting that “between 1990 and 2019, federal prosecutors filed § 242 charges about 41 times per year on average, with as few as 19 times (2005) and as many as 67 times in one year”). See also U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division Highlights: 2009–2017 , January 2017, 32–34, https://www.justice.gov/crt/page/file/923096/download [ https://perma.cc/Q3Y3-FQCB ] (reporting that the Civil Rights Division prosecuted 580 law enforcement officials for committing willful violations of civil rights and related crimes between 2009 and 2016); Brian R. Johnson and Phillip B. Bridgmon, “Depriving Civil Rights: An Exploration of 18 U.S.C. 242 Criminal Prosecutions 2001–2006,” Criminal Justice Law Review 34, no. 2 (2009), 196, 204 (observing that prosecutions under § 242 are a relatively rare event, and identifying a very small number of sexual misconduct cases); and Paul J. Watford, “ Screws v. United States and the Birth of Federal Civil Rights Enforcement,” Marquette Law Review 98, no. 1 (2014), 465, 483, https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5229&context=mulr [ https://perma.cc/737F-XGW4 ].

Congress should make structural changes to our laws to help protect the civil rights of all people. If passed, the legislation recommended in this report would impact how law enforcement, corrections, and other public officials operate nationwide. By more specifically defining what actions violate civil rights, the law would put officials on clearer notice of what is forbidden. In addition, the proposed statute would specifically codify the authority to prosecute fellow officers or supervisors who know a civil rights violation is occurring but fail to intervene something the law already allows. footnote11_b1PuDXvW95yv 11 See U.S. Department of Justice, “Law Enforcement Misconduct,” updated July 6, 2020, https://www.justice.gov/crt/law-enforcement-misconduct [ https://perma.cc/LW5V-HZ8G ] (“An officer who purposefully allows a fellow officer to violate a victim’s Constitutional rights may be prosecuted for failure to intervene to stop the Constitutional violation. To prosecute such an officer, the government must show that the defendant officer was aware of the Constitutional violation, had an opportunity to intervene, and chose not to do so. This charge is often appropriate for supervisory officers who observe uses of excessive force without stopping them, or who actively encourage uses of excessive force but do not directly participate in them.”). These changes to § 242 should result in modifications to police and law enforcement training across the country and also deter civil rights violations. footnote12_se2EAfb3URhm 12 Local law enforcement policies often provide vague, imprecise direction on use of force. These policies may focus on the extent of what is legally permitted rather than on best practices. Police Executive Research Forum, Guiding Principles on Use of Force , 2016, 15–16, https://www.policeforum.org/assets/30%20guiding%20principles.pdf [ https://perma.cc/AQ5S-3Q5F ]. For those public officials and law enforcement officers who do deprive someone of his or her civil rights, these changes would lower some of the barriers to federal prosecutions and civil lawsuits. footnote13_mrXceKf8iM9l 13 The amendments proposed herein could also be made to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, although the specifics of § 1983 are beyond the scope of this report. In either event, a clarification of the civil rights protected by the Constitution and laws of the United States would make more plain which rights are “clearly established” in the context of civil lawsuits. See discussion of qualified immunity below at notes 47–49 and in accompanying text.

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Police Brutality Statistics: What the Data Says About Police Violence in America

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Richard Meadow

Richard "Rick" Meadow is an esteemed attorney with over 30 years of experience.

Content Last Updated: June 10, 2024

The killings of Michael Brown, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, among many other unarmed Black men and women, have placed police violence at the center of the national conversation. This heightened awareness of wrongful police killings of civilians also exposed a disturbing deficit in the federal government’s collection of policing data.

Media groups like The Guardian , The Washington Post , and others rushed to fill this data void. By creating independent databases from local news reports and online sources, the researchers found that the federal government counted less than half of all officer-involved shooting deaths. Then-FBI director James Comey admitted that the Bureau’s shortcomings were “ridiculous” and “embarrassing.”

This article will reveal the most vital police brutality statistics on deaths from police violence by examining the most authoritative, independent data sources. It will include statistics describing the disparate impacts of police violence on communities of color. We’ll conclude with recommendations to help stop killings by police , and throughout the piece, try to answer these and other frequently asked questions about police violence.

Are police brutality rates increasing?
In which cities, states, and countries are police shootings most and least likely to occur?
Which racial and ethnic groups are most impacted by police misconduct and violence?
What happens to police officers after they kill civilians?

Note: This article primarily focuses on police-related killings rather than non-fatal police violence. That exclusion doesn’t minimize the problem of excessive police force causing severe injuries and personal trauma. It only reflects the scandalous lack of reliable data provided by local, state, and federal police agencies.

Regional Overview: Police Violence in the United States & Abroad

Despite the increased data visibility into the problem in recent years, police killings of civilians continue to occur at an astonishing rate. We’ll examine which groups of people are most likely to be killed by the police in the following section. But we’ll begin with a high-level view of the problem at the national, state, and international levels.

According to The Washington Post’s tracking database , at least 1,096 people were shot and killed by the police in 2022. And according to Mapping Police Violence , a leading police violence research project, police killed a minimum of 1,200 people that same year. That includes victims shot by police or another cause of death — such as tasers, physical restraints, or police vehicles.

The Mapping Police Violence analysis, which pulls data from the longstanding Fatal Encounters database , also noted a disturbing observation. In 2022, there were only 10 days when police did not kill someone in the US.

Have the rates of police killings increased over the years?

While smartphones and social media have made the problem of police violence more visible, about 1,000 people in the U.S. population are killed by police every year. According to Mapping Police Violence and The Washington Post, those figures have been remarkably consistent since they started tracking data in 2013 and 2016, respectively.

In other words, police killings are not increasing. But they’re not decreasing either, which reflects the continuing crisis of policing in America.

Which US states have the highest rates of fatal police violence?

The prestigious medical journal The Lancet analyzed mortality rates of people killed by race and state in the United States from 1990 to 2019. Likely the most comprehensive analysis on the topic, they compared data from the USA National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) to three previously mentioned police violence databases — Mapping Police Violence, Fatal Encounters, and The Guardian’s “The Counted” database.

The states with the highest mortality rates of people killed by police during the 2010s time period are

Which US states have the lowest rates of fatal police violence?

According to the Lancet data mentioned above, the states with the lowest mortality rates of people killed by the police during the 2010s time period are

Which US police departments have the highest rates of fatal police violence?

According to Mapping Police Violence, from 2013 through June 2023, the U.S. police departments with the highest rates of people killed by police were

St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department: 15.2 deaths per 1 million
Tulsa Police Department: 9.3 deaths per 1 million
Albuquerque Police Department: 9.1 deaths per 1 million

The Chicago Police Department deserves special mention. The overall annual rate of people killed by police in Chicago is below average at 3.3 deaths per million. Taking a closer look at the numbers, CPD kills Black people at an annual rate of 8.6 per million and white people at 0.3 per million.

The Chicago Police Department, on average, kills about 26 times more Black people than white people every year. To put these sky-high fatality rates into perspective by comparing them against sizable municipal police departments with significantly lower rates of police killings.

Which US police departments have the lowest rates of fatal police violence?

Chesapeake Police Department: 0.8 deaths per 1 million
Arlington Police Department: 0.8 deaths per 1 million
Buffalo Police Department: 1.0 deaths per 1 million

The key takeaway is that rates of fatal shootings by police vary considerably across police departments, with some being more than ten times as likely to kill civilians as others.

So how does America’s police violence compare to that of other countries?

American police kill civilians at extraordinarily higher rates than police in other high-income democracies. According to the Prison Policy Initiative , a criminal justice think tank, in 2019, U.S. police killed 3.35 per 1 million people. Canadian police, the next highest on the list, killed 0.98 for every 1 million. And police in England and Wales rarely kill civilians, at a rate of .05 per 1 million.

In other words, police in the U.S. kill people at a rate at least three times higher than Canadian police do and at least 60 times the rate of police in England and Wales. And according to an analysis by The Guardian, U.S. police killed more people in the first 24 days of 2015 than cops in England and Wales did throughout the previous 24 years .

Who are the most common victims of police violence?

Now that we’ve looked at police brutality from a regional perspective, we’ll analyze its victims. Revisiting The Washington Post’s database, which has tracked more than 8,600 fatal police shootings since 2015 , the data shows that police brutality is a problem that affects people across demographic groups.

Although about half of the estimated 1,000 people shot and killed by police every year in the United States are white — the proportional weight of police violence hits communities of color the hardest.

So what’s the risk of being killed by police violence by race?

The Washington Post’s database breaks down the stark racial disparities for people in the United States killed by police shootings since Jan. 1, 2015.

Police killed white people at a rate of 2.3 per million per year
Police killed Hispanic people at a rate of 2.5 per million per year
Police killed Black people at a rate of 5.8 per million per year

In other words, Black Americans are more than 2 times as likely to be killed by the police than white people.

And according to the 2022 Police Violence report , a product of the Mapping Police Violence team, Black Americans were not only more likely to be killed by police than other races. They were also more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed.

Which US police department has the highest rate of deadly force against Black Americans?

Police brutality in St. Louis is particularly prevalent against the Black community. According to Mapping Police Violence, from 2013 through June 2023, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department killed 48 people, including 41 Black people. That equates to an average annual rate of killings of Black people by police of 30.4 per 1 million. Moreover, Oklahoma PD officers killed Black people at 10.3 times the rate of white people.

What’s the risk of being killed by police violence by age and gender?

According to The Washington Post, among the 8,613 people shot and killed by the police, 8,191 — or over 95% — are male. And more than half of the victims are between 20 and 40 years old.

So overall, the profile of people killed by the police tends to be overwhelmingly male, mostly young, and disproportionately Latino and Black men.

Mental health risks

According to the 2022 Police Violence Report, police killed 111 people after receiving reports of someone behaving erratically or having a mental health crisis.

What happens to police after they kill someone?

Philip Stinson, a criminal justice expert at Bowling Green State University, maintains the most comprehensive database of officers charged with crimes . His national database contains information on 13,214 arrest cases from 2005 to 2016 involving 10,901 individual law enforcement officers.

When police kill someone, how likely are they to be prosecuted and convicted for murder?

In short, not very. According to Professor Philip Stinson, U.S. prosecutors in 2021 charged only 21 police officers with either murder or manslaughter resulting from deadly use of force. While 21 might not seem like many, it was a record-high number of officers charged.

For comparison, prosecutors in 2020 charged 16 police officers with murder or manslaughter from an on-duty deadly force incident. Twelve were charged in 2019, ten in 2018, and seven in 2017.

When police officers kill someone, how likely are they to be charged with a crime?

Based on Professor Stinson’s data on police crimes — only a tiny minority, less than 2% of officers who killed civilians in the line of duty, were charged with a crime. The vast majority of officers who killed people while on duty, 98.2%, were not charged with a crime.

When police who kill are charged with murder or manslaughter, how likely are they to be convicted?

The April 2021 murder and manslaughter conviction of Derick Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, was an extraordinary event. As mentioned above, it’s rare for DAs to charge officers who kill. And according to Stinson’s police crimes data, of the 155 officers prosecuted for murder or manslaughter since 2005, only about one-third resulted in a criminal conviction. One-third were acquitted in court, and another one-third of cases are still pending.

What are the leading causes of police brutality in the United States?

Various factors contribute to police violence in America. While high rates of gun ownership among Americans likely contribute to higher rates of fatal shootings by police, rates of violent crime in cities did not determine rates of killings by police. For example, the Buffalo and Newark police departments had relatively low rates of fatal police violence despite high crime rates. On the other hand, Spokane and Orlando had relatively low crime rates with higher rates of deadly police violence.

There is also a long history of police violence in the United States . White men initially created police departments to control enslaved people and Native Americans, and violence has been a part of American police forces since their inception.

Another challenging characteristic of American policing is the decentralization of agencies. According to a 2016 Department of Justice survey , at least 12,200 local law enforcement agencies and 3,000 sheriff’s offices operate independently with minimal oversight. About 90% of those agencies employ fewer than 50 officers. And nearly 50% of local departments have fewer than ten officers.

That fragmentation makes it nearly impossible to mandate consistent standards in police training, data collection, use of force policies, and accountability for officers who repeatedly use excessive force. As a result, police officers in the United States are often poorly trained to practice de-escalation in stressful situations. And when agencies fail to collect or release public records of excessive force and fatal police shootings, that contributes to a culture of unseen and unchecked officer misconduct and vicious cycles of community despair.

Recommendations to prevent police killings

These sobering numbers suggest that policing in the United States requires fundamental transformation. The frequency of police killings and the racial disparities pervading those police brutality statistics is a public health crisis that needs urgent action.

Civil rights organizations have long called for police accountability in the US. And the brutal killing of George Floyd accelerated a cultural and political revolution against unjust police violence targeting African-Americans and other people of color. If you’ve been a victim of police brutality, getting legal help to file a lawsuit can help hold police departments accountable for brutality and excessive force.

To help reduce fatal police encounters and increase public safety, Congress and all 50 states should pass police reform bills to provide the following interventions:

Improve use of force standards , including rules mandating when law enforcement officers can and cannot use deadly force
Collect and publish detailed data on officer arrests, use of force injuries and deaths, and racial bias data during police stops
Ensure independent and transparent investigations into all cases of excessive force and severe misconduct to ensure that officers are held accountable for their actions
License and track “wandering officers” to prevent agencies from hiring officers dismissed for misconduct by other agencies
Abolish qualified immunity , which often shields officers from liability for many constitutional violations, including fatal use of force.

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How unjust police killings damage the mental health of black americans.

Harvard Chan’s David R. Williams, whose research looks at how discrimination affects Black people’s health, appeared on “60 Minutes” in April.

Courtesy of Harvard Chan School

Christina Pazzanese

Harvard Staff Writer

Research tracks the ways racial discrimination wreaks a physical, psychological toll

Since the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, many African Americans have reported feeling overwhelmed at times by the trauma, anguish, and outrage stirred up by Floyd’s death, as well as other incidents of police violence against Black victims. The disturbing frequency of these events, and the relentless news coverage of them in the last year, has been taking a real emotional toll.

A first-ever study in 2018 found that a police killing of an unarmed African American triggered days of poor mental health for Black people living in that state over the following three months — a significant problem given there are about 1,000 police killings annually on average, with African Americans comprising a disproportionate 25 percent to 30 percent of those. The accumulation of painful days over the course of a year was comparable to the rate experienced by diabetics, according to the study’s author, David R. Williams , Florence Sprague Norman and Laura Smart Norman Professor of Public Health and chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health .

Williams, a leading expert on the social influences of health and a professor of African and African American Studies and Sociology at Harvard University, spoke with the Gazette about what he’s seen in the past year, the mental and physical tolls discrimination take on Black lives and what individuals can do to help mitigate them.

David R. Williams

GAZETTE: This is a new area of scholarly inquiry. What have you found thus far about the causal links that police killings have on Black people’s mental health?

WILLIAMS: What we sought to do was to identify if a police killing of civilians had negative effects not just on the victim’s family, immediate relatives and friends, but on the larger community. We looked at every police shooting in America over a three-year period [between 2013‒2015] and then linked that, in a quasi-experimental design, with data from the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] on the mental health of the population in every state. And what we found was that every police shooting of an unarmed Black person was linked to worse mental health for the entire Black population in the state where that shooting had occurred for the next three months.

It wasn’t every police shooting that did that. If the Black person was armed, there was no negative effect on Black mental health. We also didn’t find any effect of police shootings of Blacks, armed or unarmed, on the mental health of whites in those states. And we didn’t find any effect on Black mental health of police shootings of [unarmed] whites. So we found a very specific effect. We think it’s both the perception of it being unfair and the greater sense of vulnerability that it creates.

GAZETTE: Were you surprised at all by those results?

WILLIAMS: It’s a striking finding, and it’s the first time it has been documented in that way. On the other hand, it’s not totally surprising. There’s a body of evidence emerging that suggests these incidents are having a negative impact not just on [victims’] family members, but there’s a broader community grieving; there’s a broader “threat” to the community; there’s a broader increase in personal vulnerability that’s having mental health consequences. … We are still in the beginning of understanding of what is happening.

“ … it is not just what happens in the big things, like at discrimination at work or in interactions with the police. But there are day-to-day indignities that chip away at the well-being of populations of color …”

GAZETTE: Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, there’s been a heightened focus on police violence and anti-Black racism in the country. Between video, audio, expert analysis, and ordinary conversation, as well as acts of police violence and intimidation of Black Lives Matter protestors, how do you think this last year has affected the mental health of Black people?

WILLIAMS: I haven’t done any specific work on this specific topic in the last year, but I want to emphasize that we’re dealing with two pandemics. On the one hand, we’re dealing with the pandemic of racial injustice, as captured by police shootings. But we’re also dealing with the pandemic of COVID-19, which has had a disproportionate, negative impact on populations of color. If you look at the data for the African American population, for the Latinx population, for the Native American population, for Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, all those populations have death rates from COVID-19 that are at least twice that of whites. So we are looking at populations that are dealing with increased experiences of grief and loss at a time when people can’t come together and mourn and go through the grieving process in the normal ways because of the pandemic.

The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has also been much more severe on poor Americans of all racial/ethnic groups, and on African Americans and Latinos, in particular. So we are looking at populations that are also dealing with elevated levels of financial stress.

The Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS) it is used as a measure of subjective experiences of daily discrimination against the minority population. This measure contains nine elements that assess the person’s daily life, followed by a follow-up question about what the person believes was the reason for that daily discrimination. This measure also presents a short version of five elements. It takes five to 10 minutes to administer.

In your day-to-day life, how often do any of the following things happen to you?

You are treated with less courtesy than other people are.
You are treated with less respect than other people are.
You receive poorer service than other people at restaurants or stores.
People act as if they think you are not smart.
People act as if they are afraid of you.
People act as if they think you are dishonest.
People act as if they’re better than you are.
You are called names or insulted.
You are threatened or harassed.
You are followed around in stores.

Recommended answer categories for all items

Almost every day
At least once a week
A few times a month
A few times a year
Less than once a year; never

There is a vaccine for the COVID 19 virus, but there is no vaccine for mental health. So as a nation, as community leaders, as public health leaders, we need to think about how we provide the support and the resources and create the spaces to help people deal with the trauma, the emotional, physical symptoms — anxiety, helplessness, nausea, headaches — that they may be struggling with.

I believe we are seeing emerging mental health effects right now. Longer term, I would expect that we would see some adverse physiological effects. There is a body of research — I haven’t done most of it, but my work is consistent with it. Some scientists use the term “accelerated aging”; in other studies, they use the term “biological weathering.” What that body of research is suggesting to us is that in the United States, African Americans are aging biologically more rapidly than whites. At the same chronological age, African Americans are 7.5 years older or 10 years older, on average, compared to their white counterparts. We think that what this more rapid aging and physiologic deterioration reflects is the accumulation of all of these negative, stressful exposures in the physical, chemical, and psychosocial environment.

GAZETTE: You also study the effects that racism has on Black physiological health. You developed a very widely used scale to measure a person’s exposure to everyday discrimination that you say is highly predictive of health problems. What have you learned so far?

WILLIAMS: The evidence is clear that discrimination matters for health. And it is not just what happens in the big things, like at discrimination at work or in interactions with the police. But there are day-to-day indignities that chip away at the well-being of populations of color: How often do people act as if you are not smart? How often do people act as if they are afraid of you?

We found what we call in scientific research a “dose-response relationship” between the number of stressors individuals score high on and the number of depressive symptoms. So the more domains of stress you are high on, the higher are your levels of depressive symptoms. So reports of discrimination are linked to worse mental health, and also linked to lower levels of engagement with the health care system. People who score high on the everyday discrimination [scale] are less likely to follow through on the recommendations from their [health care] provider in terms of screening and follow-up tests.

A review of studies of discrimination and sleep found that in every single study, no exception, discrimination was associated with poorer sleep, both in quantity and in quality. We also see higher levels of everyday discrimination linked to increased obesity. We see it linked to a broad range of health outcomes … incident diabetes, incident cardiovascular disease, incident breast cancer … as well as a range of other underlying indicators of chronic disease, such as inflammation. So the evidence is clear: These little indignities add up and take a toll on individuals.

GAZETTE: One key revelation is that while income and education levels are influential drivers of health for every racial group, they provide less of a buffer from the negative effects of discrimination for Black people.

WILLIAMS: My motivation for developing the everyday discrimination scale was to try to understand the stress of racial discrimination and the contribution that it makes to the racial disparities in health. When my career started, most researchers thought that racial differences in health were simply a function of racial differences in income and education and occupational status. For most indicators nationally, the gaps in health between whites with a college degree and whites who have not finished high school is bigger than the Black/white gap. And the gap within African Americans between the college-educated and those who have not finished high school is bigger than the Black/white gap. So income and education matter for your health, regardless of your race.

But at the same time, race still matters. At age 25, for example, the worst-off whites, in terms of future life expectancy, [are those] who have not finished high school. But they live 3.1 years longer than African Americans who have not finished high school. The gap widens as education increases, with a 4.2-year gap among college-educated whites and Blacks.

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Solving racial disparities in policing

There is a stunning statistic [from] analyses we did: The best-off African Americans in terms of life expectancy at age 25, those with a college degree, have lower life expectancy than whites with a college degree; have lower life expectancy than whites with some college education; and have lower life expectancy than whites who have finished high school. [That] tells us there’s something profound about income and education that drives health regardless of your race, but there’s something else about race that matters even after we’ve taken income and education into account. That’s why I began to look at what else is it in the social environment? What does it mean to be Black in our society, and how does that shape health?

GAZETTE: Aside from stopping these police killings and eliminating racism, what steps can individuals take today to protect their own mental and physical health?

WILLIAMS: What research shows quite compellingly is that the quality of social relationships can have a huge impact in reducing the negative effects of discrimination and of other types of stressful experiences. One study looked at African American teenagers at ages 16, 17, and 18 and measured the discrimination that those adolescents reported. Those kids who [scored] consistently high on reported discrimination at 16, 17, and 18 had higher levels of stress hormones — cortisol, epinephrine, norepinephrine — higher levels of inflammation (C-reactive protein), higher BMI [Body Mass Index], and higher blood pressure by age 20, not age 30 or 40. However, that association is completely erased, it’s not evident, among those teens who had good, supportive relationships with their parents, their teachers, and their peers. So the quality of social ties seems to be an effective strategy to reduce all or at least some of the negative effects of discrimination. Building that sense of community is important.

Another resource that’s particularly powerful in the African American community is religion: A national study of Black Americans found that higher levels of religious engagement, as measured by church attendance, by greater supportive contact with members of their religious community, and by “seeking God’s guidance in their everyday life,” those three religious strategies, reduced the negative effects of exposure to racial discrimination on mental health.

Another example [comes from] a study done among First Nation communities in Canada, indigenous communities. As a group, this population had some of the highest rates of youth suicide in the world. But researchers were struck by the fact that half of the almost 200 communities had no suicides at all in the previous five years. What they found was that those communities that were involved in challenging the federal government of Canada over treaty rights, over control of their public services (their schools, health care, etc.), and that had places in the community where their traditions were celebrated, had lower rates of suicide. Each of those indicators — of protest, advocacy, and empowerment — was associated with the lower rates of suicide. It suggests that being engaged and fighting for one’s future and trying to make a difference is actually a resource that is protective for at least some mental health outcomes.

Interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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A better path forward for criminal justice: Police reform

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Rashawn ray and rashawn ray senior fellow - governance studies @sociologistray clark neily clark neily senior vice president - cato institute @conlawwarrior.

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Below is the first chapter from “A Better Path Forward for Criminal Justice,” a report by the Brookings-AEI Working Group on Criminal Justice Reform. You can access other chapters from the report here .

Recent incidents centering on the deaths of unarmed Black Americans including George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Elijah McClain, Breonna Taylor, William Green, and countless others have continued to apply pressure for wide sweeping police reform. To some, these incidents are the result of a few “bad apples.” 1

To others, they are examples of a system imbued with institutional and cultural failures that expose civilians and police officers to harm. Our article aims to combine perspectives from across the political spectrum on sensible police reform. We focus on short-, medium-, and long-term solutions for reducing officer-involved shootings, racial disparities in use of force, mental health issues among officers, and problematic officers who rotten the tree of law enforcement.

Level Setting

Violent crime has significantly decreased since the early 1990s. However, the number of mass shootings have increased and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security report being worried about domestic terrorism, even within law enforcement. Nonetheless, despite recent increases that some scholars associate with COVID-19 spillovers related to high unemployment and underemployment, violent crime is still much lower than it was three decades ago.

Some scholars attribute crime reductions to increased police presence, while others highlight increases in overall levels of education and employment. In the policy space, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 are often noted. We believe there is some validity to all of these perspectives. For example, SWAT deployment has increased roughly 1,400 percent since 1980. Coinciding with the 1986 Drug Bill, SWAT is often deployed for drug raids and no-knock warrants. 2 The death of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old Black woman killed in her home in Louisville, Kentucky, is most recently highlighted as an example that demonstrates some of the problems with these tactics. 3

The 1994 Crime Bill ushered the COPS program and an increase in prisons around the country. 4 This legislation also coincided with stop-and-frisk policies and a rise in stand-your-ground laws that disproportionately disadvantaged Black Americans and led to overpolicing. It is an indisputable fact that Black people are more likely to have force used on them. In fact, Black people relative to white people are significantly less likely to be armed or be attacking at the time they are killed by police. This is a historical pattern, including during the 1960s when civil rights leaders were being beaten and killed. However, officer-involved killings, overall, have increased significantly over the past two decades. 5 And, we also know that if drugs were the only culprit, there would be drastically different outcomes for whites. Research shows that while Blacks and whites have similar rates of using drugs, and often times distributing drugs, there are huge disparities in who is arrested, incarcerated, and convicted for drug crimes. However, it is also an indisputable fact that predominately Black communities have higher levels of violent crime. Though some try to attribute higher crime in predominately Black neighborhoods to biology or culture, most scholars agree that inequitable resources related to housing, education, and employment contribute to these statistics. 6 7 8 Research documents that after controlling for segregation and disadvantage, predominately Black and white neighborhoods differ little in violent crime rates. 9

These are complex patterns, and Democrats and Republicans often differ on how America reached these outcomes and what we do about them. As a result, bipartisan police reform has largely stalled. Now, we know that in March 2021 the House of Representatives once again passed The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. States and localities are also presenting and passing a slew of police reforms, such as in Maryland where the state legislature passed the Maryland Police Accountability Act of 2021. We are not here to debate the merits of these legislations, though we support much of the components, nor are we here to simply highlight low-hanging fruit such as banning no-knock warrants, creating national databases, or requiring body-worn cameras. People across the political aisle largely agree on these reforms. Instead, we aim to provide policy recommendations on larger-scale reforms, which scholars and practitioners across the political aisle agree needs to occur, in order to transform law enforcement in America and take us well into the twenty-first century. Our main themes include accountability, training, and culture.

Accordingly, our recommendations include:

Short-Term Reforms

Reform Qualified Immunity

Create National Standards for Training and De-escalation

Medium-Term Reforms

Restructure Civilian Payouts for Police Misconduct

Address officer wellness.

Long-Term Reforms

Restructure Regulations for Fraternal Order of Police Contracts

Change police culture to protect civilians and police, short-term reforms.

Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that courts invented to make it more difficult to sue police and other government officials who have been plausibly alleged to have violated somebody’s rights. 10 11 We believe this doctrine needs to be removed. 12 13 States also have a role to play here. The Law Enforcement Bill of Rights further doubles down on a lack of accountable for bad apples.

We are not out on a limb here. A recent YouGov and Cato poll found that over 60 percent of Americans support eliminating qualified immunity. 14 Over 80 percent of Americans oppose erasing historical records of officer misconduct. In this regard, most citizens have no interest making it more difficult to sue police officers, but police seem to have a very strong interest in maintaining the policy. However, not only do everyday citizens want it gone, but think tanks including The Brookings Institution and The Cato Institute have asserted the same. It is a highly problematic policy.

Though police chiefs might not say it publicly or directly, we have evidence that a significant number of them are quite frustrated by their inability to get rid of the bad apples, run their departments in ways that align with best practices they learn at Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers and National Association of Chiefs of Police, and discipline and terminate officers who deserve to be held accountable and jeopardize not only the public perception of their own department but drag down the social standing of the entire law enforcement profession. As noted above, The Law Enforcement Bill of Rights at the state level needs to be addressed. It further doubles down on qualified immunity and removes accountability for law enforcement.

National Standards for Training and De-escalation

In 2016, Daniel Shaver was fatally shot and killed by officer Philip Brailsford. Brailsford was charged but found not guilty. At the time of the killing, Shaver was unarmed as he lay dead in a hotel hallway. Police experts critiqued Brailsford’s tactics to de-escalate the situation. As he entered the scene, he had both hands on his M4 rifle and eliminated all other tools or de-escalation tactics. Brailsford was fired, tried for murder, and then rehired. He ultimately retired due to PTSD. Highlighting the roles of militarization, mental health, qualified immunity, and other policy-related topics, this incident shows why there is a need for national standards for training and de-escalation. Many officers would have approached this situation differently, suggesting there are a myriad of tactics and strategies being taught.

Nationally, officers receive about 50 hours of firearm training during the police academy. They receive less than 10 hours of de-escalation training. So, when they show up at a scene and pull their weapon, whether it be on teenagers walking down the street after playing a basketball game or someone in a hotel or even a car (like in the killing of Daunte Wright in a Minneapolis suburb), poor decisions and bad outcomes should not be surprising.

Police officers regardless of whether they live in Kentucky or Arizona need to have similar training. Among the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, there is wide variation in the amount of training that officers have to complete as well as what type of training they complete. With the amount of travel that Americans engage in domestically, law enforcement has not kept up to speed with ensuring that officers receive the same training. Consequently, police officers may be put in positions to make bad decisions because of a lack of the implementation of federal standards. Funding can be provided to have federally certified trainers who work with localities within states, counties, and cities.

MEDIUM-TERM REFORMS

From 2015–2019, the 20 largest U.S. municipalities spent over $2 billion in civilian payouts for police misconduct. Rather than the police department budget, these funds mostly come from general funds. 15 So, not only is the officer absolved from civil or financial culpability, but the police department often faces little financial liability. Instead, the financial burden falls onto the municipality; thus, taxpayers. This money could be going toward education, work, and infrastructure.

Not only are the financial settlement often expensive, like the $20 million awarded to William Green’s family in Prince George’s County, Maryland, but the associated legal fees and deteriorated community trust are costly. In a place like Chicago, over the past 20 years, it has spent about $700 million on civilian payouts for police misconduct. New York City spent about $300 million in the span of a few years.

We assert that civilian payouts for police misconduct must be restructured. Indemnification will be eliminated, making the officer responsible, and requiring them to purchase professional liability insurance the exact same way that other occupations such as doctors and lawyers do. This would give insurance companies a strong incentive to identify the problem officers early, to raise their rates just the way that insurance companies raise the rates on a bad driver or a doctor who engages in malpractice. In this regard, the cost of the insurance policy would increase the more misconduct an officer engaged in. Eventually, the worst officers would become uninsurable, and therefore unemployable. This would help to increase accountability. Instead of police chiefs having difficulties removing bad officers through pushback from the Fraternal Order of Police Union, bad officers would simply be unemployable by virtue of the fact that they cannot secure professional liability insurance.

Bottom line, police almost never suffer any financial consequences for their own misconduct.

Shifting civilian payouts away from tax money and to police department insurance policies would instantly change the accountability structure.

Shifting civilian payouts away from tax money and to police department insurance policies would instantly change the accountability structure. Police are almost always indemnified for that misconduct when there is a payout. And, what that means is simply that their department or the city, which is to say us, the taxpayers, end up paying those damages claims. That is absolutely the wrong way to do it.

Most proposals for restructuring civilian payouts for police misconduct have included some form of liability insurance for police departments and/or individual officers. This means shifting the burden from taxpayer dollars to police department insurance policies. If a departmental policy, the municipality should pay for that policy, but the money should come from the police department budget. Police department budget increases should take settlement costs into account and now simply allow for increased budgets to cover premium increases. This is a similar approach to healthcare providers working in a hospital. If individual officers have liability insurance, they fall right in line with other occupations that have professional liability insurance.

Congress could approve a pilot program for municipalities to explore the potential impacts of police department insurance policies versus individual officer liability insurance, and even some areas that use both policies simultaneously. Regardless, it is clear that the structure of civilian payouts for police misconduct needs to change. We believe not only will the change provide more funding for education, work, and infrastructure, but it will increase accountability and give police chiefs and municipalities the ability to rid departments of bad apples that dampen an equitable and transparent cultural environment.

Mental Health Counseling

In this broader discussion of policing, missing is not only the voices of law enforcement themselves, but also what is happening in their own minds and in their own bodies. Recent research has highlighted that about 80 percent of officers suffer from chronic stress. They suffer from depression, anxiety. They have relationship problems, and they get angered easily. One out of six report being suicidal. Another one out of six report substance abuse problems. Most sobering, 90 percent of them never seek help. 16 We propose that officers should have mandatory mental health counseling on a quarterly basis. Normalizing mental health counseling will reduce the stigma associated with it.

It is also important for law enforcement to take a serious look into the role of far-right extremism on officer attitudes and behaviors. There is ample evidence from The Department of Homeland Security showing the pervasive ways that far-right extremists target law enforcement. 17 Academic research examining social dominance ideation among police officers may be a key way to root out extremism during background checks and psychological evaluations. Social dominance can be assessed through survey items and decision-making simulations, such as the virtual reality simulations conducted at the Lab for Applied Social Science Research at the University of Maryland.

Community Policing

Community police is defined in a multitude of ways. One simple way we think about community policing is whether officers experience the community in everyday life, often when they are not on duty. Do they live in the community, send their children to local schools, exercise at the neighborhood gym, and shop at the main grocery store? Often times, police officers engage in this type of community policing in predominately white and affluent neighborhoods but less in predominately Black or Latino neighborhoods, even when they have higher household income levels. Police officers also live farther away from the areas where they work. While this may be a choice for some, others simply cannot afford to live there, particularly in major cities and more expensive areas of the country. Many police officers are also working massive amounts of over time to make ends meet, provide for their families, and send children to college.

Altogether, community policing requires a set of incentives. We propose increasing the required level of education, which can justify wage increases. This can help to reduce the likelihood of police officers working a lot of hours and making poor decisions because of lack of sleep or stress. We also propose requiring that officers live within or near the municipalities where they work. Living locally can increase police-community relations and improve trust. Officers should receive rent subsidies or down payment assistance to enhance this process.

