Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Executions are prescribed by the laws of some states (25 out of 50, to be exact), but also by the federal government for federal crimes. The federal government can execute you if you commit more than 60 crimes, including treason, terrorism, espionage, using a weapon of mass destruction, first-degree murder, murder of government officials, some drug offenses, and so on.
Federal executions are much rarer than state ones: since 1977—43 years ago—there have been 37 federal versus 1453 state executions—a ratio of almost 40 to 1.
I’m opposed to state-sponsored killings for a number of reasons, one of the most important being that if someone is exonerated, you can’t make amends if he’s dead. In fact, I see not a single justification for state or federal governments killing someone, though I do see a need to put those carrying life sentences under more humane conditions, so although they’re deprived of their liberty and certain privileges, they can still live a reasonable life.
Of the 37 federal executions occurring since 1988 (about 1.2 per year), when these killings resumed after a 16-year court-ordered halt, seven have occurred after Donald Trump ordered a resumption of these killings—again on hiatus—in July of last year.
In other words, Trump has allowed executions to go forward since then at a rate of 5.6 per year—a roughly fourfold increase over the earlier rate. As a new story from The Independent notes (click on screenshot below), three more prisoners are scheduled to die between now and Christmas, making a total of ten federal executions on President-Eject Trump’s watch.
A stay of execution for federal crimes can be ordered by either the President or the Supreme Court, so it’s well within Trump’s power to stop the three killings scheduled before the end of 2020. But, determined to do as many odious things as possible before he does the exiting perp walk through the Rose Garden, he’s letting them go forward. Here’s who’s going to be killed, and when:
On 8 December the government plans to execute Lisa Montgomery, who will be the first woman federally executed since 1953.
She is a victim of sex trafficking who suffers from psychosis and complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, according to anti-death penalty advocates.
On 10 December they plan to put to death Brandon Bernard for the murder of a Texas couple in 1999, when he was 18.
The last time the US government executed a person as young as eighteen at the time of the crime was in 1952.
The third person to be executed during the “lame duck” period is likely to be Orlando Hall, a Black man sentenced to death by an all-white jury in 1994 for kidnapping, raping, and burying a 16-year-old girl alive in retaliation for a bad drug deal.
He never denied killing her, but his lawyers insist racial bias and remorse were not taken into account.
Now nobody’s arguing that these people shouldn’t be in the pen for life (though Montgomery, who may be mentally ill, might be confined in a hospital), but I am arguing that they shouldn’t be killed. And even if you believe in federal executions, the people have just chosen to replace Trump with Biden. Shouldn’t, then, Trump stay the executions, converting them to life without parole, in case Biden might pardon them? What’s to be lost by that? Were I Trump, I’d call Biden (this is not going to happen) and ask him what he would do. If Biden said, as is likely, “I’d stay their executions, or at least would look at them carefully” then Trump should stay them as well. What is to be lost by such an action?
As the Independent reports, polls show that 56% of American favor the death penalty, but that’s dropped from 80% in 1994. Further, a Gallup poll from last year showed that 60% of Americans agree that life in prison without parole is a better punishment for murder than is the death penalty. And all three prisoners above are in jail for murder.
Like all civilized countries, America is ascending the moral arc towards ending state-sponsored executions. We can’t of course expect a narcissistic, authoritarian President to nudge America up this arc, particularly when his Republican base is so hungry for blood (nearly twice as many Republicans as Democrats favor the death penalty). But this truly is a matter of life and death, and it would be nice if Trump did the civilized thing and asked his successor.
I’ve maintained that becoming a determinist leads many people to promote criminal-justice and prison reform. This comes from realizing that people have no choice in their actions—including committing crimes—and so criminals should be treated as if they were broken machines to be fixed (if possible) rather than as “people who made the wrong choice.” Readers have responded that promoting prison reform can also come from non-deterministic world views, and that’s true. But I believe that “hard” determinism, not sullied by the semantic taints of compatibilism, leads more automatically and naturally to criminal justice reform.
Well, you might disagree, but that’s not important for today’s post. I think most of us will agree that American prisons are cruel, inhumane, and do a lousy job of rehabilitating prisoners. That’s largely, I suspect, because American prisons are directed more toward punishment than rehabilitation, and what you learn in prison is how to commit more crimes.
