I was piddling around with something related to the Tyre Nichols killing—I don't quite remember what—and decided to look at police killings by both race and age. We all know that Black people are killed at much higher rates relative to population than white people, but it turns out that the difference depends a lot on age:
It's not surprising that the rate of fatal police shootings is highest for young age groups, since ages 18-29 are the prime years for criminal activity. But look at the chart. Shooting rates do go down strongly with age for Black people, but only slightly for white people. This strongly affects the difference in shooting rates.
At ages 18-29, police shoot Black suspects at more than three times the rate of white suspects.
At ages 30-44, the difference is "only" a little more than double.
And at ages 45-65 the difference is down to 50%.
Why is this? A couple of possibilities have popped into my head, but neither made sense when I thought a little longer. So I have two questions:
- Why does the Black/white difference go down with age?
- Why does the police shooting rate stay nearly flat with age for white people? It makes no sense that the shooting rate for middle-age white crooks should be only slightly lower than it is for 20-something white robbers and drug dealers.
For some reason—maybe real, maybe not—police are way more afraid of young Black suspects than young white suspects. Conversely, by middle age apparently people of both races are equally scary.
Thoughts?
just a guess: people over 45 who interact with the police in a way that might result in getting shot are mostly homeless and/or mentally ill, and race doesn’t make as big difference in how they’re treated.
This seems plausible. There are likely different types of scenarios when police use their guns-- domestic violence, gang-related conflict, gun-wielding suspect, mental illness, homelessness, etc.-- and those types differ by age and race.
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Middle aged and elderly men are much less scary than strong, muscular young men?
We seem to have an epidemic of "fear-driven policing" in this country. Not just the citizens watching "if it bleeds, it leads!" news on the local teevie stations, but even more significantly, cops who behave like cornered rats ... with guns.
Better to be tried by 12 then carried by 6
Particularly the Supreme Court gives you "qualified immunity" and the local DA will bend over backwards to avoid indicting you.
a former cop turner self-defense / martial arts instructor on youtube has a good response to people who say that: how about neither!?! those are almost never the only 2 choices.
but of course, when there are usually zero repurcussions for police for unjustified use of force, it's just going to keep happening.
You sure? US state prisons are a horrorshow; I'd actually rather be dead than serve 20.
"Middle aged and elderly men are much less scary than strong, muscular young men?"
More than likely it is because many "cops" are out of shape and would rather shoot than chase the youngsters. Blacks know the data.
We had an editorial in our local paper by a former cop about an incident where they confronted a young man with a knife suffering a mental health break. He wrote that police take the threat of a knife as seriously as a gun and that they use the "20 foot rule" when confronting people with a knife. This rule says that if you are within 20 feet of the suspect you should draw your gun and shoot if they move towards you because "they can cover the 20 feet before you have a chance to pull your weapon." No where in this was the idea that you would just back up to move away from the advancing suspect. Nope, just pull your gun and start blasting.
First, where does that rule say start blasting? Second, how far should the responding officer back up when the suspect continues to advance?
They're careful to never specify their level of ruthlessness.
As far as necessary?
can you back up faster than a person can run forward?
I cannot.
And what happens if you trip and gal over something while backing up?
@rick Jones the rule about blasting is the one that says "If you shoot at all, empty the magazine."
How far to back up is far enough to be have the space to talk, get your backup there, flank the suspect and disarm him or her.
How do you disarm someone with a knife if they do not voluntarily drop it?
You can do a lot with a billy club, if properly trained.
Of course, if they throw the knife....
I just don’t understand why US police don’t carry shields in their cars.
How many killings are during active shoot outs vs. the suspect carried a phone?
Good question.
The racist stereotype is clearly about young Black males. When people see a young Black male, they are scared. Even Jesse Jackson once admitted it-- he said it made him sad that he felt this way, but he couldn't deny that he was thankful when he realized the young man walking towards him at night was white.
But Black females and older Black males aren't coded as threatening on the streets in the same way. It's very specifically young Black males that trigger the racist assumption that they must be criminals.
Yes, I was going to point out the same thing.
There's a stereotype about "rampaging" young black men that goes back to the days of slavery. One of the justifications for slavery was the "need" to keep young black men under control since they're so terribly "dangerous." This was lampshaded mercilessly in Blazing Saddles ("Where the white women at?").
But it's still operative; it was used in the defense arguments for Derek Chauvin's trial.