LONG-TERM REFORMS

Unions are important. However, the Fraternity Order of Police Union has become so deeply embedded in law enforcement that it obstructs the ability for equitable and transparent policing, even when interacting with police chiefs. Police union contracts need to be evaluated to ensure they do not obstruct the ability for officers who engage in misconduct to be held accountable. Making changes to the Law Enforcement Bill of Rights at the state helps with this, but the Congress should provide more regulations to help local municipalities with this process.

Police have to be of the people and for the people. Often times, police officers talk about themselves as if they are detached from the community. Officers often view themselves as warriors at war with the people in the communities they serve. Police officers embody an “us versus them” perspective, rather than viewing themselves to be part of the community. 18

It must be a change to police culture regarding how police officers view themselves and view others. Part of changing culture deals with transforming how productivity and awards are allocated. Police officers overwhelmingly need to make forfeitures in the form of arrests, citations, and tickets to demonstrate leadership and productivity. Police officers rarely get credit for the everyday, mundane things they do to make their communities safe and protect and serve. We believe there must be a fundamental reconceptualization of both the mission of police and the culture in which that mission is carried out. Policing can be about respecting individuals and not using force. It is an ethical approach to policing that requires incentives positive outcomes rather than deficits that rewards citations and force.

T here must be a fundamental reconceptualization of both the mission of police and the culture in which that mission is carried out.

Recommendations for Future Research

First, research needs to examine how community policing and officer wellness programs can simultaneously improve outcomes for the community and law enforcement. The either/or model simply does not work any longer. Instead, research should determine what is best for local communities and improves the health and well-being of law enforcement. Second, future research on policing needs to examine the role that protests against police brutality, particularly related to Black Lives Matter protests, are having on reform at the local, state, and federal levels. It is important for policymakers to readily understand the demands of their constituents and ways to create peace and civility.

Finally, research needs to fully examine legislation to reallocate and shift funding away from and within police department budgets. 19 By taking a market-driven, evidence-based approach to police funding, the same methodology can be used that will lead to different results depending on the municipality. Police department budgets should be fiscally responsible and shift funding to focusing on solving violent crime, while simultaneously reducing use of force on low-income and racial/ethnic minority communities. It is a tall order, but federal funding could be allocated to examine all of these important research endeavors. It is a must if the United States is to stay as a world leader in this space. It is clear our country is falling short at this time.

We have aimed to take a deep dive into large policy changes needed for police reform that centers around accountability, finances, culture, and communities. Though there is much discussion about reallocating police funding, we believe there should be an evidence-based, market-driven approach. While some areas may need to reallocate funding, others may need to shift funding within the department, or even take both approaches. Again, with roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies, there is wide variation in funds provided for policing and how those funds are spent. This is why it is imperative that standards be set at the federal level to help municipalities grapple with this important issue and the others we highlight in this report.

Excessive or reasonable force by police? Research on law enforcement and racial conflict

Updated review of studies and reports that provide insights into law enforcement actions and recent patterns in America.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by John Wihbey and Leighton Walter Kille, The Journalist's Resource July 28, 2016

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Allegations of the use of excessive force by U.S. police departments continue to generate headlines more than two decades after the 1992 Los Angeles riots brought the issue to mass public attention and spurred some law enforcement reforms . Recent deaths at the hands of police have fueled a lively debate across the nation in recent years.

In a number of closely watched cases involving the deaths of young black men, police have been acquitted, generating uproar and concerns about equal justice for all. On Staten Island, N.Y., the July 2014 death of Eric Garner because of the apparent use of a “chokehold” by an officer sparked outrage . A month later in Ferguson, Mo., the fatal shooting of teenager Michael Brown by officer Darren Wilson ignited protests, and a grand jury’s decision not to indict Wilson triggered further unrest . In November, Tamir Rice was shot by police in Cleveland, Ohio. He was 12 years old and playing with a toy pistol. On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was shot by a police officer after a routine traffic stop in North Charleston, S.C. The same month, Freddie Gray died while in police custody in Baltimore, setting off widespread unrest . The policeman in the South Carolina case, Michael T. Slager, was charged with murder based on a cellphone video. In Baltimore, the driver of the police van in which Gray died, Caesar Goodson, was charged with second-degree murder , with lesser charges for five other officers. There have been no indictments in the earlier cases.

These follow other recent incidents and controversies, including an April 2014 finding by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), following a two-year investigation, that the Albuquerque, N.M., police department “engages in a pattern or practice of use of excessive force, including deadly force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” and a similar DOJ finding in December 2014 with regard to the Cleveland police department . In March 2015, the DOJ also issued a report detailing a pattern of “clear racial disparities” and “discriminatory intent” on the part of the Ferguson, Mo., police department.

As the Washington Post reported in July 2015 , a pervasive problem that is only now beginning to be recognized is the lack of training for officers dealing with mentally ill persons, a situation that can often escalate to violent confrontations.

The events of 2014-2016 have prompted further calls by some police officials, politicians and scholars for another round of national reforms, in order to better orient “police culture” toward democratic ideals.

Two sides, disparate views

Surveys in recent years with minority groups — Latinos and African-Americans , in particular — suggest that confidence in law enforcement is relatively low, and large portions of these communities believe police are likely to use excessive force on suspects. A 2014 Pew Research Center survey confirms stark racial divisions in response to the Ferguson police shooting, as well, while Gallup provides insights on historical patterns of distrust. According to a Pew/ USA Today poll conducted in August 2014, Americans of all races collectively “give relatively low marks to police departments around the country for holding officers accountable for misconduct, using the appropriate amount of force, and treating racial and ethnic groups equally.” Social scientists who have done extensive field research and interviews note the deep sense of mistrust embedded in many communities.

Numerous efforts have been made by members of the law enforcement community to ameliorate these situations, including promising strategies such as “community policing.” Still, from a police perspective, law enforcement in the United States continues to be dangerous work — America has a relatively higher homicide rate compared to other developed nations, and has many more guns per capita. Citizens seldom learn of the countless incidents where officers choose to hold fire and display restraint under extreme stress. Some research has shown that even well-trained officers are not consistently able to fire their weapon in time before a suspect holding a gun can raise it and fire first; this makes split-second judgments, even under “ideal” circumstances, exceptionally difficult. But as the FBI points out, police departments and officers sometimes do not handle the aftermath of incidents well in terms of transparency and clarity, even when force was reasonably applied, fueling public confusion and anger.

In 2013, 49,851 officers were assaulted in the line of duty, with an injury rate of 29.2 percent, according to the FBI. Twenty-seven were murdered that year.

FBI Director: No “reliable grasp” of problem

How common are such incidents of police use of force, both lethal and non-lethal, in the United States? Has there been progress in America? The indisputable reality is that we do not fully know. FBI Director James B. Comey stated the following in a remarkable February 2015 speech :

Not long after riots broke out in Ferguson late last summer, I asked my staff to tell me how many people shot by police were African-American in this country. I wanted to see trends. I wanted to see information. They couldn’t give it to me, and it wasn’t their fault. Demographic data regarding officer-involved shootings is not consistently reported to us through our Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Because reporting is voluntary, our data is incomplete and therefore, in the aggregate, unreliable.

I recently listened to a thoughtful big city police chief express his frustration with that lack of reliable data. He said he didn’t know whether the Ferguson police shot one person a week, one a year, or one a century, and that in the absence of good data, “all we get are ideological thunderbolts, when what we need are ideological agnostics who use information to try to solve problems.” He’s right.

The first step to understanding what is really going on in our communities and in our country is to gather more and better data related to those we arrest, those we confront for breaking the law and jeopardizing public safety, and those who confront us. “Data” seems a dry and boring word but, without it, we cannot understand our world and make it better.

How can we address concerns about “use of force,” how can we address concerns about officer-involved shootings if we do not have a reliable grasp on the demographics and circumstances of those incidents? We simply must improve the way we collect and analyze data to see the true nature of what’s happening in all of our communities.

The FBI tracks and publishes the number of “justifiable homicides” reported by police departments. But, again, reporting by police departments is voluntary and not all departments participate. That means we cannot fully track the number of incidents in which force is used by police, or against police, including non-fatal encounters, which are not reported at all.

Without a doubt, training for police has become more standardized and professionalized in recent decades. A 2008 paper in the Northwestern University Law Review provides useful background on the evolving legal and policy history relating to the use of force by police and the “reasonableness” standard by which officers are judged. Related jurisprudence is still being defined, most recently in the 2007 Scott v. Harris decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. But inadequate data and reporting — and the challenge of uniformly defining excessive versus justified force — make objective understanding of trends difficult.

A 2015 report conducted for the Justice Department analyzed 394 incidents involving deadly police force in Philadelphia from 2007-2014. It found that “officers do not receive regular, consistent training on the department’s deadly force policy”; that early training among recruits is sometimes inadequate in regard to these issues; that investigations into such incidents are not consistent; and that officers “need more less-lethal options.”

For perhaps the best overall summary of police use-of-force issues, see “A Multi-method Evaluation of Police Use of Force Outcomes: Final Report to the National Institute of Justice,” a 2010 study conducted by some of the nation’s leading criminal justice scholars.

Available statistics, background on use of force

The federal Justice Department releases statistics on this and related issues, although these datasets are only periodically updated: It found that in 2015, among the 53.5 million U.S. residents aged 16 or older who had any contact with police, 985,300 of them — 1.8 percent — experienced threats or use of force . Law enforcement officials were more likely to threaten or use force on black people and Hispanics than white people, according to an October 2018 report . “ When police initiated the contact , blacks (5.2 percent) and Hispanics (5.1 percent) were more likely to experience the threat or use of physical force than whites (2.4 percent), and males (4.4 percent) were more likely to experience the threat or use of physical force than females (1.8 percent).” Of those who experienced a threat or use of force, 84 percent considered it to be excessive. In terms of the volume of citizen complaints, the Justice Department also found that there were 26,556 complaints lodged in 2002; this translates to “33 complaints per agency and 6.6 complaints per 100 full-time sworn officers.” However, “overall rates were higher among large municipal police departments, with 45 complaints per agency, and 9.5 complaints per 100 full-time sworn officers.” In 2011, about 62.9 million people had contact with the police.

In terms of the use of lethal force, aggregate statistics on incidents of all types are difficult to obtain from official sources. Some journalists are trying to rectify this; and some data journalists question what few official national statistics are available. The Sunlight Foundation explains some of the data problems , while also highlighting databases maintained by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The available data, which does not paint a complete national picture, nevertheless raise serious questions, Sunlight notes:

[A]ccording to the CDC, in Oklahoma the rate at which black people are killed per capita by law enforcement is greater than anywhere else in the country. That statistic is taken from data collected for the years 1999-2011. During that same time period, Oklahoma’s rate for all people killed by law enforcement, including all races, is second only to New Mexico. However, Oklahoma, the District of Columbia, Nevada and Oregon are all tied for the rate at which people are killed. (The CDC treats the District of Columbia as a state when collecting and displaying statistics.) In Missouri, where Mike Brown lived and died, black people are killed by law enforcement twice as frequently as white people. Nationwide, the rate at which black people are killed by law enforcement is 3 times higher than that of white people.

As mentioned, the FBI does publish statistics on “justifiable homicide” by law enforcement officers: The data show that there have been about 400 such incidents nationwide each year. However, FiveThirtyEight, among other journalism outlets, has examined the potential problems with these figures. News investigations suggest that the rates of deadly force usage are far from uniform. For example, Los Angeles saw an increase in such incidents in 2011, while Massachusetts saw more officers firing their weapon over the period 2009-2013.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics did publish a report in 2016 that found that about 1,900 people had died while in police custody during the prior year. That report, which offered details about the cause of death during a three-month period, found that nearly two-thirds of deaths in police custody between June and August of 2015 were homicides — including justifiable homicides by a law enforcement officer — while nearly one-fifth were suicides and just over one-tenth were accidental deaths.

The academic community has also provided some insights in this area. A 2008 study from Matthew J. Hickman of Seattle University, Alex R. Piquero of the University of Maryland and Joel H. Garner of the Joint Centers for Justice Studies reviewed some of the best studies and data sources available to come up with a more precise national estimate for incidents of non-lethal force. They note that among 36 different studies published since the 1980s, the rates of force asserted vary wildly, from a high of more than 30 percent to rates in the low single digits. The researchers analyze Police-Public Contact Survey (PPCS) data and Bureau of Justice Statistics Survey of Inmates in Local Jails (SILJ) data and conclude that an estimated 1.7 percent of all contacts result in police threats or use of force, while 20 percent of arrests do.

A 2012 study in the Criminal Justice Policy Review analyzed the patterns of behavior of one large police department — more than 1,000 officers — and found that a “small proportion of officers are responsible for a large proportion of force incidents, and that officers who frequently use force differ in important and significant ways from officers who use force less often (or not at all).” A 2007 study in Criminal Justice and Behavior, “Police Education, Experience and the Use of Force,” found that officers with more experience and education may be less likely to use force, while a review of case studies suggests that specific training programs and accountability structures can lower the use of violence by police departments.

A 2016 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) came to a conclusion that surprised some observers. Across the U.S., though blacks are 21.3 percent more likely to be involved in an altercation with police where a weapon is drawn, the researchers found no racial differences in police shootings: “Partitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings. Investigating the intensive margin – the timing of shootings or how many bullets were discharged in the endeavor – there are no detectable racial differences.”

Researchers continue to refine analytical procedures in order to make more accurate estimates based on police reports and other data.

Characteristics of suspects

A widely publicized report in October 2014 by ProPublica concluded that young black males are 21 times more likely to be shot by police than their white counterparts: “The 1,217 deadly police shootings from 2010 to 2012 captured in the federal data show that blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that age range died at the hands of police.”

Research has definitively established that “racial profiling” by law enforcement exists — that persons of color are more likely to be stopped by police. FBI Director James Comey’s 2015 comments are again relevant here:

[P]olice officers on patrol in our nation’s cities often work in environments where a hugely disproportionate percentage of street crime is committed by young men of color. Something happens to people of good will working in that environment. After years of police work, officers often can’t help but be influenced by the cynicism they feel.

A mental shortcut becomes almost irresistible and maybe even rational by some lights. The two young black men on one side of the street look like so many others the officer has locked up. Two white men on the other side of the street—even in the same clothes—do not. The officer does not make the same association about the two white guys, whether that officer is white or black. And that drives different behavior. The officer turns toward one side of the street and not the other. We need to come to grips with the fact that this behavior complicates the relationship between police and the communities they serve.

While the cases of Rodney King in 1991 and Amadou Diallo in 1999 heightened the country’s awareness of race and policing, research has not uniformly corroborated the contention that minorities are more likely, on average, to be subject to acts of police force than are whites. A 2010 paper published in the Southwestern Journal of Criminal Justice reviewed more than a decade’s worth of peer-reviewed studies and found that while many studies established a correlation between minority status and police use of force, many other studies did not — and some showed mixed results.

Of note in this research literature is a 2003 paper, “Neighborhood Context and Police Use of Force,” that suggests police are more likely to employ force in higher-crime neighborhoods generally, complicating any easy interpretation of race as the decisive factor in explaining police forcefulness. The researchers, William Terrill of Northeastern University and Michael D. Reisig of Michigan State University, found that “officers are significantly more likely to use higher levels of force when encountering criminal suspects in high crime areas and neighborhoods with high levels of concentrated disadvantage independent of suspect behavior and other statistical controls.” Terrill and Reisig explore several hypothetical explanations and ultimately conclude:

Embedded within each of these potential explanations is the influence of key sociodemographic variables such as race, class, gender, and age. As the results show, when these factors are considered at the encounter level, they are significant. However, the race (i.e., minority) effect is mediated by neighborhood context. Perhaps officers do not simply label minority suspects according to what Skolnick (1994) termed “symbolic assailants,” as much as they label distressed socioeconomic neighborhoods as potential sources of conflict.

In studying the Seattle and Miami police departments, the authors of the 2010 National Institute of Justice report also conclude that “non-white suspects were less likely to be injured than white suspects … where suspect race was available as a variable for analysis. Although we cannot speculate as to the cause of this finding, or whether it is merely spurious, it is encouraging that minority suspects were not more likely to be injured than whites.”

Use of Tasers and other “less lethal” weapons

A 2011 report from the National Institute of Justice, “Police Use of Force, Tasers and Other Less-Lethal Weapons,” examines the effectiveness and health outcomes of incidents involving CEDs (conducted energy devices), the most common of which is the Taser. The report finds that: (1) Injury rates vary widely when officers use force in general, ranging from 17 percent to 64 percent for citizens and 10 percent to 20 percent for officers; (2) Use of Tasers and other CEDs can reduce the statistical rate of injury to suspects and officers who might otherwise be involved in more direct, physical conflict — an analysis of 12 agencies and more than 24,000 use-of-force cases “showed the odds of suspect injury decreased by almost 60 percent when a CED was used”; and (3) A review of fatal Taser incidents found that many involved multiple uses of the device against the suspect in question.