But here’s a country where prisoners are treated much more humanely: Finland. And here’s the story of one Finnish murderer who’s serving a long sentence but appears to be on the path of reformation. As the video claims, the recidivism rate in Finland (re-imprisonment within two years after release) is half of what it is in America. If you see the environment experienced by Finnish prisoners, and the efforts made to treat them humanely and reform them, that makes sense.
If someone can really be turned into a good and useful citizen, very unlikely to do any more crime, why should they be kept in jail under horrible conditions? You may say—and some will—that “the U.S. is not Finland.” But why can’t it be in the ways shown below?
UPDATE: My Chicago colleague Brian Leiter has a short post on his website about the indictments, which he thinks constitute a fair resolution. He blames the death of Taylor not on the involved cops, but on the system, which includes guns, a history of racism that leads to poverty and crime, and no-knock warrants. A brief excerpt:
The media, unfortunately, have linked these cases of police killings, even though they have almost nothing in common. And now, unsurprisingly, a Louisville grand jury has failed to indict any of the officers involved in the no-knock raid that led to Ms. Taylor’s death (by contrast, the officer that killed Mr. Floyd was quickly and rightly indicted, although he is planing an aggressive defense). The failure to indict any officer for the killing of Ms. Taylor is unsurprising because: (1) a judge had authorized the raid and the warrant to search the apartment because of Ms. Taylor’s sometime-boyfriend, a suspected drug dealer, and (2) when the police entered the apartment, the boyfriend fired on the police (he did not know they were police), wounding one officer; the police returned fire, resulting in Ms. Taylor’s death. On these facts, it’s hard to see how any officer was culpable for Ms. Taylor’s death. Louisville subsequently banned no-knock raids, which undoubtedly contributed mightily to the cascading calamity resulting in her death.
. . . Since that is the reality in the U.S.–extreme poverty and desperation, combined with a proliferation of weapons–the real question has to be what institutional and systemic reforms will minimize situations ripe for tragedies like the killing of Ms. Taylor. Eliminating the no-knock raid is probably one, and the sociologist Randall Collins has identified some others. Of course, eliminating poverty and restricting access to firearms would be even more important, but that would require real political and economic change in the country that elected Donald Trump.
h/t: Greg
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I don’t consider myself particularly well informed on the Breonna Taylor incident, which, as you know, prompted big protests in Louisville, Kentucky (and the rest of America) last night. I’ve read the newspaper articles about it (e.g., here, here, and here, and many others), as well as the Wikipedia page, and still don’t know how to regard the killing of Ms. Taylor.
As you know, Taylor, 26, was killed on March 13 of this year after being shot six times by one police officer, part of a group of three executing a search warrant on Taylor’s apartment, where she was staying on that night with her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker. The search was authorized because Walker was thought to not only be a drug dealer, but also to hobnob with drug dealers, and because Taylor had dated one of the other drug merchants before taking up with Walker. (The police tracked Walker to Taylor’s apartment.) When the police entered Taylor’s apartment, Walker, thinking the intruder might be Taylor’s former drug-dealer boyfriend,T fired a legal weapon in self defense, he says, and the police fired back, killing Taylor. Several shots from one cop also went into an adjacent apartment, leading to the sole charge in the case: three charges of “wanton endangerment” against the single cop who fired the errant shots. Each charge carries a maximum of five years in jail. The other two policemen were not charged, and this apparently lenient result led to the protests.
I’m on the fence about all this because the details are hazy and because of the absence of evidence that could have been there, and the secrecy of the grand jury, I don’t know them. Perhaps, given the absence of bodycams, none of us will ever know the important details.
On the side of the charges being way too light we have this:
The warrant was originally a “no knock” warrant in which the cops could simply bust their way into Taylor’s apartment. Before the raid this was changed to the requirement that the police announce themselves and knock before entering. Some neighbors testify that they did not hear police announce themselves.
The city has settled a civil suit by paying the Taylor family $12 million, which (though standards of evidence are lower for civil suits) implies that Louisville recognized that the police bore some culpability.
If the police didn’t announce themselves and didn’t knock as per the requirement, then Walker would seem to have been justified in firing at police. In that case, the ultimate killing of Taylor would be a result of police misbehavior.
