Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
During my civil rights career, I was inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream that people be judged by the content of their character. Now, however, when it comes to the police, that ideal is discarded.
Consider the following propositions:
On July 7, 2016, Micah Johnson, a Black man, shot dead five white Dallas police officers. This “proves” that Black men are violent, racist individuals who seek out and kill white police officers.
On May 25, 2020, a white Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, kneeled on the neck of George Floyd, a handcuffed Black man, until he died. A second white officer and a Black officer immobilized Floyd. An Asian American police officer stood by. This “proves” that police officers are violent, racist individuals who seek out and kill Black people.
Both of the above propositions are stereotypes. Stereotypes, preconceptions that describe a group, are never true for the group as a whole, and often are true for only a tiny percentage of that group.
Stereotypes are used to justify discrimination and violence. Michael Johnson wanted to kill white officers because of police killings of Black people, law enforcement officials alleged.
While no serious person believes the first stereotype, we are being told that the second one is true. A Black CNN commentator indicated that if a detained Black man does not fight the police “we die." Sen. Cory Booker claimed that “many” “mostly unarmed” Black men were “being murdered by police officers.”
Is it true?
A 2016 Harvard researcher's study found that Black people are no more likely to be killed by police officers than are white people. A 2019 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found “no evidence of anti-Black ... disparities across" fatal shootings by police. Both white and Black people are far more likely to be murdered by an acquaintance of their own race than they are to be shot dead by the police.
There are millions of interactions between Black people and police annually, including about 2 million arrests.
In 2019, 1,004 people, mostly white, were shot dead by the police, according to the Washington Post. Assuming that an average of one police officer is involved per killing, then 1,004 police officers, or fourteen-hundredths of 1% of America’s 700,000 police officers, were involved in fatal police shootings. Obviously, the typical police officer will never kill anyone in his career.
A Washington Post database shows that 14 Black and 25 white “unarmed” Americans were shot dead by police in 2019. An analysis that was broadcast on "Tucker Carlson Tonight" of 10 of the “unarmed” Black decedents showed that for five of these persons, calling them unarmed is misleading: two had cars, one had a stun gun, and two others had guns, authorities said. In those two cases where the decedents had guns, which were the only cases where the weapons were not used to assault police, the officers faced homicide charges.
Even if the remaining deaths were criminal, they do not add up to a narrative of numerous police officers indiscriminately murdering unarmed Black men. Neither do all Black detainees die unless they resist arrest. Indeed, the odds of any unarmed person being shot dead by police are less than their odds of being struck by lightning.
Donald W. Bohlken of Indianola is an attorney and a retired administrative law judge with the Iowa Department of Inspections and Appeals. He worked for seven years combined at the Iowa Civil Rights Commission and Cedar Rapids Human Rights Commission as an investigator and then for 21 years as an administrative law judge at the Iowa Civil Rights Commission and the Department of Inspections and Appeals.