A 2011 study, “Changes in Officer Use of Force Over Time: A Descriptive Analysis of a National Survey,” documents trends in the use of non-lethal force by law enforcement officers (LEAs). The results indicate that CED use has risen significantly (to about 70 percent of LEAs), while baton use is down to 25 percent in 2008. “CED use was ranked among the most-used tactics from 2005 to 2008,” the scholars conclude. “Excessive-force complaints against LEAs, internally generated, have more than doubled from 2003 to 2008. Officer injuries varied little from 2003 to 2008, but they are still only about half as common as suspect injuries. Also, only 20 percent of LEAs collect injury data in a database, complicating future research.”

Meanwhile, a 2018 study published in the Security Journal , “Smart Use of Smart Weapons: Jail Officer Liability for the Inappropriate Use of Tasers and Stun Guns on Pretrial Detainees,” offers insights on how some these weapons are used on individuals who are incarcerated while awaiting trial. The paper demonstrates that although the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled it inappropriate to use tasers on pretrial detainees who do not follow verbal commands, the practice is common. It suggests that correctional officers should be reminded “of the distinction between convicted inmates and pretrial detainees who cannot be punished, so that they can abide by the recent Supreme Court decision and avoid liability in the future.”

Potential impact of body cameras

Video recordings of interactions between the police and the public have increased significantly in recent years as technology has improved and the number of distribution channels has expanded. Any standard smartphone can now make a video — as was the case in the Walter L. Scott shooting — and dash-mounted cameras in police cars have become increasingly common.

The mandatory adoption of body cameras by police has been suggested to increase transparency in interactions between law-enforcement officials and the public. A 2014 study from the U.S. Department of Justice, “Police Officer Body-Worn Cameras: Assessing the Evidence,” reviews available research on the costs and benefits of body-worn camera technology. The author, Michael D. White of Arizona State University, identified five empirical studies on body cameras, and assesses their conclusions. In particular, a year after the Rialto, Calif., police deparment began requiring all officers to wear body cameras, use of force by officers fell by 60 percent and citizen complaints dropped by nearly 90 percent. The searcher notes:

The decline in complaints and use of force may be tied to improved citizen behavior, improved police officer behavior, or a combination of the two. It may also be due to changes in citizen complaint reporting patterns (rather than a civilizing effect), as there is evidence that citizens are less likely to file frivolous complaints against officers wearing cameras. Available research cannot disentangle these effects; thus, more research is needed.

The studies also noted concerns about the cost of the required devices, training and systems for storing video footage; potential health and safety effects; and especially privacy concerns, both for citizens and the police. In April 2015, a bill being considered in the Michigan State legislature would exempt some body-camera footage from the state’s Freedom of Information (FOI) laws. Those who spoke in favor of the law included a conservative Republican legislator and an ACLU representative.

Public opinion and media

The coverage of such incidents by mass media has been studied by researchers, some of whom have concluded that the press has often distorted and helped justify questionable uses of force. Finally, survey data continue to confirm the existence of undercurrents of racism and bias in America, despite demonstrable social progress; a 2014 Stanford study shows how awareness of higher levels of black incarceration can prompt greater support among whites for tougher policing and prison programs.

Keywords: crime, local reporting, racism, violence, police enforcement, police brutality, body cameras, technology , policing

About the Authors

John Wihbey

Leighton Walter Kille

Utility Menu

Roland G. Fryer, Jr.

An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force

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Date Published:

This paper explores racial diﬀerences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than ﬁfty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these disparities. On the most extreme use of force –oﬃcer-involved shootings – we ﬁnd no racial diﬀerences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account. We argue that the patterns in the data are consistent with a model in which police oﬃcers are utility maximizers, a fraction of which have a preference for discrimination, who incur relatively high expected costs of oﬃcer-involved shootings.

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Charter Schools and Labor Market Outcomes
High-Dosage Tutoring and Reading Achievement: Evidence from New York City∗
Updating Beliefs when Evidence is Open to Interpretation: Implications for Bias and Polarization
Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings
The ‘Pupil’ Factory: Specialization and the Production of Human Capital in Schools.
Self-Selection and Comparative Advantage in Social Interactions
Two-Armed Restless Bandits with Imperfect Information: Stochastic Control and Indexability
Information, Non-Financial Incentives, and Student Achievement: Evidence from a Text Messaging Experiment
The Impact of Voluntary Youth Service on Future Outcomes: Evidence from Teach For America

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How Chicago Is Tackling Police Violence and Mental Health at Once

O n a Wednesday afternoon last March, 19-year-old Win Rozario called 911 for help. Win was inside his family home in Queens with his mother and younger brother, Utsho. Two New York City Police officers arrived within two minutes. Utsho let them in the door, asking them to “be gentle” with Win, who was experiencing a psychotic episode like those he had had before and for which he had been hospitalized during the previous year. Recently released body camera footage shows the officers, who were trained by NYPD in responding to mental health calls, were anything but gentle.

Police claimed that when they went to take Win into custody to transport him to a mental health facility, he grabbed a pair of scissors and charged at them. Utsho told the New York Times that their mother was hugging Win at the time, trying to comfort and calm him. The officers tasered Win. His mother continued to hug him and took the scissors from him; police say she also detached the Taser prongs from his body—something the body cam footage could not prove. According to Utsho, whose account differed from the police narrative, “my brother didn’t really go down. So one of the cops pulled out a gun and shot him as my mother was still hugging him.” Both officers then fired multiple rounds at Win, who was taken by medical responders to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Body camera footage now shows that what transpired deviates from what police initially claimed and gives little indication that Win posed an imminent threat to the officers that could justify repeatedly shooting and killing him.

This nightmarish scene is not isolated. Approximately one fifth of all people killed by U.S. police officers in the line of duty since 2015 were suffering—or perceived to be suffering—from a mental health crisis. People diagnosed with severe mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by law enforcement. The number may well be higher: recent research shows killings by police have gone unreported in official statistics in over half of all cases from 1980 to 2019.

Despite widespread promises of police reform in recent years, killings by police show no sign of abating. In 2023, U.S. police officers killed at least 1,247 people —more than in any other year in over a decade. These killings are symptoms of a disease born of investing in reactive police and punishment instead of violence prevention and supportive services —an approach that President Biden is now once again seeking to deepen by calling for federal funding to hire 100,000 more police officers .

Chicago provides an exemplary case study of the consequences of such investments, and how American cities might now change course. The City paid out $295 million between 2019–2022 to settle over 500 cases involving more than 1,000 police officers accused of misconduct, which is more City money than it budgeted for the entire Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) over this same period. This is reflective of a pattern in which the Police Department, long relied upon by lawmakers as a catch-all agency for responding to mental health, social, and economic crises, has built an unusually pronounced legacy of corruption , torture , racist brutality , and far-right extremist group affiliations .

It is fully appropriate to condemn CPD for this reality and its ongoing failure to institute meaningful reforms, despite a federal consent decree imposed in 2019 in the wake of repeated killings by Chicago police. (CPD has fully complied with just 6% of the reforms required by the consent decree.) It’s also important to see that CPD has been set up to fail and that officers’ behavior is unlikely to change unless reforms are made not just internally but also to the City’s budgetary decisions, specifically to chronic overinvestment in police alongside underinvestment in CDPH—now one of the most defunded large-city public health departments in the country.

There is now very little supportive infrastructure left to prevent or respond to the manifestations of poverty, desperation, ruptured social fabric, and healthcare exclusion that particularly affect Chicago’s Black and Latinx neighborhoods. In times of need, residents have few options but to request police who—despite wildly inappropriate training for the role—are effectively required to fill in as community mental health workers.

The thousands of calls with a mental health component that CPD responds to each month generate widespread frustration among officers, who feel that they are forced to address social and medical problems for which they are not trained and that care systems should be managing instead. In this context, police officers are widely demoralized . Hiring has become increasingly difficult. According to a August 2023 report , CPD there were 1,730 open positions, most of which have remained unfilled for years. (Yet even with these vacancies, CPD features the second-highest number of officers per capita and the second-highest per capita police budget among large U.S. cities.)

After years of labor by a coalition of community organizers known as the Collaborative for Community Wellness, an innovative policy meant to address the shortcomings of CDPH and the overburdening of CPD is finally on the verge of implementation. Treatment Not Trauma, which one of us (ER) has worked with the Collaborative to design , seeks to rebuild a CDPH-run community care system so as to remove response to mental health and behavioral crises from CPD’s plate. It is a transformative policy that revolves around three interdependent parts : non-police crisis response systems, community mental health centers and crisis triage facilities, and a transformative model of mental health delivery led by community care workers. Mayor Brandon Johnson has embraced TNT as one of his signature policy priorities and just announced the first steps toward its implementation.

As explained in the white paper , TNT would build on non-police crisis response programs that have been successfully implemented in other cities like Denver , Atlanta , San Francisco , Pittsburgh , and even New York City . But TNT goes well beyond them to apply a public health model of mental health that begins from the recognition that crisis response works best, and is needed least, when interwoven with crisis prevention systems based on supportive community ties. TNT is thus designed around hiring, training, and properly compensating nonprofessional mental health workers from within communities to work in task-sharing collaboration with professional ones. The upshot would be a non-police mobile crisis response system and a better ability to prevent crises in the first place. Such public-health approaches to community mental health that invest resources in employing and training lay community members to provide care to one another have been profoundly underutilized in the U.S., dominated as it is by a notoriously ineffective, inefficient, and deeply corrupted healthcare industry . But there is abundant evidence from international contexts of their effectiveness and importance , especially in the face of the dearth of existing services and professionals seen in Chicago’s highest-need neighborhoods.

To house and support this work, TNT envisions reopening 14 City-run mental health centers, returning the total number of such centers to 19. They will operate as 24-hour walk-in service, crisis reception and stabilization, and home bases for community outreach care worker teams. Taking a more holistic view, these hubs are also meant to function as places for community gatherings to rebuild social fabric in historically dispossessed neighborhoods.

Will it work? Based on evidence from cities that have implemented parallel agendas, TNT can be expected to reduce the dependence on overburdened police, hospital emergency departments, and inpatient psychiatric beds. In the process, the city would enable meaningful change—and savings.

One study found that mobile crisis intervention services reduced inpatient hospitalization costs by 79% over the six months following each crisis call. A related study , which evaluated only initial expenses, found a 23% savings. A more comprehensive evaluation estimates that a program for non-police crisis response like TNT would yield a $537 million savings in Cook County, or $279 million when restricted to Chicago alone. Actual savings may be greater, as TNT is more ambitious than the crisis-response model that the figure is based on.

From a criminal-legal perspective, nearly every study evaluating preventative measures finds substantial benefits. A study of Denver’s recent adoption of a TNT-like approach, for example, reduced low-level crimes by 34% (while observing no increase in more serious crimes).

It’s no surprise, then, that TNT is backed by the public . In November 2022, a referendum was introduced on the ballot in three wards asking residents if they supported reopening Chicago’s previously existing 19 City-run mental health centers and dispatching mental health teams rather than police to respond to mental health emergencies. The measure passed with a staggering 93% approval. And a survey exploring community visions for mental health crisis response among 652 Chicagoans across all wards of the city found that over three quarters (77%) of respondents believed that police should not have a role in responding to mental health crises.

TNT’s popularity among voters is not in doubt. What remains to be seen is whether the Johnson administration will ultimately make the major investments needed for TNT to be successful. After including a substantial increase in police funding in his first budget alongside a comparatively static City allocation for public health, Johnson has displayed a penchant for compromise with the same failed policing paradigms that he campaigned against. This has alarmed local organizers and given them reason to doubt his commitment to TNT, particularly to the work of building the community care corps around which TNT revolves.

One of the biggest barriers to realizing TNT’s full potential arises from the misperception of what TNT means for the police. Far from a threat to improved policing and safety, TNT would function as an enormous asset for a flailing police administration that has, for decades, been unable to reform itself. If Chicago continues to rely on police to serve as de facto community health workers, both officers and communities will continue to suffer. The fact is, police reform is too important and too difficult to leave to police alone. Meaningful reform will require investing in supportive systems beyond policing that can, in turn, shrink the outsized footprint of police and punishment in American society.

TNT isn’t just about protecting people living with mental illness, nor only about building a way out of the current cycle of living from crisis to crisis. It’s also about no longer setting up police officers as scapegoats for the fallout of decisions to defund care systems. TNT is about finally following the evidence and making a decision to invest in the supportive infrastructure for violence prevention that we all—police officers included—need to be able to live safely and fully together, rather than in constant fear of one another.

Chicago has an opportunity to lead the way for the entire country in refusing to simply lament the seemingly endless series of preventable killings by police and to, instead, finally implement policies adequate to stop them.

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Understanding What Police Brutality Is and Why It Occurs

Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of The Anxiety Workbook and founder of the website About Social Anxiety. She has a Master's degree in clinical psychology.

Cara Lustik is a fact-checker and copywriter.

Verywell / Nusha Ashjaee

Why Police Brutality Occurs

Examples of police brutality, tyre nichols, breonna taylor, george floyd, dontre hamilton, eric garner, john crawford iii, why racism can turn to violence, how to reduce police brutality, trigger warning.

Information presented in this article may be triggering to some people as it describes various examples of police-related violence.

If you are in crisis, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 for support and assistance from a trained counselor. If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911.

For more mental health resources, see our National Helpline Database .

Police brutality refers to the excessive use of force by a police officer against a victim or victims that is deemed to go beyond the level required to sustain life, avoid injury, or control a situation.

Most encounters with the police do not involve violence. A U.S. Department of Justice Report measured contact between police and the public in 2018.

Around 61.5 million people had an encounter with the police the year before the survey, but only 2% of people experienced threats or use of force. However, it's worth remembering that roughly half of the encounters in this survey were traffic-related incidents, and the report did not include police behavior during protests as a category.

In order to solve the problem of police brutality, it is necessary to understand the underlying factors that lead to it happening in the first place. In fact, there are a number of different factors that may play a role, not all of which have to do with the underlying personality of the officer who engages in the act.

However, each of them can be considered from a psychological standpoint or psychological lens. This helps us to understand how to fix the problem from a psychological view.

Individual-Level Factors

What are the individual-level factors that contribute to police brutality? These can be understood as those that originate from the offending officer. Some examples of individual-level factors are given below.

Mental Health Issues

The mental health of the offending officer may play a role. A 2019 study found that officers who self-reported engaging in abusive police practices tended to have higher levels of PTSD symptoms.

It is possible that officers with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from job-related stressors and trauma may have an increased startle response , a tendency toward suspicion, and problems with aggression. These traits can make it more likely that they will overreact and use deadly force when not necessary. However, it is also possible that engaging in excessive force results in a sense of profound guilt and moral injury that in turn lead to PTSD symptoms.

Some researchers theorize that traits of "psychopathy", also called antisocial personality disorder (APD) , may be more prevalent in police officers than the general population. Traits such as "fearless dominance" or "cold-heartedness" can be adaptive in dangerous or emotionally charged situations, but they can also make an individual more likely to engage in excessive use of force or to feel that they do not need to follow the rules.

That said, research on this theory is limited. It is unlikely that APD, which is very rare, could explain most police brutality cases.

Personal problems experienced by police officers may increase the likelihood of them engaging in excessive force, such as relationship problems or other stressful life events.

Organizational-Level Factors

What are the organizational-level factors that contribute to police brutality? These can include policies of the police department or the general working environment.

If the police department sets limits for the use of force that allows police officers to use their own discretion (in other words, limits that are too vague or lenient), then the likelihood that officers will use excessive force is going to increase.

In addition, if the general working environment of the police department is such that excessive use of force is not punished or reprimanded, then that sends the message to the police force that it's an acceptable part of their job description.

The Washington Post's police shootings database shows that police shoot and kill roughly 1,000 people a year in the United States. However, only 110 officers since 2005 have been charged with murder or manslaughter, and only 42 officers have been convicted.

In other words, the use of force becomes legitimized because everyone does it and nobody says anything about it.

This, despite the fact that if a civilian were to inflict the same level of force on another individual in the same situation, it would be considered to be a violation of the law. Due to qualified immunity, it can be difficult to prosecute officers for misconduct.

In order to understand the problem of police brutality, it is helpful to consider some of the more prominent examples in recent times. Below are some of the more well-known cases and issues surrounding them.

On January 7, 2023, 29-year-old Black man Tyre Nichols was pulled over in Memphis, TN, due to claims of reckless driving.

The five cops who stopped him, who were also Black, brutally beat him for about three minutes. As a result of his injuries, he died three days later.

The charges brought against the officers included second-degree murder and kidnapping.

After body-camera footage was released on January 27th, the public was outraged as many deemed it to be one of the most heinous acts of police violence ever witnessed.

Breonna Taylor was a 26-year-old Black woman who died after being shot in her apartment on March 13, 2020 in Louisville, Kentucky. Her death was the result of a search warrant that was being executed by white police officers from the Louisville Metro Police Department.

The raid began shortly after midnight. Her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, thought the officers entering the apartment were intruders and fired a warning shot at them, which hit one officer in the leg. In return, the officers fired 32 shots, leaving Breonna Taylor dead and Walker physically unharmed.

While the City of Louisville agreed to pay $12 million to Taylor's family, the three police officers involved were not indicted on charges related to Taylor's death. The incident led to subsequent protests throughout the United States.

George Floyd was a 46-year-old Black man who died on May 25th, 2020 in Minneapolis, Minnesota after being arrested for using a counterfeit $20 bill. During the arrest, former police officer, now convicted murderer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on Floyd's neck while Floyd was handcuffed and lying on his face.