Any old Kyle Onstott novel was saying the same thing 60 years ago -- "Yup, them is the ones ya gotta watch out fer." Dunno if any of his slaver characters ever said that, but they would. I heard it too, in Houston when I was a kid, and later; it was an article of faith for many.
Doubtful it's the only thing in this, but I don't question that it's a thing, even now.
Ding ding ding!
Also, I don't find it confusing at all that the rates of white people being shot are basically the same regardless of age. It sure looks to me like as people get older, they're less scary to police/society and that shows up as white folks being slightly less likely to get shot when they're in middle age or older - and it decreases the impact of the racist fear of the (young) black male.
Am I seeing an optical illusion? The chart seems to show that white people aged 30-44 are shot at a slightly higher rate than the 18-29s. That seems strange and cries out for explanation.
Exactly this. The stereotype has been actively pushed since the days of slavery, and modern media has mercilessly leaned on it for the better part of a century. As noted, it has gotten to the point where it’s almost as pervasive in black society as the broader society, and it’s absolutely on the top of the minds of cops, who see so many folks that they react to archetypes more than the individuals in front of them.
A few years ago I read that the Haitian overthrow of the French colonists was used to really drive paranoia in the slave holding US states. And the US government was complicit in backing France's demands that Haiti pay France back for their investments in plantations where Haitian's had worked as slaves. The drain on Haiti's economy dragged them down for many years and locked them into poverty to this day.
Can we get for real a little. Please study this video closely and then ask yourself where even black cops are getting these racist assumptions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MUGAxpI0Bc
When Jesse Jackson or any other person, feels less afraid when they realize a young man walking towards them at night is non-black, it's not because their thinking is based on a "racist stereotype". It's simply because they know that black men and black teens have the highest crime rates.
Underlying the shootings and not fully appreciated is the police person’s fear of perps with guns. I think cops are actually terrified of the risk and often over-react. I guess they fear black men and people in less affluent areas more than others but who knows why they react the way they do.
What puzzles me, however, is that cops don’t favor gun control and are often outspoken to the point of not enforcing gun laws. A paradox that is literally killing people.
Back in the day, a LONG time ago, police actually were in favor of keeping guns out of the hands of criminals, and untrained people. Particularly the bigger, higher capacity guns. Way back then, in the mists of history (the 1960s and earlier), the NRA favored responsible gun ownership, and offered gun safety and marksmanship classes to all ages.
But the NRA went rogue in the 1990s. Police decided they preferred Nixon's "law'n'order" pitch, and bound themselves to the Republican Party. So now the police won't tolerate "gun controls" and as a result, work in constant fear of being blown away by some armed-better-than-they-are hood.
So they shoot first: that way, they eliminate the need to "ask questions" afterwards.
I think it also depends which police you're talking about. I think here in Chicago (will need to check) but the union (FoP - and rank and file?) is pro-NRA and anti-gun control, while the Chief and other management types are for gun control.
The FOP president supported the Jan 6th insurrection, even though they attacked fellow officers, until he was shouted down.
It's because cops are idiots.
My guess. It's an interaction between criminality (which reduces with age) and aggressive policing being focused on high crime metro areas. If this were correct then the effect would be mitigated by some measure of urban density. However, I also noticed something odd when tinkering with the WaPo police shooting database. It seemed as though there was considerable difference in the nature of how blacks and whites fled from police (vehicles versus on foot) if I recall. Interesting indeed.
Survivorship bias.
Innate racist perceptions make young black men scary to police, but as they age, that racist threat perception is partially offset by innate perceptions of older people as less of a physical threat.
White men in their 30s and 40s can spend a lot of time cultivating their grievances and frustrations and think that gives them a right to be psychotically aggressive and nuts.
Cops are less likely to get in trouble for roughing up/killing black people. White young people are more likely to have parents who have political connections/power. Middle aged and older people of all races are more likely to have connections/power.
Fear doesn’t have to be just fear of physical risk. If Tyree Nichols was white and acted in the same manner I doubt the police would have acted in the same manner. As a black man in a poor neighborhood he was unlikely to have gotten them in trouble and this wouldn’t be a story at all if he hadn’t died.
plus one
"For some reason—maybe real, maybe not—police are way more afraid of young Black suspects than young white suspects."