The city waited for months before charging the police with a crime (I understand, though, that a federal investigation is underway.)
No drugs were found in Taylor’s apartment (apparently there wasn’t even a concerted search for them), and there’s this from Wikipedia about the supposed involvement of Walker in drug dealing, which bears on the validity of the search warrant:
Specifically, the warrant alleges that in January 2020, Glover left Taylor’s apartment with an unknown package, presumed to be drugs, and subsequently went to a known drug apartment with this package soon afterward. This warrant states that this event was verified “through a US Postal Inspector.” In May 2020, the U.S. postal inspector in Louisville publicly announced that the collaboration with law enforcement had never actually occurred. The postal office stated they were actually asked to monitor packages going to Taylor’s apartment from a different agency, but after doing so, they concluded, “There’s [sic] no packages of interest going there.” The public revelation put the investigation and especially the warrant into question and resulted in an internal investigation. No drugs were found in Taylor’s apartment after the warrant was executed.
and, finally, this:
The real person suspected of drug dealing was already in police custody by the time they executed a warrant on Walker’s apartment.
On the side of the charges being appropriate, or not involving racism, we have this:
One neighbor said he did hear the police announce themselves. We don’t know for sure because the cops weren’t wearing bodycams. (Why isn’t this required for all cops in situations like this one?)
The protests, if not the killing of Taylor, is deemed “racist” because she was black and the three police officers were white. Yet the charges were brought by a grand jury that likely included black jurors. Who, then, is the object of the protestors’ ire? The cops, the grand jury, or the system?
We don’t know what evidence was presented to the grand jury, and it may not emerge during a trial for “wanton endangerment”.
The attorney general of Kentucky who announced the charges, Daniel Cameron, is black. (Against that people will say, well, he’s a black Republican, which he is.) Cameron was visibly upset when announcing the charges, choking up when he talked about his own family as well as Taylor’s.
Some of the jurors who voted to bring the lighter charges were likely black, though we won’t know.
So we have conflicting claims about several items bearing critically on what happened, and no tangible evidence in the form of bodycam footage. Presumably a grand jury brings charges if they think there might be sufficient evidence to convict the cops of homicide, and apparently they didn’t think sufficient evidence existed. The proceedings are sealed, so we won’t know what happened.
What I’ve written above is what I’ve distilled from reading about the case, and I may have made a few errors or left out crucial information. If so, please correct or supplement what I’ve written.
I can conclude only that I’d know better what to think had I been on the grand jury. But I’m not at all convinced that the killing of Taylor was a racist act. How could it be, when the cops opened fire at an unknown person who was shooting at them? Taylor’s killing might be seen as part of a pattern of white police killing black citizens, but this is not a George Floyd-like incident in which accusations of racist cops are at least plausible.
Anyway, I’m sure many readers have their own opinions of the police’s guilt, and about whether the protests, which were largely peaceful but did have some violence (two police officers were shot), were justified. Weigh in below.
Here’s Taylor, who was formerly an emergency medical technician:
Photo courtesy of the family of Breonna Taylor, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Athough Steve Bannon was scheduled to speak here a while back, that never took place, though the University refused to ban him. Now it looks as if he won’t be here for a long while.
Hot off the press (click on screenshot for details):
Bannon, of course, was Trump’s former campaign manager. He and three others face one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Each count carries a maximum of 20 years in prison!
A few details from the report:
Bannon is among four people indicted for allegedly defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to the online “We Build the Wall” campaign.
Manhattan federal prosecutors allege that Bannon, campaign leader Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea “received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall, which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations.”
“We Build the Wall” began as a GoFundMe campaign in late 2018, designed to raise money directly from the public to build a border wall in the face of Congressional opposition.
While Kolfage publicly guaranteed that he would not take salary or compensation, and that 100 percent of funds raised would go toward the wall, the indictment alleges he actually took more than $350,000 for personal use and took steps to conceal it.
It’s both ironic and horrific that a campaign designed to keep poor immigrants out was actually used to enrich the promoters.