Bystanders who tried to intervene were prevented from doing so by other officers. Prior to his death, George Floyd pleaded for relief, saying that he could not breathe and that he was going to die. The entire incident became public when video footage shot by onlookers was released to the public. Autopsies revealed Floyd died as a result of the actions of the officers, and worldwide protests were sparked by the incident.

While these incidents occurred in 2020, police brutality has been a problem for decades. Below is a list of incidents from 2014, at the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement that brought police brutality to the forefront of public discourse.

On April 30, 2014 Dontre Hamilton was killed after being shot 14 times by a police officer in a Milwaukee park. Local Starbucks employees had called the police for a wellness check after seeing Hamilton sleeping on a park bench. The officer who responded to the call, Christopher Manney, began what would later be described by the Police Chief Edward Flynn as an "inappropriate pat-down."

Hamilton woke up and began to struggle. Manney's defense team would later use Hamilton's prior diagnosis of schizophrenia to suggest that he was dangerous, but Flynn would later justify his firing of Manney by saying the officer ignored departmental policy and instigated the fight.

Eric Garner was killed on July 17, 2014 in New York after he was put in an illegal chokehold by a white police officer. Garner said "I can't breathe" 11 times while he was held down. The officer involved, Daniel Pantaleo, was not charged with a crime. His death sparked protests and "I can't breathe" as a slogan for protest.

John Crawford III was killed on August 5, 2014 after being shot by a police officer at a Walmart in Beavercreek, Ohio. He had been holding a pellet gun, which the store had advertised as being on sale, and there was no confrontation. The officers involved were not charged.

These are only some examples of how excessive use of force can lead to death.

Racism refers to bias held against a person or group of people because of their race or ethnicity. Why does racism turn into excessive use of force or violence among police officers? There are several factors to consider.

Prevalence of Deaths Due to Police Brutality

Research has demonstrated that the risk of being killed as a result of the use of excessive force by police in the United States varies by racial and ethnic group membership.

Specifically, Black men and women, American Indian/Alaska Native men and women, and Latin American men were shown to have a higher lifetime risk of dying due to police violence compared to their White counterparts.

In contrast, Latin American women and Asian/Pacific Islander men and women had a lower lifetime risk of dying due to police violence than White counterparts.

The overall lifetime odds were shown to be 1 in 2,000 for men and 1 in 33,000 for women. Overall, the highest risk was shown for Black men, who faced a 1 in 1,000 chance of being killed by a police officer over the course of their lifetime.

Racial Profiling

Why are Black men and other minorities at a higher risk for dying due to an excessive use of force by police than their White counterparts? Racial profiling may help to explain this phenomenon.

Racial profiling refers to assuming guilt based on race or ethnicity, a problem that mostly affects those individuals who have a higher lifetime risk of dying as a result of police brutality.

For example, police officers may use stereotypes when trying to determine the suspects in a crime, or they may perceive persons of certain races (such as Black men) as more aggressive or threatening when faced with a confrontation.

How can we work to reduce police brutality? There are a number of different steps that can be taken to reduce the risk of this phenomenon from an organizational and psychological standpoint.

In 2014, President Barack Obama signed an order to appoint a task force on 21st century policing. The task force developed a list of recommendations such as improving training and education, reducing bias among police officers and departments, introducing and improving crisis intervention training , and promoting cultural sensitivity as well as compassion.

Implicit Bias Training

Implicit bias training takes the approach that police officers operate with subconscious biases that they may not even be aware of. When these biases are activated, they may handle a situation differently than they would if, for example, a person was White instead of Black or driving a BMW instead of a old beat-up pickup truck.

The premise of this training is to help police officers understand that everyone grows up with subconscious biases, even if someone doesn't feel like they have any prejudice. The goal is to make police officers aware of their biases so that they can manage them in the moment. This is more effective than calling out police officers as racist, as most officers would not consider themselves to fall into that category. Rather, this approach takes the stance that all officers need training.

The idea behind implicit bias training is that those who are better able to manage their biases will be safer, more effective, and fairer in their role as police officers. However, there have been very few studies on the effectiveness of implicit bias training for police.

Only one 2020 study has looked at impacts on real-world behavior. While implicit bias training seemed to improve officer knowledge of implicit bias concepts and motivation to act without prejudice, the study found that training had little to no effect on racial and ethnic disparities in police enforcement. In other words, implicit bias training alone was not enough to change behavior.

Improved Hiring Practices

One way to reduce the risk of police brutality is to hire individuals who have a lower risk of becoming violent on the job.

Personality psychology can be helpful in making these decisions, as there are assessments that can be used to predict how individuals will respond to stressful situations as well as predict their behavior when on the job.

The use of personality assessments can also be a way to level the playing field for minorities, as it can be an unbiased way to determine who is the best fit for the job.

Improved Disciplinary & Supervision Measures

Suppose a police officer engages in excessive or deadly force, and there is no punishment. In that case, this sends the message to the rest of the department that the behavior is acceptable.

Instead, adequate supervision to identify police officers acting inappropriately before that behavior gets out of control, as well as disciplinary measures to send the message that the behavior is unacceptable, are necessary to identify and reprimand police officers who are the most likely to use excessive or deadly force.

Using such measures will also deter other officers from acting in the same manner and set the tone for the overall behavioral expectations of police officers in a department.

In other words, police departments should begin to lead by example, and that starts with enforcing the law for police officers in the same way that it would be for civilians.

Provide Mental Health Support for Police Officers

When police officers are better able to manage their emotions under stress, understand which emotions they are experiencing, and communicate well despite being in high-stress situations, they will be better able to de-escalate complex scenarios rather than react by using excessive force.

In other words, there is a tipping point at which excessive force begins to be used, and this tipping point can be dialed backward when police officers receive adequate support for their mental health needs.

Additionally, given the fact that PTSD can be a risk factor for the use of excessive or deadly force, providing swift and adequate support to officers who have experienced trauma on the job seems to be a necessary prerequisite to preventing the use of excessive force.

This begins by providing adequate funding to support the mental health of police officers, and it also means reducing stigma and encouraging police officers to come forward when they are struggling with their mental health.

As a society in general, mental health is still surrounded by stigma , so it is doubly important that police officers are made to feel that it is acceptable for them to talk about their mental health struggles. Rather than feeling isolated with their trauma, stress, or unmanageable emotions, police officers should be made to feel that they know exactly who to speak to for support and that those supports will be in place and easily accessible when they are most needed.

This also means the police departments should be trained to recognize the symptoms of PTSD so that they can intervene and offer support when an officer may not recognize their own symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

Improve Relationships Between Police & Community

To reduce the use of excessive and deadly force, it is important to improve the relationships between the police department and the community, particularly the Black community, as this sector is generally the one most affected by police brutality (and subsequent anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress).

This could take the form of programs and initiatives that place police officers in the community in a helping or educational role instead of a policing role. It could also mean having the police department work with the community or participate in marches and rallies to show their support and understanding. This was seen taking place when some police departments chose to attend Black Lives Matter protests and marches and kneel in support instead of taking a combative stance.

When police officers and the public begin to see each other as individuals rather than as groups to fear or cast stereotypes upon, real change will begin.

Conduct Research

In addition to the above measures, it is also necessary to continue to conduct research to understand the psychology behind police brutality. Which personality factors are most likely to correlate with excessive use of force? Which mental disorders show the highest correlation with deadly use of force? What forms of training help most to reduce implicit bias and improve the situation?

Ongoing research on these and other topics is the cornerstone of moving forward and improving the situation when it comes to the excessive use of force by police officers and the disproportionate impact that it has on racial minorities.

Defunding Police Departments

What about defunding police departments? This is a tactic that has been brought up as a solution to police brutality.

Defunding the police means taking money away from funding the police department and instead sending those funds to invest in the communities that are struggling the most and where most of the policing occurs.

It's very much similar to the concept of directing money toward prevention instead of dealing with problems after the fact. While not a simple solution, there is merit in funding programs and communities that are struggling instead of putting more people behind bars.

A Word From Verywell

Understanding the psychology behind police brutality is the first step toward fixing the problem. Unfortunately, the situation is inherently one that needs to be fixed from the top down, beginning with the government systems and how they allocate their funding. When better training and education are in place for police officers, as well as better mental health support, then better outcomes may result.

It's also worth noting that while this problem seems to be most prominent in the United States, other countries may have their own racial tensions (for example, in Canada and Australia, there is tension between the government and Indigenous people). The United States, however, struggles more than most with using deadly force in the form of gun violence.

Mental health support is available if you or someone you know has been affected by or witnessed police-related violence. Please reach out to a mental health professional . Acts of police brutality are traumatizing, and you deserve care, understanding, and support.

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BBC News. George Floyd: What happened in the final moments of his life .

CBS News. Former Milwaukee officer not charged in fatal shooting of mentally ill man .

O'Kane C. Eric Garner's mom says seeing a black man plead "I can't breathe" is "like a reoccurring nightmare" . CBS News .

CBS News. Family sues over fatal shooting at Ohio Wal-Mart .

Edwards F, Lee H, Esposito M. Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age, race-ethnicity, and sex . PNAS. 2019;116(34):16793-16798. doi:10.1073/pnas.1821204116

Laurencin CT, Walker JM. Racial profiling is a public health and health disparities issue . J Racial Ethn Health Disparities . 2020;7:393-397. doi:10.1007/s40615-020-00738-2

President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing. Final Report of the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing .

Center for Police Research and Policy. The Impacts of Implicit Bias Awareness Training in the NYPD .

Williams DR. Stress and the Mental Health of Populations of Color:Advancing Our Understanding of Race-related Stressors . J Health Soc Behav . 2018;59(4):466-485. doi:10.1177/0022146518814251

Johnson DK. Confirmation Bias and Police Brutality . Psychology Today .

Miller L. Why Cops Kill: The Psychology of Police Deadly Force Encounters . Aggression and Violent Behavior. 2015;22:97-111. doi:10.1016/j.avb.2015.04.007

Muller RT. Officers with PTSD at Greater Risk for Police Brutality . Psychology Today.

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Turner E. How can psychology advance police-community relations? Using psychological science and advocacy to contribute to solutions . American Psychological Association.

By Arlin Cuncic, MA Arlin Cuncic, MA, is the author of The Anxiety Workbook and founder of the website About Social Anxiety. She has a Master's degree in clinical psychology.

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Police Departments Have Shrunk. Crime Is Plummeting. Now What?

New, surprising data has lessons for all sides of the “defund” debate..

In late May, Politico ran an article with the trollish headline “White House to the left: We told you so on crime.” The piece was built on interviews with two anonymous advisers to President Joe Biden, who asserted that falling violent crime rates and the electoral defeat of a “progressive” prosecutor in Oregon had validated the administration’s “toughness” and vocal support for increased law enforcement funding. Its framing depicted the politics of law and order as a zero-sum game in which leftists—especially those who called to “defund” law enforcement in 2020 after numerous high-profile instances of police brutality—have been routed.

But while it’s true that voters generally chose not to support defunding efforts amid rising COVID-era crime rates, the administration’s more-cops triumphalism might not tell the entire story either. In a New Republic piece published the day after the White House’s Politico victory lap, for instance, Michelle Phelps—a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota who studies policing—noted that thanks to retirements and resignations, there are actually fewer police officers working in the Minneapolis Police Department now than there were before the protests triggered by the May 2020 murder of George Floyd by an MPD officer. And according to numbers compiled by the Police Executive Research Forum, a respected independent group, that’s true of major cities across the country as a whole. “In large agencies, sworn staffing slightly increased during 2023,” PERF writes , “but it is still more than 5 percent below where it was in January 2020.” (Caveat: PERF’s data relies on departmental self-reporting.)

In other words, while voters may not have wanted it to be the case, and it didn’t happen in the way that activists would have chosen either, many U.S. police departments have gotten smaller—and the violent crime rate is still plummeting . So what is going on? Slate spoke to Phelps, author of the new book The Minneapolis Reckoning: Race, Violence and the Politics of Policing in America , about the fallout from Floyd’s death in Minnesota and how it might relate to the politics of police and crime nationally. The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Ben Mathis-Lilley: How did public attitudes toward police in Minneapolis shift—or not shift‍—after George Floyd was killed?

Michelle Phelps: We saw the prosecution and the successful conviction of the individual officers, and we saw investigations into the department by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights and the Department of Justice. Both of those investigations have documented extensive failures in hiring, training, and oversight policies, and both of them are in the process of leading to consent decrees . But what we didn’t see were major overhauls of policies and practices. Misconduct review and civilian oversight in Minneapolis is still a disaster. We did not see meaningful state or federal legislative reforms around policing. The George Floyd Act and the potentially transformative bills that were considered in the Minnesota Legislature came up empty-handed. So we see individual punishment of officers, but not bigger structural, systemic changes. Although one of the arguments of the book is we should expect that kind of work to take years, and maybe decades and generations, so it’s not surprising that it’s still ongoing.

There was also a citywide vote on whether to dissolve the police department and replace it with a more broadly construed department of public safety, which failed in November 2021 by a 56–44 percent margin.

The charter amendment did fail, but it was benchmarked nationally as this indicator of the failure of the “defund” slogan, and I think the reality on the ground is more complicated. The department has not been defunded or dismantled, but it is more than a third smaller in terms of number of officers than it was before, because they are unable to hire and retain officers quick enough to continue to keep pace with officers leaving and retiring.

The other thing is that the city did create an Office of Community Safety, very similar to what the Department of Public Safety was supposed to do. We have unarmed mental health and behavioral crisis response teams now responding to calls, and we have an office devoted to violence interruption work, though at the moment it’s a little bit unclear what they’re doing or how they’re staffed. It’s one of the unheralded successes of summer 2020.

You’ve written in the past that it’s too simplistic to depict criminal justice policy in the U.S. as having a pendulum pattern , with brutality scandals being followed by liberal reforms that are themselves followed by panic about crime rates. But how do you explain the charter amendment’s failure if not as a conservative backlash to rising crime?

By the time we get to November 2021, it’s true that—particularly in north Minneapolis, where we see the most stark race and class segregation—rates of homicide victimization were on par with the worst years of the 1990s in Minneapolis. That was part of the opposition to the charter amendment.

But what the national rhetoric gets wrong is, first of all, we didn’t see big racial divides [in the vote]. The typical story is like, you see this rise in crime and so you get this kind of white-backlash politics. In the Star Tribune poll before the vote there was a pretty muted racial divide, and if anything, white folks were slightly more supportive. The bigger demographic divide was actually in age, with younger folks more in support and older folks more opposed across the color line.

So the racial story of the charter amendment is complicated. You had Black community members and community leaders who were coming out in support of it because they thought it would create new models of public safety and reduce police violence. And you also had Black community leaders and members who came out against it and said, “White people are going to vote for this because they think it’s a racial justice initiative, but we need policing, and we can have good policing with police reform.” But notably you didn’t see any Black spokespersons who came out and said, “We love the MPD, and they’re doing a great job.”

And then there was this reduction in policing that occurred anyway because of officers quitting or retiring. Has that achieved any of what the “defund” push was supposed to do? In other words, have lower police staffing levels reduced the amount of problematic interactions between officers and civilians?

One way to think about overpolicing is the frequent stops and fishing expeditions, where police pull over a motorist or pedestrian because the officer wanted to see, like, Oh, if I frisk this person, are they going to have a weapon? If I search their car, am I going to find drugs? Those are the kinds of searches that are most likely to be racially biased and erode trust in police the most, because people know that they’re getting stopped because of who they are. And at least in Minneapolis, the data is very clear that the reduction in the number of officers has meant that they’re spending more of their time responding to emergency calls for service and less on those discretionary stops. In terms of are fewer people being stopped and harassed for nothing, I think the answer is very clear that when we have fewer police, less of that happens.

The question about police violence is harder to measure right now. It’s not clear that fewer stops necessarily means less violence per stop. And we have not yet seen a reduction in the number of people that police shoot and kill every year. So I’m less optimistic that there’s clear-cut benefits here for police violence.

Is it possible that police departments have made up for staffing shortages by paying the officers that remain to work overtime, especially given that in most places, departmental budgets either stayed where they were or were actively increased?

I haven’t looked at the city’s data. But that’s another place where reduction in staffing could have paradoxical consequences, because we know that officers that are more tired are more prone to violence.

The good news is that, for whatever reason, crime is still falling.

To me, it points to the [prior] rise as predominantly a consequence of the dislocations and insecurities of the pandemic. We still are losing officers faster than we’re getting them in Minneapolis, and yet crime is still declining, particularly homicide.

In a funny way, this is something that abolitionists and the police department should be able to agree on: That police are, at best, a last-step, stopgap measure, after a series of policy failures, that can stanch victimization on the margins. But they’re not the biggest driver of violence or safety. When we think about thriving middle-class neighborhoods, they didn’t get that way because they have a police station on every block, right?

The Biden administration would probably point to the funding for police departments that it has helped allocate.

I think the most important thing there was that there was a series of infusions of cash from the federal government, both to city governments and to residents, that helped to buffer some of the most profound financial consequences of the pandemic. It allowed Minneapolis to help avoid a fiscal catastrophe as tax revenue dropped off during the pandemic.

And I think the administration is trying to thread a needle. They are desperate to not lose the next election and have a second Trump presidency. And while I think the left wing of the Democratic Party likes to think that everybody agrees with them, the hypereducated leftist position on a lot of these things is actually not that popular when you poll for it. So the administration is trying to walk this middle ground where they can get independents and even softer conservatives into their camp and court centrists in the Democratic Party.

