Im-Politic: The Washington Post’s Phony Probe of Policing Abuses

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crime, Im-Politic, journalism, law enforcement, Mainstream Media, police misconduct, police reform, policing, statistics, Vera Institute of Justice, Washington Post

As RealityChek readers surely know by now, reporting information out of context is one of my biggest gripes about journalism these days. (See, e.g., here.) So if there hadn’t been so much important news coming out of the Ukraine war and on so many other fronts this week, I’d have already written about an especially egregious example that appeared in the Washington Post this past Thursday.

Its big “exclusive” finding? “The Post collected data on nearly 40,000 payments [to resolve police misconduct claims] at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade, documenting more than $3.2 billion spent to settle claims.”

Sounds like a bundle right? Even a criminally large amount of money. In isolation, of course. But information never exists in isolation. And any reporter or anyone else with a working brain or a lick of integrity would have tried to answer these two questions: How does this sum compare with the nation’s total policing budget over the same period? And how does it compare with the national cost of crime?

None of this background appeared in the Post piece. But it took me a grand total of thirtyseconds of searching on-line to find answers from reliable sources.

The national law cost of policing? That’s $115 billion per year, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, whose declared mission is ending “the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.”

That is, the organization isn’t exactly an apologist for current policing performance. But it’s telling us that over ten years, the cost of settling police misconduct claims equalled 0.28 percent of America’s policing budget (of $1.15 trillion). Any decent person would like to see that number fall to zero percent, but 0.28 is pretty close. And it’s even better considering that, as at least Post reporters Keith Alexander, Steven Rich, and Hannah Thacker (along with their editors) had the honesty to observe (in the middle of this long article) that

“City officials and attorneys representing the police departments said settling claims is often more cost-efficient than fighting them in court. And settlements rarely involve an admission or finding of wrongdoing.”

The authors also state that their figures exclude payments of less than $1,000. Let’s suppose, however, that including these incidents doubles the total amount of payouts over the last decade. Then they’d represent 0.56 percent of the national policing budget. That’s still awfully close to zero for a line of work whose employees lay their lives on the line every day, and who constantly need to make split-second life-and-death decisions.

It’s of course certain that the number of police misconduct charges that produced payouts, whether they stemmed from genuine abuses or not, doesn’t include all cases of misconduct because so many undoubtedly aren’t reported. But even if all of them were, and consequently the total cost of misconduct got doubled, its share of total U.S. policing spending over the last decade would barely top one percent. So forgive me if I’m not overcome with outrage.

As for the second question, in February, 2021, a team of academics and policy analysts estimated that in the 2017, crime cost the U.S. economy $2.6 trillion. That single year number is more than 8oo times bigger than the Post‘s figure for the last ten years’ worth of costs for police misconduct payouts.

As a result, these police misconduct costs as a percentage of the costs of crime to America over a year – much less a decade – don’t even represent the proverbial “drop in the bucket.” They’re more like an aerosol particle in the bucket.

The researchers who came up with the cost-of-crime figure acknowledge that limitations on the available data for crime forced them to include modeling techniques in their calculations, and that more work (and more actual information) should be performed to produce greater accuracy. But even if the $2.6 trillion overestimates the national cost of crime by half, it would still render the police misconduct payouts total utterly trivial in comparison.

Policing abuses definitely need to be reduced dramatically. But how about setting the same goal for the kinds of rampant journalistic abuses most recently epitomized by this Washington Post investigation?

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Following Up: Gun Sense Still Lacking in the Crime/Violence/African Americans Debate

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African Americans, Arionne Nettles, Barack Obama, Chicago, crime, Following Up, gun violence, guns, homicides, law enforcement, police reform, policing, poverty, racism, The New York Times

Everyone (like me) worried about the metastasizing influence of race-panderers can give thanks that so many are so completely, and indeed stupefyingly, incompetent. Otherwise, merchants of division like Northwestern University journalism faculty member Arionne Nettles and her enablers at The New York Times might be overwhelming favorites to tear the country apart for good. All the same, the more they push claims (I’m getting fed up with the pseudo-sophisticated term “narrative”) that are not only flagrantly phony but transparently contradictory, the more they obscure genuine and important failures and inequities that need fixing.

Nettles and The Times editors who considered her piece on African American victims of “gun violence” worthy of publication in this form took only a paragraph and a half to blow up their own case that big cities across the United States have seen a recent “rise in gun violence – perpetrated both by civilians and police officers” that’s taken an especially heavy toll on black children and teenagers.

They’re of course right about these tragedies and their scale. But the obvious insinuation that “civilians and police officers” share even remotely comparable blame is demolished by the observation that

“In one especially alarming spree last summer, Chicago police officers shot five people in just two months. And shootings and murders in the city were up more than 50 percent overall in 2020 compared with 2019; 875 people died from gun violence – a record high. A majority of the city’s victims (78 percent) were Black.”