I’m reading the book below, which I found in a free book box, about the famous Leopold and Loeb murders of 1924. The murders took place in Hyde Park/Kenwood, just a few blocks from where I sit. Nathan Leopold (left on the cover below) and Richard Loeb, once University of Chicago students, 19 and 18 respectively, decided to commit the perfect crime—a murder. There was no obvious reason for it except for for their hubris, especially Leopold’s, for he was a fan of Nietzsche and thought he was exempt from ordinary moral strictures. That gave rise to the book’s title. (Click on the screenshot to go to the Amazon site, and I do recommend the book as a historical page-turner.) They planned the murder for six months, confident that they could kill someone (they planned to abduct a random child from a nearby school) and never get caught.
In May of that year, the pair abducted and brutally murdered 14 year old Bobby Franks, Leopold’s second cousin. They drove his body to Indiana and sequestered it in a railroad culvert. The pair then sent a ransom note to Franks’s family, though the child was already dead. They probably would have pulled off the crime, too, except that Leopold dropped his glasses near the body, and they had a special frame that had been sold to only three people in Chicago. The cops quickly traced the glasses and zeroed in on the pair, who promptly confessed everything in great detail. And they confessed without ever having talked to a lawyer, which of course is a serious mistake.
Leopold and Loeb’s families were wealthy, and engaged three lawyers to defend them, including Clarence Darrow, the most famous lawyer in America. (The next year he was the major defense attorney in the Scopes “Monkey Trial”.) Darrow, who also lived near me in Hyde Park, is a hero of mine: dedicated to fighting for the underdog, fiercely smart and eloquent, and an outspoken determinist and atheist.
The boys changed their plea from “not guilty” to “guilty”, therefore giving up a jury trial as well as the possibility of a verdict of “not guilty by reason of insanity”. The only courtroom proceedings, then, were the lawyers’ arguments before the judge to determine what sentence the boys got (hanging, life without parole, or 14 years or more in prison).
Even Darrow admitted that the boys should be in jail until they died, but argued fiercely before the judge that the boys had no choice but to commit the crime—they were conditioned by their genes and environment to murder Bobby Franks. Darrow considered this mitigation, and was arguing for a prison sentence rather than hanging. Much of the book is devoted to the testimony of neurologists and psychologists who argued whether or not the boys were mentally ill, even though they couldn’t plead insanity. Darrow argued that both had mental disorders, and these played a major role in the crime.
In his summation and plea that the judge impose prison rather than the noose, Darrow made a famous twelve-hour argument, some of which you can read here. It was heavily deterministic, to wit:
This terrible crime was inherent in his organism, and it came from some ancestor … Is any blame attached because somebody took Nietzsche’s philosophy seriously and fashioned his life upon it? … It is hardly fair to hang a 19-year-old boy for the philosophy that was taught him at the university.
. . . Why did they kill little Bobby Franks? Not for money, not for spite; not for hate. They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly, for the experience. They killed him because they were made that way. Because somewhere in the infinite processes that go to the making up of the boy or the man something slipped, and those unfortunate lads sit here hated, despised, outcasts, with the community shouting for their blood. Mr. Savage, with the immaturity of youth and inexperience, says that if we hang them there will be no more killing. This world has been one long slaughterhouse from the beginning until today, and killing goes on and on and on, and will forever. Why not read something, why not study something, why not think instead of blindly shouting for death?
Darrow won. To everyone’s surprise, the judge gave them both life sentences. In 1936, Loeb was murdered in prison with a razor by a fellow inmate who claimed that Loeb made homosexual advances (Leopold and Loeb had a homosexual relationship). Leopold was actually paroled in 1958, moved to Puerto Rico, and died in 1971 at the age of 66.
I’ve digressed, but the story is a fascinating one, seen at the time as the crime of the century, with worldwide interest and publicity. Thousands of onlookers tried to rush the Chicago courtroom to hear Darrow’s summation, and finally had to be beaten back by the police.
When reading the book, I discovered that the standard for “insanity” at the time, which if proven by the defense would get you a “not guilty by reason of insanity” verdict (and likely a shortish stint in an asylum) was that the defendant did not understand that his conduct was criminal. That is, he didn’t know the difference between right and wrong (in the law).
Darrow argued that although Leopold and Loeb were not “insane” by these standards (he knew that such a plea wouldn’t fly), they were nevertheless suffering from mental illness, and it is on this issue that his speech centered.