But they are also trying to listen to that left wing at intervals. You see support, for instance, for violence prevention work and community safety work. That, to me, feels like at least a bit of a victory, that there is at least a nudge towards a more holistic approach.

You said we should expect a real movement toward that kind of approach to take a long time. Why?

On the more existential side of the question, any kind of profound social change, none of it happens overnight. It is, in part, shifting public opinions, generational change. But it’s in part building up models of what change looks like. One of the challenges in summer 2020 was that police abolitionists were saying to folks, “What comes next is a set of experiments,” and I understand why activists fought for that, but for the everyday member of the public, the idea of let’s experiment has a different ring to it. I heard from a lot of folks in north Minneapolis who said, Why is it always experimenting on us ?

But right now, when we’re in this lull period, is a moment to think about these models: How many different response teams a city can have; what the costs and benefits are of scaling that up; of doing it inside of city government versus community-led. Can we figure out whether community violence interruption works, and if so, what makes it most or least effective? Building these experiments and getting the word out about how we think about public safety more expansively, is, I think, what we could be doing to build momentum for the next time we have a window of opportunity.

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Behind the Badge

6. Police views, public views

Contrasting experiences, conflicting emotions
Police are highly committed to their work but say more officers are needed
Most officers have had at least some training in key areas of reform
Most officers say high-profile incidents have made policing harder
How officers view police relations with whites and minorities
Support for aggressive, physical tactics
Similarities and differences between police and public views
While officers worry about their safety, most feel public doesn’t understand the risks they face
For police, contact with citizens can be a mixed bag
Police say they feel pride in their work more often than fulfillment
For police, sometimes moral imperative trumps department rules
Most officers are satisfied with their department and committed to its success
Support for top leadership’s direction is stronger in smaller agencies
For promotions and assignments, minorities and women are more likely to say their counterparts are treated better
Officers are divided on the fairness of their agency's disciplinary process
A majority of officers say there are not enough police in the community where they work
About a third of officers say their department’s use-of-force guidelines are very useful
Most officers say that they should be required to intervene when another officer is about to use unnecessary force
About four-in-ten officers say they are expected to meet a quota for arrests or tickets
3. Police and the community
4. Police, fatal encounters and ensuing protests
5. Reimagining the police through training and reforms
Acknowledgments
Methodology

Police and the public hold sharply different views about key aspects of policing as well as on some major policy issues facing the country. For example, most police say more officers are needed to adequately patrol their communities, while the majority of the public doesn’t think more officers are necessary. A majority of officers oppose a ban on assault-style weapons, while a majority of the public favors a ban on these weapons. More than eight-in-ten police say people don’t understand the risks and rewards of police work well, while an equally large majority of the public says they do.

At the same time, there are areas of broad agreement between officers and the public. Majorities of the police and public favor the use of body cameras by officers to record interactions with the public. Large majorities of police and the public also support easing some legal restrictions on marijuana, though the public is more likely than officers to support the legalization of marijuana for both personal and medical use (49% vs. 32%).

These contrasting views and striking similarities emerge from two surveys, one of 7,917 sworn police officers conducted online May 19-Aug. 14, 2016, and the other a nationally representative survey of 4,538 adults conducted Aug. 16-Sept. 12, 2016, by mail and online. The surveys included a number of identically worded questions, which allowed for direct comparisons of how officers and the public see the role of the police in their communities and how they view recent deaths of blacks during encounters with police, as well as to capture their views on some major policy issues, including gun control, the use of body cameras by officers and assessments of racial progress.

Some of the sharpest differences between the police and the public emerge over views on deaths of blacks during encounters with police in recent years and the protests that many of those incidents ignited. For example, 67% of the police but only 39% of the public describe these deadly encounters as isolated incidents rather than signs of a broader problem between blacks and police. When this overall finding is analyzed by race, an equally striking result snaps into focus: About seven-in-ten white officers (72%) but fewer than half of all black officers see these encounters as isolated incidents. By contrast, majorities of black officers (57%) as well as the public overall (60%) say the incidents are signs of a broader problem between police and the black community.

When the subject shifts to overall views on racial progress, large differences again emerge between the public and the police and also between blacks and whites within each group. For example, when police and the public are asked if the country has made the changes needed to give blacks equal rights with whites, fully eight-in-ten police officers – including 92% of white officers but only 29% of black officers – say the necessary changes have been made. By contrast, about half (48%) of the public, including 57% of whites but only 12% of blacks, says the country has made the changes needed for blacks to have equal rights with whites.

The remainder of this chapter examines these and other related findings in greater detail. The first sections compare and contrast police and public views on the role of police in the community and how each group views the risks and rewards of police work. The next sections describe how each group views recent deadly encounters between police and blacks and also examines police and public attitudes toward the protests that followed many of these incidents. The final section examines police and public attitudes on some current issues relevant to law enforcement, including gun policy, legalization of marijuana and racial equality.

How the public sees the police, how police see themselves

Protectors, enforcers or both – what do Americans see when they look at their local police? And do their perceptions of the police align with what officers say is their primary role?

Overall, about six-in-ten (62%) officers say their primary role is to serve as both protectors and enforcers; among the public, about half (53%) view their local police this way.

At the same time, three-in-ten officers (31%) say their primary role is to serve as protectors, about twice the share of the public (16%) who see their local police in that way.

An even larger disparity between police-public views emerges over the enforcement role of police. Only 8% of officers say they mainly see themselves as enforcers – the long arm of the law – yet fully three times the share of the public (29%) see their local police that way.

This disparity over how the public views police and how officers see their role is partially explained by race. Blacks are significantly more likely than whites to see their local police as mainly enforcers (39% vs. 26%) and less likely to see officers as both protectors and enforcers (43% vs. 57%).

Overall, 46% of Hispanic adults see police in their community as both enforcers and protectors, while 33% view them as enforcers and 14% as protectors. Among Hispanic officers, about two-thirds (65%) see their role to be both protectors and enforcers, while 7% say they are enforcers and 28% consider themselves to be protectors.

Contrasting views on size of police force

When it comes to manpower, police are unequivocal: More than eight-in-ten officers (86%) say their department does not have enough police to adequately patrol their community. By contrast, a majority of the public (57%) wants no change in the size of the local police force. About a third of the public (34%) want more officers in their local area, and 8% favor fewer officers.

Among the public, these differences are linked, in part, to how they see their local police. Among those who view the local police as mainly being enforcers, a quarter say they want more officers and 19% would favor a smaller police department. The remaining 54% favor no change.

At the same time, roughly a third (36%) of those who see the police as both protectors and enforcers would prefer to see more officers. Only 4% favor a smaller force, while 59% prefer the current level of policing. Similarly, about a third of those who view their police as protectors (30%) favor a larger police presence, 11% would like a smaller force and 59% prefer no change. (The views of police on whether there are enough officers in their communities are far more unequivocal: About eight-in-ten or more in each group says their department falls short of having the number of officers their community needs.)

Police work: Great risks, great frustrations

The overwhelming majority of Americans say they understand the risks and challenges that police face. And an equally lopsided share of police disagrees.

Fully eight-in-ten Americans (83%) say they understand the risks and challenges of police work – including 38% who believe they understand the risks very well. By contrast, fully 86% of the police say the public does not fully comprehend the trials that officers face – including 40% who say Americans don’t understand well at all the risks and challenges of police work.

Another survey finding provides a striking example of an apparent disconnect between what the public thinks police work is like and the reality of law enforcement.

Perhaps influenced by popular television police dramas that routinely feature vividly choreographed shootouts, more than eight-in-ten Americans (83%) believe that typical police officers fire their service weapon while on duty at least once in their career – and about three-in-ten (31%) believe police discharge their weapon at least a few times a year.

In fact, only about a quarter of all officers (27%) say they have ever fired their service weapon. 14

Police work more dangerous, more frustrating

But how do police view the risks and rewards of their work, and how do those views differ from Americans in other occupations? To partially answer those questions, the surveys asked officers and employed Americans how often they worried about their physical safety while at work, how often their job made them feel frustrated and how often it made them feel fulfilled.

Average police officers are three times as likely as workers overall to say they nearly always or often have serious concerns about their physical safety while on the job (42% vs. 14%). Employed Americans, meanwhile, are about four times as likely as officers on average to say they hardly ever or never seriously worry about their physical well-being at work (67% vs. 16%).

Officers also are more likely on average than employed Americans overall to say their jobs frequently make them feel frustrated and somewhat less likely to feel fulfilled by their work. Half (51%) of officers say their job nearly always or often frustrates them, compared with 29% of all workers. A larger share of white officers report feeling frustrated by their job than do white workers overall (54% vs. 28%).

At the same time, about four-in-ten officers (42%) say their work frequently makes them feel fulfilled, compared with half of employed adults (52%) who feel that way. There was no significant difference between white and black officers.

Officers, public agree that police work is more difficult now

The public and officers agree that recent deaths of blacks during incidents with police and the protests they have sparked have added to the challenges of police work. More than eight-in-ten officers (86%) say their job is harder now as a result of the protests. At the same time, seven-in-ten Americans believe police work has become more dangerous in the past five years.

On both measures, solid majorities of whites and blacks agree police work is harder now, though whites are more likely than blacks to say policing has become more challenging. About nine-in-ten white officers (89%) and 81% of black police say their job has gotten harder. Similarly, roughly three-quarters of whites (74%) in the general population and 60% of blacks say policing has become more hazardous in recent years.

Public, police see deadly police-black encounters differently

Police and the public describe the recent fatal incidents involving blacks and the police in very different ways.

Roughly two-thirds of the police (67%) say these deadly encounters are isolated incidents, while about three-in-ten (31%) say they are signs of serious problems between law enforcement and the black community. But when the public is asked to consider these incidents, the result is virtually reversed: Six-in-ten say these encounters are signs of a broader problem, while 39% describe them as isolated incidents.

These differences grow sharper when race is added to the analysis. Black and white officers see these incidents very differently, as do whites and blacks in the general public.

For example, about seven-in-ten white police officers (72%) and 44% of whites overall say fatal black-police encounters are isolated incidents. By contrast, only about four-in-ten black officers (43%) and 18% of blacks overall share this view.

At the same time, black officers are about twice as likely as blacks nationally to describe these encounters as isolated incidents (43% vs. 18%). And while a narrow majority of black officers (57%) say the incidents are signs of a broader problem, a much larger majority of blacks overall (79%) express this view. In fact, roughly similar shares of black police and whites overall – 57% and 54%, respectively – see these incidents as pointing to larger issues between blacks and law enforcement.

Anti-police bias is seen as a motive for protests by most officers and public

Large majorities of the police and the public agree that long-standing anti-police bias was at least some of the principle behind the protests that have followed many of the recent fatal incidents involving blacks and the police.

About nine-in-ten officers (92%) say the protests were motivated by bias toward the police, including 68% who say this was a great deal of the reason behind the demonstrations. A smaller but still substantial 79% majority of the public agrees that prejudice against the police provided at least some of the impetus for the protests, including 41% who see this as a major motivation.

A familiar pattern emerges when race is factored into the analysis. Black and white officers differ somewhat about the motives of the protesters, and the views of each group differ with those of all blacks and whites.

Fully nine-in-ten white officers (95%) and 85% of whites nationally say the protests are motivated at least somewhat by anti-police bias. Underlying this modest difference is the much larger share of white officers who feel that long-standing animosity toward police is a great deal of the protesters’ motivation (72% of white officers vs. 47% for all whites).

Among blacks, the disparity between police and the public is even greater than it is among whites. About nine-in-ten black officers (91%) say anti-police feelings are a reason for the protests. By contrast, 56% of blacks overall share this view.

Again, the belief that anti-police bias is a major reason behind the demonstrations is more strongly held by black officers. Black officers are more than twice as likely as blacks generally to say bias was a great deal of the reason for the demonstrations (59% of black officers vs. 25% of all blacks).

White officers more skeptical that accountability motivated protests

The police and the public also disagree about how important a motivation the desire to hold police accountable was to protesters. The difference is dramatic: Only about a third of all officers (35%) say the desire to make officers answerable was at least some of the motivation for the demonstrations, while 65% of the public says accountability was a factor.

A different pattern emerges when blacks and whites are asked the degree to which they believe the protests are genuine attempts to force police accountability. White officers stand apart; they are far less likely than whites generally, black officers or blacks to see holding officers answerable for their actions as a major goal of the protests.

About a quarter (27%) of white officers say accountability motivated the protests; by contrast, more than twice the share of whites overall (63%) say this. In fact, a quarter of whites overall (27%) say the desire for police accountability was a great deal of the reason for the protests – identical to the share of police who say accountability was either a great deal (5%) or some (22%) of the motivation, combined.

Blacks, both officers and in the public, see the desire for accountability as a driving factor behind the protests. About seven-in-ten black police officers (69%) say concerns about police accountability played at least some role in the protests, a view shared by 79% of all blacks. Moreover, blacks nationally are significantly more likely than black officers to say this was a great deal of the motivation for demonstrators (55% vs. 34%).

Broad support for body cameras

One consequence of recent fatal encounters between police and blacks has been the growing call for police to wear video cameras to record interactions between officers and the public. While some law enforcement organizations, including the police unions in Miami and Boston, have attempted to slow down efforts to make officers wear “body cams,” the surveys find that a clear majority of officers and a larger share of the public support their use.

Two-thirds of the police (66%) and an even larger share of the public (93%) favor the use of body cameras by police to record interactions between officers and the public. However, the surveys also find that police see relatively fewer benefits than the public does from the use of body cams by officers.

About six-in-ten Americans (59%) but only a third of police say body cams would make members of the public more likely to cooperate with officers. By contrast, a majority of police (56%) says body cams would make no difference, a view shared by about a third (35%) of the public. Only 5% of the public and 10% of the police say members of the public would be less likely to obey officers who are wearing body cameras.

Police are somewhat more convinced about the positive effects of body cameras on police behavior than on the public’s behavior. Half of officers and two-thirds of the public (66%) say a police officer would be more likely to act appropriately when wearing a body cam. At the same time, 44% of officers and 27% of the public doubt that wearing body cams would have an impact on police behavior, while small shares of officers and the public say officers would be less likely to act appropriately (5% and 6%, respectively).

Broad support from police, public for some gun law reforms

Police officers are considerably more likely than the general public to say it is more important to protect the rights of Americans to own guns than it is to control gun ownership (74% of officers vs. 53% of the public). At the same time, there is widespread agreement between police and the public on several key gun law reforms. For example, more than nine-in-ten officers and almost the same share of the public favor laws that would prevent the mentally ill from purchasing guns (95% and 87%, respectively). And about the same proportions of the police and the public favor background checks for people who buy weapons at a gun show or from a private individual (88% and 86%, respectively).

A majority of police and a larger share of the public also support the creation of a federal database to track gun sales (61% and 71%, respectively).

However, the consensus on guns vanishes when the focus turns to assault-style weapons. About two-thirds of Americans (64%) but only about a third of police (32%) favor outlawing assault weapons.

The gender gap among police on this issue is among the largest of any question in this survey: A majority of female officers (57%) favor a ban on assault weapons, compared with about a quarter of their male colleagues (27%). This disparity mirrors the overall gender gap in the country as a whole: 74% of women and 54% of men favor making these weapons illegal.

A majority of police, public support easing some restrictions on marijuana

As more jurisdictions move to decriminalize or legalize the private use of marijuana by adults, large majorities of the police and the public favor easing restrictions on the drug. However, a larger share of the public than police favor legalization of marijuana for personal and medical use (49% vs. 32%).

Overall, about seven-in-ten officers support allowing medical use of marijuana (37%) or favor the legalization of the drug for both personal and medical use (32%). The public is more favorably inclined than police toward relaxing marijuana laws; more than eight-in-ten Americans support either legalizing marijuana (49%) or allowing only medical use of the drug (35%).

The surveys found little support among the public for outlawing marijuana use under any circumstances (15%). However, police are twice as likely as all adults to favor an outright ban on the drug (30%).

As with younger adults generally, officers younger than 35 are more likely than those ages 50 to 60 to favor permitting personal and medical use of marijuana (37% vs. 27%). Among the public, a majority of adults (63%) under the age of 45 favor legalization.

Police say no more changes needed to achieve racial equality; public divided

The wide disparities in the views of blacks and whites in American society over whether more changes are needed to achieve racial equality loom even larger in the country’s police departments.

Overall, the surveys find that police are significantly more likely than the public to say the country has made the changes necessary to give blacks equal rights with whites (80% vs. 48%). By contrast, half of the public believes the country still needs to make changes to achieve racial equality, a view shared by only 16% of police.

Underlying these overall results are sharp disagreements between blacks and whites on this issue – a racial divide that is wider within America’s police departments than it is in the country as a whole.

Fully nine-in-ten white police officers (92%) say the country has made the needed changes to achieve racial equality. Nationally, a modest 57% majority of whites say this, a difference of 35 percentage points.

The differences between black officers and blacks overall is significantly smaller. About three-in-ten black officers (29%) say the necessary changes have been made, a view shared by only 12% of blacks nationally and a 17 percentage point difference. By contrast, large majorities of black officers and blacks overall believe more changes are needed (69% and 84%, respectively).

The survey questions specifically asked the public and officers not to include in their count or estimate instances where officers fired their service weapon “on a gun range or while training.” ↩

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Justice Department Finds Brutality and Bias by Phoenix Police

The department’s report comes after a three-year investigation into complaints of discrimination and use of force by law enforcement that the city says has been burdensome.