This isn't the only possible explanation, right? Are you not even mentioning the possibility that young black people are engaging in activities that result in getting shot by police at much greater rates than young white people (or people of different age groups)? Obviously sometimes its the cops' fault. But not always. Sometimes its justified.
Saying that there may be a real reason for police to be more afraid of young blacks than young whites is Kevin Drum's way of answering his own questions.
Police should be most afraid of Covid. More cops have been killed by Covid than any other cause since the start of the pandemic. Yet they have.proven to be very resistant to getting the vaccine.
I believe fear of getting in trouble is more a cause of cops violent attitude towards blacks. This explains the black cops in the Nichols case.
I think the inexplicable habit young unarmed black males have for "reaching for their waist" when confronted my armed police is the reason.
The interesting thing about this data is that given what we know about Lead levels in blood, this makes an even stronger case for this being even more about cop bias, since the difference in exposure among youth is that it is lower, and less disparate than it used to be.
The data I would still like to see is cop shootings segmented by income of the victim. I suspect some (~50%) of racial disparity is more of a class disparity.
But this data makes clear it is not just a class issue, since young black men are not any more likely to be in lower income strata than their elders
Old white guys have guns. Cops assume young black men have guns.
If you read the accounts of police shootings in the news/on the WaPo list, you can see just how typical it is for an older white guy to have a mental health episode that includes firing guns at cops or the general public.
These rates may change in the near future. As more older Black men buy guns, the police perceptions of them may change. We're also seeing more people of color engage in workplace or public mass shootings that are unrelated to gangs/crime organizations.
It’s all gangs.
Law enforcement agencies report a greater percentage of Hispanic/Latino and African-American/black gang members compared with other race/ethnicities.
The most recent figures provided by law enforcement are 46 percent Hispanic/Latino gang members, 35 percent African-American/black gang members, more than 11 percent white gang members, and 7 percent other race/ethnicity of gang members.
And they all have guns.
Shouldn't those numbers be corrected for crime rate, or alternatively for the frequency of situations that cops confront where a person is wielding a weapon? Police shootings track the violent crimes rates of groups. Whites have a lot higher violent crime rate than Asians. So if you add a bar to the chart for Asians, it will be likely lower than whites for every age group. Or add females vs. males, and the bars are lower yet.
Any stats that ignore crime rates, or how often police encounter weapons for a group being studied, gives a biased view of how police are behaving. If someone has a reason why this is not true, I'd like to hear it.
Data like these are kind of useless. There are too many unexamined factors. What about street gangs? I live in Chicago where virtually 100% of street gang activity is in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods. How much of the excess is related to street gang involvement? How about a breakdown of the data by urban/suburban/small-town/rural location? Does the pattern change or remain the same?
It could very well turn out that the pattern holds up even when you remove that factor. But until we know, it's disingenuous to offer up an opinion on the reason for it.
"For some reason—maybe real, maybe not—police are way more afraid of young Black suspects than young white suspects."
Congratulations, you've discovered racism. =)
Racist fear of young Black men, yes. The mechanism that drives the fear based, shoot first mentality is the training. I've had access to first hand reports of police training in a large city in Texas, and the degree to which the training instills a level of terror (yes, I mean terror) in those officers is deeply disturbing. The parallels with military training, that it's me or him, us or them, are crystal clear. From what I heard those officers are being subjected to intensive, fear based propaganda in order to prepare for war with the "bad guys."
This isn't news, but it concerns me that the fundamental, formative, endemic effects of U.S. police training aren't the whole of any conversation about American policing. It's the training, period. Not that there aren't any number of other factors. But all other factors - racism, police violence, police shootings, all of it - are established, allowed, or enabled by the training. You want to get rid of violent, 'bad' cops? Change the training. They either change or they're weeded out. You want to change from the "warrior" mentality to the "protector" mentality? Change the training. When officers aren't trained to see themselves as at war and under siege, everything changes.
It's the training. That's what every conversation about policing in America must be about. Anything else is a waste of time.
"At ages 18-29, police shoot Black suspects at more than three times the rate of white suspects."
Drum is assuming here that the ratio of black suspects to the black population is the same as the ratio of white suspects to the white population. There is no basis for this assumption. Consider these CDC tables giving homicide death rates by sex, race and age. Overall as of 2016 white people were homicide victims at a rate of 3.8 per 100,000 per year. Black people were homicide victims at the rate of 42.3 per 100,000 per year. Over 10 times as high. Just who does Drum think the suspects are in these homicides?