Let’s assume that every one of the five Chicago police shootings mentioned here was totally unjustified. Let’s also state categorically that unjustified shootings by police are way more disturbing than other types of shootings because law enforcement must be held to a much higher standard. Are Nettles and The Times still seriously contending that the two categories of violence are on anything like a par, even as threats to African American lives?

More important, these and similar passages – along with Nettles’ interviews with African American mothers who have lost children to such violence – add powerfully to the evidence that, as I’ve argued before, the overwhelming problem here isn’t “gun violence” at all. Instead, it’s a culture of violence and broader irresponsibility that’s gained a strong foothold in too many Black neighborhoods, and whose importance keeps being ignored by supposed champions of American minorities.

A handful of data points from recent (2018) national (FBI) law enforcement statistics clinch this case. First, of the 328.24 million total U.S. population estimated by the Census Bureau that year, 76.3 percent were white and 13.4 percent African American. That’s a ratio of nearly six-to-one. Yet that year, reported Black homicide offenders in one-on-one incidents actually slightly outnumbered their white counterparts in absolute terms (3,177 to 3,011).

Almost as stunning: Of the 2,925 Black homicide victims that year, nearly 89 percent were killed by other Blacks. Nearly 81 percent of the 3,315 white homicide victims in 2018 were killed by whites, so it’s clear that American killers principally go after members of their own race. But relatively speaking these figures – combined with Nettles’ accurate observation that Blacks are much likelier to die in firearms incidents than Whites – reveal not a gun violence crisis afflicting so many African American communities. They reveal an African American violence problem.

No one can reasonably doubt that racism’s legacy and the resulting lack of economic opportunity and poverty play a big underlying role. As I (and many others) have written, the racial wealth gap alone is yawning, owes much to discrimination, and generates affects that have lasted generations. It should be just as hard reasonably to doubt, however, that something other than poverty is responsible.

Look at Chicago. In 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, its Black poverty rate was 26.3 percent – that’s much higher than the overall poverty rate for the city (16.4 percent), or the national African American poverty rate (18.8 percent). So even though there seems to be a Chicago-specific problem on top of a poverty problem, even in Chicago nearly three fourths of the Black population lives above the poverty line. That hardly means affluence, but it’s hardly destitution, either.

Moreover, the Chicago Black poverty rate is down considerably from 2010’s 33.6 percent (although the city’s overall poverty rate fell faster during this period). Yet the city’s numbers of homicides and its homicide rate have roughly doubled during the subsequent nine data years, and in Chicago, the vast majority of the killers (as with the victims) are African American.

As suggested above, moreover, Nettles’ ham-handed treatment of the “gun violence” and homicide issue is all the more inexcusable because the author’s interview subjects do a decent job of reinforcing the case that there does exist a serious race-based policing problem in this country. Not that the African American women with which the author spoke are entirely free of denialism about what’s plaguing their neighborhoods. There’s Shanice Steenholdt, who seems to believe that Australia-like gun control laws would turn her city of Houston into a replica of the small Australian town in which she lived for a time where she “didn’t feel like [she] had to worry about gun violence.” There’s Chicago’s Diane Lasiker, w appears to think that the big problem in her city is that it seems “to want to keep the Police Department separate from the community.” Her fellow Chicagoan Chez Smith and Flint, Michigan’s Marcia McQueen put much stock in “offering conflict resolution techniques” to their communities’ youth.

But the story told by Atlanta’s Cora Miller of her husband’s arrest (in Minnesota) reinforces the case that it’s much too common for completely innocent African Americans to be mistreated by police. As I’d written last August, I’ve heard first-hand accounts of such episodes from Black friends who have experienced it first hand – on top of South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott’s experiences with Capitol police. If these individuals – who are all highly successful by any reasonable definition – can be harassed for no good reason, imagine how often everyday folks just trying to get by face these indignities and indeed dangers.

So let’s by all means get policing up to snuff. Let’s by all means identify the most effective ways in which government and business can help foster opportunity in needy Black (and other) communities. But let’s also never forget a voice who has passionately argued that

“no matter how much money we invest in our communities, or how many 10-point plans we propose or how many government programs we launch — none of it will make a difference, at least not enough of a difference, if we don’t seize more responsibility in our own lives.”

In case you’re wondering, his name is Barack Obama.

Making News: Podcast On-Line of National Radio Interview on Police Reform

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"Defund the Police", "Disband the Police", Breitbart News Tonight, Camden, George Floyd, Making News, New Jersey, police brutality, police reform, race relations, racism, surveillance

I’m pleased to announce that the podcast of my latest national radio interview is now on-line.  Broadcast last night on “Breitbart News Tonight,” it dealt with the subject of yesterday’s post on what lessons are really being taught by Camden, New Jersey’s recent experiment in police “defunding” and “disbanding” and even “reform.”  To listen, head to this link and scroll down till you see my name.

And keep checking in with RealityChek for news of upcoming media appearances and other developments.

