gracchusdixit

The premeditated assassination of two New York City police officers two weeks ago was a tragedy that every decent person in the country should deplore.  No less deplorable, however, is the fact that this tragedy has been exploited to distract attention from the plague of widespread police violence and to excuse criminal behavior on the part of police officers themselves.

Those who declared that the Mayor of New York had “blood on his hands” because he dared to speak up in behalf of protestors questioning police behavior have no claim on our conscience and should be spurned for the shameless provocateurs that they are.  Foremost among these are the top officials of the police unions, not only in New York but everywhere police have killed unarmed and harmless citizens.

The rhetoric from these demagogues has been virtually identical, as if they were reading from a prepared script.  They have assailed their critics as traitors, cowards, or ingrates—traitors when the criticism comes public officials like New York’s Mayor, Bill de Blasio; cowards when it comes from reporters or the media; ingrates when the criticism comes from the general public.  One union official after another has proclaimed, in a tone of righteous and angry indignation, that cops “put their lives on the line every day,” as if that existential declaration were irrefutable proof of heroism and moral rectitude, sufficient to inoculate their members against scrutiny, and, ipso facto, a reason to shut down debate and shut off complaint.

No one doubts that most police officers are responsible professionals or that their work can at times be dangerous.  We didn’t need the killings in New York to remind us of that.

But the assertion that cops “put their lives on the line every day” is another matter.  It is a rhetorical exaggeration, an emotional sleight of hand, designed to advance the self-interest of those who would have us believe that officers of the law should be above the law.  Far worse, this rhetoric not only gulls the public, it deceives police officers themselves into thinking that they are in greater danger than they actually are, causing them to act and react with excessive and disproportionate force.

The facts are these.  There are more than a million state and local law enforcement officers in the United States, and last year, 111 of them died on the job.  The average American is therefore more likely to die behind the wheel of an automobile, and the average coal miner is 40 times more likely to die in the pits.  More to the point, of last year’s 111 police fatalities, only 27 were “felonious,” i.e., the result of confrontations with criminals.  Twice as many police officers died in traffic accidents, some of which they caused themselves.  Almost as many died in training or gun-related accidents that had nothing to do with criminals.  Each and every one of these deaths is lamentable, but their number and their nature scarcely justify the rhetoric of exceptional heroism in the face of extraordinary danger.

The greater danger lies elsewhere.  In the year that 27 American police officers were killed “feloniously,” somewhere between one and two thousand ordinary American were killed by police officers.  The exact number is something that we will never know, because every independent examination has uncovered systematic underreporting and obfuscation by police departments. Some police departments don’t bother to keep records; many fail to report the relevant statistics even when they do.

Nor will we ever know how many of these killings were (to use the parlance of the FBI) “justifiable,” because few police departments admit to any unjustified killings, and the number of cops who are indicted (let alone tried, convicted or punished) for such killings is negligible.  The absolution of Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, was exceptional solely because he appeared in front of a grand jury.  Most police officers who kill civilians never endure even that much.

Although we will never know exactly how many people are killed by American police officers, we do know that it far exceeds the numbers in other so-called “civilized” societies.  In Germany or France or Italy, the number of people killed by police each year can be counted on the fingers of one hand.  Last year, British police fired their weapons exactly three times—and killed no one.

There are many reasons for this jarring difference, of course, not the least of which is the ubiquitous presence of guns in our society, which threaten police officers and ordinary citizens alike.  But that neither explains nor excuses the sheer scale of American police violence.  Nor does it justify the awful reality that black Americans are 20 times more likely than whites to be killed.

So, the next time we hear the self-righteous claim that cops “put their lives on the line every day,” let’s remember that it is ordinary Americans, particularly black Americans, whose lives are really on the line.  The death of two police officers in New York was a tragedy.  But it did nothing to change the greater tragedy.