While thinking it over, I realized, as I’ve said here before, that understanding that your crime was against the law is a lousy criterion for “insanity” mitigation in these cases. That’s because, as a determinist, I think that to some extent everyone who commits a crime is “insane” in the sense that they could not help themselves. As for Illinois’s insanity defense, there may be those, including some serial killers, who know that their deeds are criminal and illegal, but are under such delusions or compulsions that they cannot help themselves, even though they know about conventional and legal morality.
Is “a knowledge of criminality”, then, to be the line that divides a gentler, more rehabilitative punishment from one that throws you into jail with other criminals, a dreadful fate if you’ve committed a capital offense? I can’t see why. Why is “mental illness that blinds you to criminality” so different from “mental illness that compels you to do murder, even though you know it’s wrong?” In fact, as a determinist, I don’t think that the criminal, at the moment of the crime (and oftentimes before, as with Leopold and Loeb) could have chosen to behave differently. Regardless of your views on punishment, if you agree with me—and I think all science-minded people must)—then you have to take determinism into account when weighing punishments.
My own view, which I’ve expounded here over and over again, is that even “hard” determinism mandates punishment for three reasons: to keep a dangerous person out of society (sequestration), to rehabilitate them if possible (so that sequestration can end), and to deter others (deterrence). But none of this justifies any punishment, like the prosecutor in the Leopold/Loeb case argued repeatedly, based on the fact that the criminal made the wrong choice. (The State’s Attorney repeatedly argued for the death penalty because Leopold and Loeb, not being insane, could have realized the criminality of their act and refrained from it.)
And although both Darrow and I are determinists, he went even further than I, arguing that prisons were superfluous. But perhaps we do agree on this: “prison” shouldn’t be an exercise in horror, but a removal from society (which is punishment itself and a deterrent), combined with whatever therapy necessary to ensure that the criminal can be returned to society. If there is no such therapy, then sequestration for life is mandated. In Norway, you’re examined for rehabilitation every five years, and if you’re judged un-rehabilitated, you stay in jail for another five years. But Norwegian prisons are far less brutal than American ones.
In other words, I don’t like the insanity defense, which offers true rehabilitation only to those deemed “insane”. My view of criminal trials is that there should be two phases:
A. Was the criminal “responsible” for the deed? That is, did he do the act, period? That can be decided by a jury.
B. What is the best way to treat a convicted criminal in light of the three rationales for punishment given above? What sequestration is an appropriate deterrent? (That is something that can be decided empirically.) Is there a form or rehabilitation that will allow the criminal to return to society and pose no more danger than that of an ordinary citizen? If there is, that therapy should be given. The sentence, then, should be imposed not by judges or juries, but by a panel of experts, legal, medical and psychiatric.
I know that this mandates an extensive reform of the American penal system, and will be costly and will involve trial and error for a long time to come. And many people who are libertarian free-willers, and who think that criminals could have decided otherwise, will oppose reforms that take determinism into account. But I can’t see any good argument for keeping the present system, which is cruel, retributive, and yields a high rate of recidivism.
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CODA:
Here are Leopold and Loeb’s mugshots taken when they entered prison (Leopold is at the top
In a few previous posts (e.g., here and here), prompted by claims of African-American linguist John McWhorter, I examined the various biases and difficulties that plague attempts to see if police kill black suspects at a higher rate than whites. This new article in FiveThirtyEight, though not providing an answer to the problem, shows further complications in the attempt to get answers, so that at present we have no idea if there are racial disparities in who becomes the object of police violence.
Click on the screenshot to read:
There are three ways to compare racial disparities:
1.) Proportion of racial populations who are victims of police violence. As is well known, about 0.096% of black men and boys will be killed by the cops during their lifetime. That compares to 0.039% among whites: a 2.5-fold difference. But this doesn’t mean that blacks are more likely to be killed in police encounters, because they may encounter police more often, even if the “kill rate” is the same among races. Which brings us to the second calculation.:
2.) Proportion of racial populations who are victims of police violence, normalized by the proportion of encounters with police. As McWhorter pointed out, blacks encounter police more than whites, so even if both races experience violence at the same rate per encounter, there could still be a differential mortality of blacks at the hands of the cops, but one that wouldn’t necessarily denote racism. There are some data on this, as the article notes:
One example of an encounter denominator approach is a 2019 study by Roland Fryer, an economist at Harvard. He found that police shoot white, Black and Hispanic Americans whom they’ve stopped at equal rates.3 At first blush, that would seem like evidence that the police are not racially biased — every demographic is being treated equally, after all.