Im-Politic: About that Camden Model for “Defunding” or “Replacing” Police

Tags

"Defund the Police", "Disband the Police", Camden, community policing, crime, George Floyd, Im-Politic, New Jersey, police brutality, police reform, surveillance, violent crime

It was as predictable as the sun rising: No sooner did many participants in the recent George Floyd-killing protests and their supporters adopt “Defund the police” as a position, than all manner of Mainstream Media journalists and other sympathizers began piping in that not only is that stance not the slightest bit extreme, but that there’s a shining example of how this program could work: Camden, New Jersey.

Which sounds incredibly promising – especially considering that Camden has long been an especially dismal example of urban decay. Until you look at the Camden policing record since its police policy transformation began in 2014.

Throwing cold water on the Camden experiment is certainly not the same as dismissing the idea that many police reforms are urgently needed and long overdue. Let’s also acknowledge that many and possibly most “defunders” apparently don’t literally back abolishing police forces or even drastically reducing their budgets – or imagining that cops on the beat can literally be replaced person-for-person with social workers and community activists, or that “investing in communities” and law enforcement are either-or choices.

Most encouragingly, there does seem to be a strong case that for too long police forces have been given responsibilities that really aren’t policing matters, and that they shouldn’t be assigned to tasks like dealing with folks who suffer serious mental illness problems but aren’t institutionalized. No one should blanketly oppose all efforts to reshuffle municipal resources.

But the idea that Camden has adopted a radically new model of policing and that the results have been miraculous is at best way too simplistic, and indeed largely misleading. And no claims are more common, and more irresponsible, than contentions like “Camden Sees Crime Drop Over Past Decade.” (For other typical examples, see here and here.)

If, for example, you look at the crime statistics superficially (presented in the Tap into Camden article linked above), you do indeed see a falloff in crime in Camden over the last decade – from 5,559 in 2010 to 3,267 last year. (Of course, the full-year 2020 data aren’t in yet.) That’s an impressive 41.23 percent.

The problem is that Camden’s experiment in new police techniques isn’t a decade old. Its first full year didn’t come until 2014. The good news is that crime is off significantly since then, too – by 25.67 percent. In fact, it decreased more than during the pre-reform years – when crime fell by 20.94 percent.

The bad news is that crime changes over a specific period of time don’t clinch the case for effective or ineffective policing. That’s because these ups and downs often take place during periods of population change. And it’s not only clear that crime in Camden has been down at least in part because the city simply has been losing population. It’s also the case that, adjusted for population decline, crime declined more slowly in Camden before the police overhaul than it has since.

Specifically, during the four years between 2010 and 2014, when crime tumbled by 20.94 percent, the city’s population shrank by 1.45 percent. Between 2014 and 2018, the next four-year-period, Camden lost 2.60 percent of its residents – a difference of just over 79 percent. But the falloff in crime of 22.61 percent was only about eight percent greater than that seen during the previous four years.

Nor does the picture change much when you add in the 2019 totals – a fifth year – which brings the overall post-2014 crime decrease to the 25.67 percent figure mentioned above.

It’s also crucial to note that “Defund the police” doesn’t come close to describing accurately the changes the city actually made. First, to be technically accurate, Camden didn’t make these changes. In a desperation move (precisely because crime was deemed out of control) the surrounding county took charge in May, 2013. Moreover, although the new strategy undoubtedly emphasized “rebuilding trust between the community and their officers,” and “changing the culture” (as reported in the New York Times article linked above), other crucial elements were  more policing and, it’s arguable, more intrusive policing. According to Times correspondent Kate Zernike, the county:

“added officers [and] put 120 civilian clerks and analysts in a new operations and intelligence center, monitoring 121 surveillance cameras and the gunshot-mapping microphones. When shots are fired or a 911 call comes in, the system automatically dispatches the two nearest police units.

“Car-mounted cameras read license plates, which are checked against law-enforcement databases. A disembodied voice announcing ‘medium alert’ signals a car whose owner has bought drugs in Camden before. ‘High alert’ flags a stolen car.”

Something else to keep in mind: As Zernike wrote, during the years leading up to 2013, the old city police force “was so overwhelmed, it stopped responding to property crimes or car accidents without injuries.” And even so, the data that take into account the vital demographic context show that crime at the time was dropping faster than it has during the post-reform period.

Moreover, focusing solely on “violent crime” reveals a better post-reform performance – but with one terrible exception. Adjusted for population change, murders and assaults have decreased faster after the reforms than before them. But whereas during the four years before the reform, rapes were off just over thirty percent, during the four years after, they rose by 25.49 percent.

The journalistic accounts have contained enough encouraging impressionistic observations to indicate that Camden is a better place to live now than it was pre-police reform. But as these reports also show, that’s an awfully – indeed, unacceptably – low bar. And it’s hard to imagine that many of the Defund supporters know that much of this progress results from a “thin blue line” that’s not only gotten considerably thicker, but that’s been equipped with many more eyes and ears.