Cars and a van driving by the Phoenix Police headquarters at sunset.

By Eileen Sullivan and Jack Healy

Eileen Sullivan reported from Washington, and Jack Healy from Phoenix.

The Justice Department issued a sweeping rebuke of policing in Phoenix on Thursday, finding severe discrimination against Black, Hispanic and Native American people, routine violations of the rights of homeless people and excessive use of force.

The review is one of the harshest to come out of the Biden administration in its efforts to investigate police departments for systemic problems. It is also the first time a civil rights investigation into police practices found that the rights of homeless people were violated.

“Ultimately, our findings reveal evidence showing longstanding dysfunction,” Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general who leads the department’s civil rights division, told reporters on Thursday. She added, “The problems at their core reflect the lack of effective supervision, training and accountability.”

City officials said in statements Thursday that they would take the findings seriously. But they have told the Justice Department that the city already enacted police reforms since the investigation began in 2021, and the Phoenix police of today “are materially different than the department that you investigated.”

Phoenix has bristled at the prospect of federal involvement in its policing. But the department’s findings were so severe, Ms. Clarke said, that “this is one instance where we can’t count on the police to police themselves.”

She said the agency had no immediate plans to sue Phoenix and its police force to mandate changes. She indicated that a first step would be arriving at an agreement with Phoenix officials to enter into a consent decree — a legally binding improvement plan — or placing the department under an independent monitor, as it has in similar situations.

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June 19, 2024

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Study shows biases undermine diversity efforts in policing

by George Washington University

As more organizations attempt to increase the representation of women in traditionally male-dominated occupations (such as engineering, technology or banking), new research from George Washington University professor Jennifer Merluzzi indicates that simply hiring more women into these fields may not make diversity efforts more effective.

The study, published in American Sociological Review (April 2024), " A Hidden Barrier to Diversification? Performance Recognition Penalties for Incumbent Workers in Male-Dominated Occupations, " looked at the impact of increasing gender representation within the traditionally male-dominated occupation of law enforcement.

Merluzzi and her co-author Jirs Meuris, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examined publicly available data spanning 13 years on nearly 14,000 officers working in the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Their findings revealed a performance recognition penalty for men and women workers from the process of occupational diversification itself.

Since the study used data that spanned multiple years and looked at the officer's individual likelihood of recognition, the findings documented the difference in performance recognition each individual officer received as the number of women in his or her policing unit changed over time.

Women entered the units both as new recruits from the police academy, but also as men and women transferred into and out of different work units across time and thus represented the regular fluctuations of workers typical of an effort to diversify a highly gendered occupation.

"There are hundreds of people in a work unit and what this shows is when the number of women you're working with is higher this month than last month, your likelihood of receiving performance recognition goes down," Merluzzi said. "But you are the same worker doing the same tasks in the same job—the only thing changing is the number of women working alongside you that month in your police unit."

Merluzzi noted that the percentage of women in the CPD remained fairly consistent throughout the timeframe they studied, but that even small fluctuations in the number of women in one's surrounding work unit negatively impacted that individual worker's chance of performance recognition.

Both men and women employees were impacted by this performance recognition penalty, but since women had a lower baseline likelihood of receiving a performance recognition, the impact of this penalty on women was even more substantial.

The study also found both men and women supervisors were both likely to display this bias, although they found that men supervisors were more likely to penalize men officers than women officers for their association with women peers in their unit, while women supervisors equally penalized men and women officers for this.

Merluzzi said they also considered alternative explanations for their results such as women officers being sorted into some units over others or that the tasks the officers were being asked to do changed as they worked with more women officers in a way that reduced the chance of performance recognition.

For example, they investigated and confirmed that the same pattern of penalties held in units with the greatest and least percentage of women as well as in units performing the most "masculine" (i.e., involving use-of-force) and the most "feminine" (i.e., sexual assault and prostitution cases) tasks during their observation period.

Considering the implications of the study's findings, Merluzzi said it highlights the criticality of policy makers to address the underlying structural problems that lead to bias and inequality, beyond current quota-based initiatives aimed at getting more women into these male-dominated fields.

"There are significant, highly publicized efforts to diversify police forces across the country with a large emphasis on quota-based approaches," Merluzzi said.

"What this study indicates is that unfortunately, simply adding more women without fixing the underlying, sticky structural issues may be ineffective and lead to worse results. Here, a police officer's career outcomes declined as a consequence of his or her association with diversity."

What's interesting about this occupational context, Merluzzi said, is that all police officers go through the identical academy training before starting as officers. This helps rule out that men and women workers were different in some important way from a training standpoint that could help explain the subsequent performance evaluation difference.

"Beyond numeric representation alone, you have to unpack parts of the occupation itself and why some occupations are perceived as being more gendered and the associated status with that gendering. When there is a cultural association of an occupation as inherently 'men's work,' the evaluation within the profession becomes unfairly defined by the person doing the job rather than their job performance or abilities."

The career consequences of this can be serious for employees. In fields like policing where salaries are fairly fixed and promotions are less sought after by the majority of officers, performance recognition can help obtain better work assignments and gain visible accolades and acknowledgement for work that can at times require significant risk to the worker.

Another consequence is that workers can start becoming resistant to diversity because they associate it with being individually penalized.

"If an association with diversity hurts your own performance outcomes, you're not going to embrace diversity efforts or the women entering into your unit," Merluzzi said.

Merluzzi said she would expect to find similar patterns in other traditionally male-dominated fields, which is why organizations seeking to increase diversity in these occupations need to address systemic and cultural biases to make those efforts more effective.

"There's a lot of focus on pipeline initiatives to get more women into these heavily masculine occupations," Merluzzi said.

"Clearly, efforts to encourage women into these fields are incredibly important, but we cannot over-rely on these as the panacea. What our study demonstrates is that the solution is much more complicated than that—even if you solved the issue on an individual level basis, this shows that there are also impacts on an aggregate level that are essential to consider in designing any diversity policy for these occupations."

Journal information: American Sociological Review

Provided by George Washington University

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Justice Department says Phoenix police violated rights. Here are some cases that drew criticism

FILE - Phoenix Police stand in front of police headquarters on May 30, 2020, in Phoenix, waiting for protesters marching to protest the death of George Floyd. Phoenix police violate people’s rights, discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Native American people when enforcing the law and use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force, the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday, June 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

FILE - Attorney General Merrick Garland speaks during a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, Friday, April 14, 2023. Phoenix police violate people’s rights, discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Native American people when enforcing the law and use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force, the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday, June 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

FILE - Michael Sullivan, the interim police chief for the Phoenix Police Department, speaks a news conference, Feb. 7, 2023, in Phoenix. Phoenix police violate people’s rights, discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Native American people when enforcing the law and use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force, the U.S. Justice Department said Thursday, June 13, 2024. (AP Photo/Gregory Payan, File)

Darrell Kriplean, president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, which represents about 2,200 Phoenix officers, responds to a Department of Justice report on the department during a news conference Thursday, June 13, 2024, in Phoenix. The Justice Department said that Phoenix police discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Native American people, unlawfully detain homeless people and use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Darrell Kriplean, president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, which represents about 2,200 Phoenix officers, responds to the Department of Justice report on the department during a news conference Thursday, June 13, 2024, in Phoenix. The Justice Department said that Phoenix police discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Native American people, unlawfully detain homeless people and use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Darrell Kriplean, president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, which represents about 2,200 Phoenix officers, takes a question after the release of a Department of Justice report on the Phoenix Police department during a news conference Thursday, June 13, 2024, in Phoenix. The Justice Department said that Phoenix police discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Native American people, unlawfully detain homeless people and use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Joe Clure, executive director of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, which represents about 2,200 Phoenix officers, speaks during a news conference after the Department of Justice released their report on the Phoenix Police Department Thursday, June 13, 2024, in Phoenix. The Justice Department said that Phoenix police discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Native American people, unlawfully detain homeless people and use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Darrell Kriplean, president of the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, which represents about 2,200 Phoenix officers, answers a question during a news conference after the Department of Justice released their report on the department Thursday, June 13, 2024, in Phoenix. The Justice Department said that Phoenix police discriminate against Black, Hispanic and Native American people, unlawfully detain homeless people and use excessive force, including unjustified deadly force. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

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PHOENIX (AP) — Phoenix police use unjustified deadly force, discriminate against people of color and routinely violate the rights of homeless people, the Justice Department said in announcing the results of a sweeping civil rights investigation.

The government launched the investigation in 2021 after years of complaints and issued a report Thursday. The Phoenix Police Department was criticized for its treatment of protesters, deaths of people who were restrained by officers, and a high number of shootings by officers.

Phoenix police didn’t immediately respond to the report’s findings. A top police union official called the investigation a “farce.” Mayor Kate Gallego said she’ll “carefully and thoroughly review the findings before making further comment.”

Here’s a look at some of the cases mentioned in the report:

The Justice Department reviewed all Phoenix police shootings from January 2019 to December 2022, finding some likely could have been avoided if not for “reckless tactics” by officers that increased the risk of deadly encounters.

For example, the report says, Phoenix police shot at people who did not pose a threat. And, police used excessive force on wounded people and delayed medical assistance, the report says.

A person tries to keep cool under misters outside a homeless shelter, May 30, 2024, in Phoenix. At least six people have died from heat-related causes in 2024 so far in sizzling metro Phoenix, where the temperatures this week hit 115 degrees Fahrenheit (46 Celsius), Arizona's Maricopa Department of Public Health reported. (AP Photo/Matt York)

In one instance, an officer shot a man who who was holding a knife to his own throat, saying he wanted to die. In another case, a police officer fired a shot at a man who fell down, the report says.

And in another case, police waited over nine minutes to help a woman after officers shot her 10 times. The woman died.

Police also shot a man with a gun and then fired bean bag rounds at him as he lay motionless.

“The pain inflicted from such rounds would be extraordinary, but the first two stun bags elicited no reaction to suggest the man was conscious or presented a threat. Yet the supervisor ordered officers to fire more rounds at the man,” the report says.

After the sixth projectile was fired, an officer said he needed gloves to start CPR, the report says.

“No rush, guys, no rush,” the supervisor responded. The officers fired two more rounds before approaching the man who died at the scene, the report says.

Investigators reviewed protests in Phoenix between 2017 and 2022. They said police targeted lawful protesters for arrest and reacted with unjustified force or arrest when people in everyday encounters spoke or attempted to record officers’ conduct.

During the protests in the summer of 2020, Phoenix officers failed to warn protesters before shooting projectiles and made little attempt to distinguish between peaceful protesters and those engaged in unlawful acts, the report said.

The report cites a widely criticized “ challenge coin ” that circulated among Phoenix officers in 2017. It depicted a gas mask-wearing demonstrator getting shot in the groin with a projectile and contained a vulgar comment about his injury.

Discrimination

Distrust grew deeper, especially in Black and Hispanic communities, in June 2019 when cellphone video emerged showing officers pointing guns at an unarmed Black couple with two small children they suspected of shoplifting.

The couple said their 4-year-old daughter took a doll from a store without their knowledge and rejected police suggestions they stole, too. No charges were filed. After the video drew criticism, Phoenix police quickly implemented widespread use of body worn cameras, making it one of the last big departments to do so.

The Justice Department said Phoenix police disproportionately targeted communities of color. Police enforced certain laws — like low-level drug and traffic offenses, loitering and trespassing — more harshly against Black, Hispanic and Native American people than against white people who engaged in the same conduct, the report says.

Black drivers in Phoenix were 144% more likely and Hispanic drivers were 40% more likely than white drivers to be arrested or cited for low-level violations in view of red light cameras, the report says.

Native American people were more than 44 times more likely than white people — on a per capita basis — to be cited or arrested for possessing and consuming alcohol.

Homelessness

Phoenix police illegally detained homeless people, in some cases falsely claiming the people were obstructing sidewalks or alleys, the Justice Department said. Police also cited or arrested homeless people “for conduct that is plainly not a crime,” the report says.

More than a third of the Phoenix Police Department’s misdemeanor arrests and citations between January 2016 and March 2022 were of homeless people, the report says. One man was arrested or cited at least 20 times between 2019 and 2022.

The report notes citations and arrests for one 69-year-old man who was sitting or sleeping on public property. At one point he asked police: “Is there no end to the harassment of the homeless?”

The Justice Department said police also use “combative language and needless force” when dealing with children.

Police threw a 15-year-old Latino boy against a bus stop pole and handcuffed him after he asked to call his mother, the report says.

“The officers also questioned the boy while he was handcuffed, without informing him of his Miranda rights,” the report said. The officers unlawfully searched his backpack without a warrant before releasing him with a lecture that the encounter was his own fault, according to the report.

Police also handcuffed and used neck restraints on a 13-year-old boy who walked out of school without permission, according to the Justice Department.

“With the officer’s knee in his back and hand on his neck, the boy pleaded to be let go: ‘My mom’s right there. I can’t breathe. I’m just trying to get home,’” the report says.

When the boy’s mother complained, a supervisor defended the conduct as “reasonable and necessary,” the report says.

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‘We’re refusing to let ourselves live in comfortable complacency’: Scenes from the Cardiff encampment for Palestine

The Cardiff encampment for Palestine three days before the June 3rd attack by the South Wales police. (Photo: Mouna Madanat)

I’m sitting on a bench at the Cardiff University Encampment for Palestine, listening to the birds singing and hearing the quiet voices from a community talk taking place about the genocide in Sudan.

The site is one of friendship and solidarity. Quite the opposite of what a statement released by Cardiff University wants you to believe:

“The existence of the camp is disturbing for some of our community. Some staff and students have written to me to tell us that some of the materials being displayed at the camp and on social media are causing them distress.”

I read these lines on my Instagram feed, and I look up at the posters that surround me.

“Kick imperialism off campus,” “You cannot build a Holy Land for your children on the graves of other children.” These are the signs displayed at the camp. Simple messages of hope and peace.

The moment I set foot on the encampment, I was greeted with smiles and warmth and offered a big bowl of food. The sense of community at the camp is like no other.

Cardiff is the capital city of Wales, in the United Kingdom, to the west of England. Wales is home to several immigrant communities, with around 18% of the population being Black, Asian mixed, or other ethnic groups. Cardiff University is not particularly known to be much of an activist hub, so this makes the strength and size of the Cardiff encampment even more impressive.

I’m speaking to Emily (who asked for her surname not to be included), a student at Cardiff University who has been at the encampment for 16 days now.

She speaks on her experience at the encampment, and we touch on how it’s strange to live through the dichotomy of a privileged normal life, while wanting to acknowledge the genocide.

“Here you’re somewhere where being deeply upset that there’s a genocide happening isn’t strange. In the way it is in the rest of the world where it comes second, whereas here it comes first. A lot of people have felt like they’ve been going crazy for a long time. We’re all thinking, is anyone else seeing this?”

I ask Emily how the encampment has been received by the university. She softly sighs and says, “It’s clear that their priorities are themselves and their jobs. In their first meeting with us, they said, ‘We’re not talking about demands. We want to talk about health and safety.’ The audacity of them to talk about safety when they’re actively pouring money into bomb factories through investments into Israeli weapons, and then lying about it!”

We talk about the local community, since Cardiff is almost 10% Muslim. The presence of brown immigrant communities in Cardiff is prevalent, with a vast number of local shops and restaurants owned by Muslims.

“We owe so much to the local Muslim community,” Emily says. “They’re incredible and have treated us so well. They set up a rota bringing us hot food, with people coming by every day. They often pray here, and we set everything up. It’s beautiful.”

She also mentions that the protests in America have made people very scared about police brutality.

“A speaker came here from CAGE International for a talk,” she says, referring to the advocacy charity in London that which works to empower communities impacted by state oppression of Muslims. “And the police were involved because they were worried about terrorism. It was blatantly racist. The university even called CAGE an extremist organization. We held it in the park because we couldn’t have him on university grounds. We haven’t had police brutality yet. South Wales police are very racist, but they’re not violent with us.”

Just three days later on June 3, South Wales Police arrested around 16 protestors (most of whom came from the encampment) outside Cardiff Bay police station, using unprecedented levels of violence to do so. The protestors and members of the camp were there to demand the release of a fellow activist by the name of Neezo, who was disabled and who they believe was unlawfully arrested two days beforehand.

The violence involved pulling their hair, kicking them to the floor, pushing them to the ground, and twisting their limbs so aggressively they have physical signs of bruising and cuts.

One protestor was heard crying out, “You’re hurting us. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe.” Witnesses said they saw specific instances of racial profiling, with police officers intentionally reaching for girls wearing hijabs and people of color, in one instance even arresting a Palestinian girl who wasn’t even involved in the protest. She was simply standing by the police station.

They were held for roughly 19 hours before being released, but not before they had their phones confiscated.

I speak with Qasim Falasteen, a local activist and photographer who has several first-hand experiences with the South Wales police. We talk specifically about the course of events that led to the police brutality experienced on June 3.

He says, “Because of the way we felt Neezo was unlawfully detained and arrested, we as a community proceeded to the police station to hold a peaceful demonstration for his release. Over a couple of hours we saw police officers gathering to the rear of the building, and we knew it could only mean one thing. We were protesting peacefully. There was no criminal damage, there was no violence.”

Around 45 police officers gathered. They were kneeing us in the back, pinching our arms, pushing, shoving, and kicking people. We were told that if we didn’t vacate we would be arrested, to stand up and leave now, so people got up to leave and were pulled back down and arrested.”

Qasim tells me how one boy was aggressively thrown to the ground and then dragged away. He says, “I saw the police officer ‘accidentally’ fall on his back. He was a 21-year-old first-year student. He told me he thought he was about to die. Six or seven big officers were holding him down, and the way they threw him to the ground was so violent and brutal. He was somebody of color, young, and very peaceful.”

“Out of the 16 people that were arrested, three were white. Everybody else was Palestinian, Jordanian, Middle Eastern, or other Muslims. It was very aggressive and it’s always a different response when it’s a non-white person. Whether it’s attacking a group or singling out the people of color or religion, those people are receiving worse treatment than others. That’s really visible.”

“South Wales police can employ 40 or 50 people with vast amounts of technology, vehicles, surveillance equipment etc., but they can’t employ a single person that is representative of the community,” Qasim goes on to say. “Not a single person speaks Arabic, not a single officer can translate. They’ve openly said, ‘yes we have been labelled as institutionally racist, but we are trying to change that,’ what are they doing to change that? On the 3 rd of June, every single police officer was white!”

“The police don’t get involved until we respond in an angry way,” he continues. “They’ll let people drive their motorbikes through our protests, throw food and drinks at us. The police just wait until we say something, and then they get aggressive towards us. This is designed — it’s not by accident. This is designed to intimidate and bring out the worst in us. We’ve shown for nine months that we are not violent and not aggressive.”

As of today, Cardiff University has finally agreed to sit down, open negotiations, and discuss the demands with the students.

Something in particular that Emily said rings loud in my mind: “I think a university should inherently be about activism. The point of university is to research, educate, and make the world a better place. If it’s not working to improve the world, why is it existing?”

I think about this as I re-read Cardiff University’s statement, “We appreciate and understand that many would like the University to take up a clear position in relation to the conflict. The conflict has been, and remains, incredibly distressing to many members of our community. We will not be issuing a statement as requested.”

As an alumni student from Cardiff University and an Arab myself, I can’t help but feel disappointed at the university’s stance on the genocide. Instead of condemning the violence from Israel and now the South Wales Police, they have chosen silence.

One can only hope it’s up from here.

Holocaust survivors and their descendants at a protest in London opposing the Gaza genocide, May 2024. (Photo: X)

Ten Holocaust survivors condemn Israel’s Gaza genocide

Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Old College, University of Edinburgh

Divestment at the University of Edinburgh: Breaking from Balfour’s colonial legacy

Are these the same peaceful protesters who were arrested for illegally occupying a roadway and blocking rush hour traffic? And subsequently “occupying” the lobby of the police station?

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Sunny, hot, muggy Thursday with a few pop-up storms

Tyre Nichols case revives calls for change in police culture

by AARON MORRISON, CLAUDIA LAUER and ADRIAN SAINZ | Associated Press

Protesters march on a bridge Friday, Jan. 27, 2023, in Memphis, Tenn., as authorities release police video depicting five Memphis officers beating Tyre Nichols, whose death resulted in murder charges and provoked outrage at the country's latest instance of police brutality. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

An unarmed Black man dies after a videotaped beating by police. The officers involved are fired. After a thorough review of the evidence, criminal charges are swiftly filed against the offending officers.

Investigation, accountability and charges.

This is often the most Black citizens can hope for as the deaths continue. Nationwide, police have killed roughly three people per day consistently since 2020, according to academics and advocates for police reform who track such deaths.

Tyre Nichols' fatal encounter with police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, recorded in video made public Friday night , is a glaring reminder that efforts to reform policing have failed to prevent more flashpoints in an intractable epidemic of brutality.

Nearly 32 years ago, Rodney King’s savage beating by police in Los Angeles prompted heartfelt calls for change. They've been repeated in a ceaseless rhythm ever since, punctuated by the deaths of Amadou Diallo in New York, Oscar Grant in Oakland, California, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and so many others.

George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis in 2020 was so agonizing to watch, it summoned a national reckoning that featured federal legislation proposed in his name and shows of solidarity by corporations and sports leagues. All fell short of the shift in law enforcement culture Black people in America have called for — a culture that promotes freedom from fear, trust in police and mutual respect.

“We need public safety, right? We need law enforcement to combat pervasive crime,” said Jason Turner, senior pastor of Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis. “Also, we don’t want the people who are sworn to protect and serve us brutalizing us for a simple traffic stop, or any offense.”

The five Black officers are now fired and charged with murder and other crimes in the Jan. 10 death of Nichols, a 29-year-old skateboarder, FedEx worker and father to a 4-year-old boy.

From police brass and the district attorney’s office to the White House, officials said Nichols’ killing points to a need for bolder reforms that go beyond simply diversifying the ranks, changing use-of-force rules and encouraging citizens to file complaints.

"The world is watching us," Shelby County District Attorney Steve Mulroy said. "If there is any silver lining to be drawn from this very dark cloud, it’s that perhaps this incident can open a broader conversation about the need for police reform.”

President Joe Biden joined national civil rights leaders in similar calls to action.

“To deliver real change, we must have accountability when law enforcement officers violate their oaths, and we need to build lasting trust between law enforcement, the vast majority of whom wear the badge honorably, and the communities they are sworn to serve and protect,” the president said.

But Memphis, whose 628,000 residents celebrate barbecue and blues music and lament being the place where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, has seen this before. The city took steps advocates called for in a “Reimagine Policing” initiative in 2021, and mirrored a set of policy changes reformers want all departments to implement immediately, known as “8 Can’t Wait.”

De-escalation training is now required. Officers are told to limit uses of force, exhaust all alternatives before resorting to deadly force and report all uses of force. Tennessee also took action: State law now requires officers to intervene to stop abuse and report excessive force by their colleagues.

Showing unusual transparency for a police department, the MPD now publishes accountability reports that include the race of people subjected to use of force each year. They show Black men and women were overwhelmingly targeted for rougher treatment in 2019, 2020 and 2021. They were subject to nearly 86% of the recorded uses of guns, batons, pepper spray, physical beatings and other force in 2021, the total nearly doubling that year to 1,700 cases.

Seven uses of force by Memphis police ended in death during these three years.

“I don’t know how much more cumulative Black death our community should have to pay to convince elected officials that the policing system isn’t broken — it’s working exactly as it was designed to, at the expense of Black life,” said Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, a Tennessee-based civil rights leadership training school.

The Nichols case — just one of the brutality cases to make national news this month — exposes an uncomfortable truth: More than two years since the deaths of Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks touched off protests, policing reforms have not significantly reduced such killings.

States approved nearly 300 police reform bills after Floyd’s murder, creating civilian oversight of police, more anti-bias training, stricter use-of-force limits and alternatives to arrests in cases involving people with mental illnesses, according to a recent analysis by the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Despite calls to “defund the police," an Associated Press review of police funding nationwide found only modest cuts, driven largely by shrinking revenue related to the coronavirus pandemic. Budgets increased and more officers were hired for some large departments, including New York City’s.

Still stuck in Congress is the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would prohibit racial profiling, ban chokeholds and no-knock warrants, limit the transfer of military equipment to police departments, and make it easier to bring charges against offending officers. Biden said he told Nichols' mother that he would be “making a case” to Congress to pass the Floyd Act “to get this under control.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton said his eulogy at Nichols’ funeral on Wednesday will include a call for new laws. NAACP President Derrick Johnson also took Congress to task.

“By failing to write a piece of legislation, you’re writing another obituary,” Johnson said. “Tell us what you’re going to do to honor Tyre Nichols. We can name all the victims of police violence, but we can’t name a single law you have passed to address it.”

Advocates want state and federal legislation because local changes vary widely in scope and effect and can be undone by a single election after years of grassroots activism. But some say strict regulations are just the start — and the video of Nichols’ agony proves it.

“Changing a rule doesn’t change a behavior,” said Katie Ryan, chief of staff for Campaign Zero, a group of academics, policing experts and activists working to end police violence. “The culture of a police department has to shift into actually implementing the policies, not just saying there’s a rule in place.”

The five officers charged — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Desmond Mills Jr., Emmitt Martin III and Justin Smith — were part of the so-called Scorpion unit. Scorpion stands for Street Crimes Operations to Restore Peace in our Neighborhoods.

The Memphis police chief, Cerelyn “CJ" Davis, disbanded the unit on Saturday.

“It is in the best interest of all to permanently deactivate the Scorpion unit," she said in a statement.

Prior to the move by Davis, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland said it was clear that the officers involved in the attack on Nichols violated the department's policies and training.

“I want to assure you we are doing everything we can to prevent this from happening again," Strickland said in a statement. “We are initiating an outside, independent review of the training, policies and operations of our specialized units."

The Memphis police union extended condolences to Nichols' family, saying it “is committed to the administration of justice and NEVER condones the mistreatment of ANY citizen nor ANY abuse of power.” The statement also expressed faith that the justice system would reveal “the totality of circumstances” in the case.

Patrick Yoes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, pushed back against the conclusion that policing must change. This was not “legitimate police work or a traffic stop gone wrong,” Yoes said. “This is a criminal assault under the pretext of law.”

Protesters turned out again Friday night after the city released the video footage. Turner, the Memphis pastor, called the images “further proof that our city’s and our nation’s criminal justice systems are in dire need of change.”

“It’s not like we’re short on concrete, reasonable recommendations,” said the Rev. Earle Fisher, senior pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church. “What we’re short on is the political will and the commitment to making the structural changes.”

Associated Press reporter Noreen Nasir contributed from Memphis, Tennessee. Adrian Sainz also reported from Memphis. Aaron Morrison reported from New York, and Claudia Lauer from Philadelphia.

COMMENTS

Race and policing in America: 10 things we know
How we did this. Most of the findings in this post were drawn from two previous Pew Research Center reports: one on police officers and policing issues published in January 2017, and one on the state of race relations in the United States published in April 2019. We also drew from a September 2016 report on how black and white Americans view police in their communities.
Police Violence and Associations With Public Perceptions of the Police
Correlates of Police Violence. Research has shown that Black and Latino/a adults are more likely to experience police violence than white adults (Davis et al., 2018; Edwards et al., 2019; Ross, 2015; Tregle et al., 2019).Gender also plays a key role, as empirical evidence has found that Black and Latino men were more likely than white individuals and women to experience threats or use of ...
Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980-2019: a
We found that more than half of all deaths due to police violence that we estimated in the USA from 1980 to 2018 were unreported in the NVSS. Compounding this, we found substantial differences in the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence over time and by racial and ethnic groups within the USA. Proven public health intervention strategies are needed to address these systematic ...
What works to reduce police brutality
In Seattle, officers trained in a "procedural justice" intervention designed in part by psychologists used force up to 40% less. These are just a few examples of the work the field is doing to address police brutality. "There's much more openness to the idea of concrete change among police departments," says Joel Dvoskin, PhD, ABPP, a ...
Police brutality and racism in America
Risk is highest for Black men, who (at current levels of risk) face about a 1 in 1000 chance of being killed by police over the life course. The average lifetime odds of being killed by police are about 1 in 2000 for men and about 1 in 33,000 for women. Risk peaks between the ages of 20 and 35 for all groups.
Systemic Racism in Police Killings: New Evidence From the Mapping
This research note provides new evidence consistent with systemic anti-Black racism in police killings across the United States. Data come from the Mapping Police Violence Database (2013-2021). I calculate race-specific odds and probabilities that victims of police killings exhibited mental illness, were armed with a weapon, or attempted to ...
What the data say about police brutality and racial bias
What the data say about police brutality and racial bias — and which reforms might work ... Hoekstra, M. & Sloan, C. W. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 26774 (2020).
Risk of being killed by police use of force in the United States by age
Violent encounters with the police have profound effects on health, neighborhoods, life chances, and politics (1-9).Policing plays a key role in maintaining structural inequalities between people of color and white people in the United States (1, 10).The killings of Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Charleena Lyles, Stephon Clark, and Tamir Rice, among many others, and the protests that followed ...
Mapping Police Violence
See our research & resources View the data Read about the methodology Filter view: Year. 2024. Location. the U.S. Victim. people. Copy link to dashboard. ... Protest against police brutality reduces officer-involved fatalities for African Americans and Latinos (but not for Whites) - SSRN. Open article. Copy link.
What the data say about police shootings
What the data say about police brutality and racial bias — and which reforms might work ... In a 2017 national survey by the Pew Research Center, 76% of police officers reported that they had ...
A Civil Rights Expert Explains the Social Science of Police Racism
The 2014 shooting death of Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., sparked a renewed emphasis on racism and police brutality in the U.S.'s political and cultural conversation.
PDF An Examination of Police Brutality in The United States: Living and
The research material provided in this paper was collected January 6, 2017 through May 6, 2017. The research source utilized in obtaining this information was from the data base of the library at University of Wisconsin-Parkside. The terms searched were "police brutality,"
Police Violence
In 2019, Kenyan police killed 122 people. Between October 2019 and January 2020, police in Iraq killed around 600 protesters. Between 2015 and 2018, over 500 people were fatally shot by the police in Jamaica, and over 300 shot and injured. Around 1000 people are killed by police in the USA every year.
Protecting Against Police Brutality and Official Misconduct
When public officials engage in misconduct, people expect justice, often in the form of a federal investigation and criminal prosecution. In 2020 alone, instances of police violence, including the killings of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and Breonna Taylor and the shooting of Jacob Blake, led to demands for increased police accountability and ...
Solving racial disparities in policing
Citing Muhammad's research, ... Instead, crime statistics were "weaponized" to justify racial profiling, police brutality, and ever more policing of Black people. This phenomenon, he believes, has continued well into this century and is exemplified by William J. Bratton, one of the most famous police leaders in recent America history. ...
Police Brutality Statistics: What the Data Says About Police Violence
Police brutality in St. Louis is particularly prevalent against the Black community. According to Mapping Police Violence, from 2013 through June 2023, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department killed 48 people, including 41 Black people. That equates to an average annual rate of killings of Black people by police of 30.4 per 1 million.
How unjust police killings damage the mental health of Black Americans
A first-ever study in 2018 found that a police killing of an unarmed African American triggered days of poor mental health for Black people living in that state over the following three months — a significant problem given there are about 1,000 police killings annually on average, with African Americans comprising a disproportionate 25 ...
A better path forward for criminal justice: Police reform
Second, future research on policing needs to examine the role that protests against police brutality, particularly related to Black Lives Matter protests, are having on reform at the local, state ...
Excessive or reasonable force by police? Research on law enforcement
Law enforcement officials were more likely to threaten or use force on black people and Hispanics than white people, according to an October 2018 report. " When police initiated the contact, blacks (5.2 percent) and Hispanics (5.1 percent) were more likely to experience the threat or use of physical force than whites (2.4 percent), and males ...
An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force
Abstract: This paper explores racial diﬀerences in police use of force. On non-lethal uses of force, blacks and Hispanics are more than ﬁfty percent more likely to experience some form of force in interactions with police. Adding controls that account for important context and civilian behavior reduces, but cannot fully explain, these ...
How to Really Stop Police Brutality
The number may well be higher: recent research shows killings by police have gone unreported in official statistics in over half of all cases from 1980 to 2019. ... torture, racist brutality, ...
Police brutality
Police brutality is the excessive and unwarranted use of force by law enforcement against an individual or a group. ... The stated objective of the organization is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated".
Police Brutality: What Is It, Why It Happens, Examples
Prevalence of Deaths Due to Police Brutality . Research has demonstrated that the risk of being killed as a result of the use of excessive force by police in the United States varies by racial and ethnic group membership. Specifically, Black men and women, American Indian/Alaska Native men and women, and Latin American men were shown to have a ...
Police department staffing is down. Crime is also down. Was the "defund
Police departments have shrunk. ... law enforcement in 2020 after numerous high-profile instances of police brutality—have been routed. ... numbers compiled by the Police Executive Research ...
Comparing police views and public views
About six-in-ten Americans (59%) but only a third of police say body cams would make members of the public more likely to cooperate with officers. By contrast, a majority of police (56%) says body cams would make no difference, a view shared by about a third (35%) of the public.
Justice Department Finds Brutality and Bias by Phoenix Police
Phoenix reported 12 fatal police shootings in 2023, and has reported eight so far this year. The Justice Department under Mr. Biden has moved toward greater oversight of police departments, after ...
Study shows biases undermine diversity efforts in policing
Merluzzi and her co-author Jirs Meuris, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, examined publicly available data spanning 13 years on nearly 14,000 officers working in the Chicago ...
Justice Department says Phoenix police violated rights. Here are some
Victims cited in DOJ report on Phoenix police brutality call on city to implement mandated reforms. Phoenix police have pattern of violating civil rights and using excessive force, Justice Dept. says. In one instance, an officer shot a man who who was holding a knife to his own throat, saying he wanted to die. In another case, a police officer ...
'We're refusing to let ourselves live in comfortable complacency
Cardiff University's encampment for Gaza was worried about police brutality based on the scenes they watched from the U.S. On June 3 their fears came true when South Wales police attacked ...
Tyre Nichols case revives calls for change in police culture
Protesters march on a bridge Friday, Jan. 27, 2023, in Memphis, Tenn., as authorities release police video depicting five Memphis officers beating Tyre Nichols, whose death resulted in murder ...