As I pointed out, though, this statistic is not perfect because the types of encounters and their dynamics may differ among races, and you need to control for that, which hasn’t been done But the FiveThirtyEight article adds another complication:
3.) Members of racial groups might be stopped at different rates because of racial bias itself.This is called “collider bias.” There are in fact data suggesting that although the frequency deaths per encounter may not differ among races, blacks and whites may be stopped at different rates. And that, in fact, seems to be the case, as we knew from traffic tickets, a disparity (blacks stopped more often) that disappears after dark when race becomes less evident. And, as the article says, it seems as if blacks are stopped when there is less evidence for stopping them than there is for whites, a difference that would reflect racism:
But we know that police officers are more likely to stop Black and Hispanic people than white ones — and that more of those stops are unfounded. Researchers measure this with something called the “hit rate,” or the rate at which contraband is actually found on the people who were stopped. A lower hit rate implies bias because it means that the decision to search someone was made with less evidence. White people stopped in New York City, for example, were more likely to be carrying a weapon than Black and Hispanic people who were stopped. White drivers stopped by the police were more likely to have contraband than Black and Hispanic drivers nationally.
As political scientists Knox, Will Lowe and Jonathan Mummolo, among others, have pointed out, that complicates Fryer’s findings. All of a sudden, what at first appeared to be equal treatment actually suggests unequal treatment. Because of the initial discrimination in who gets stopped, the sample of stopped people isn’t the same across races. The different hit rate indicates that stopped white people are actually more likely to have contraband, on average, than stopped Black people. In other words, in a world without discrimination in who was stopped — if the Black and white people who were stopped were equally likely to be engaged in criminal activity — you’d see an even bigger disparity in outcomes.
In other words, black people stopped by cops may be less likely to be engaged in criminal activity. To control for this, we need the data about the proportion of blacks versus whites who were observed and stopped or not stopped by police. To get this data seems impossible (you can be stopped for acting suspiciously, or just because you’re black), but the differential “hit rate” suggests that cops are targeting blacks at a higher rate than whites without good reason. And that suggests racial bias. Curiously, I think this is pretty evident when explained in words, but FiveThirtyEight presents the same results graphically—to my mind, not clarifying matters much.
And even if bias doesn’t emerge in the rate of killings, it does come out in other aspects of the justice system, for an encounter with a cop is only the first step in a long chain of events that might culminate in jail. The article gives evidence of bias in the subsequent steps of the process:
I haven’t read the links in the previous paragraph, which of course could be themselves biased (for example, is race the only reason why black defendants are more likely to be denied bail, or are there other factors like criminal records or the nature of the crime?). But I think there are enough data to conclude one thing: there is evidence for racism in police practices and in the judicial system, and this must be remedied.
On the main issue of whether black deaths at the hands of police reflect racism, at least in part, we don’t yet know the answer. To rephrase Hitchens’s Razor, what can be asserted without evidence must be buttressed with evidence before it can be accepted.
Although John McWhorter, a professor of English and linguistics at Columbia University, is also a contributing editor at The Atlantic, his new essay on police violence was not published there. Rather, it’s in Quillette. Given that in length, style, and quality (it’s very well written and makes cogent points) it would be suitable for The Atlantic, I’m guessing that he didn’t even try to publish it there. That’s because it makes an argument that is politically uncongenial to The Atlantic and to much of the Left: that perhaps the claim that black men get shot by police at a rate higher than their frequency in the population is not a function of police racism, but of a greater frequency of interactions between blacks and police due to a higher crime rate in black communities.
This idea is heterodox, contrarian, and is suitable for Quillette. But no mainstream Leftist media would ever touch it, even though it might contain some truth. It’s not ideologically acceptable to say that while there are some racist cops, the difference in the relative frequency of blacks versus whites killed by cops could be due to a higher crime rate among black males and in the black community, perhaps itself a function of poverty that breeds crime. This is a valid hypothesis, but it taboo for most of us to discuss. As black men, however people like McWhorter and Glenn Lourycan say this without fear of being deemed “racists”.
Read for yourself (click on screenshot).
First, the disproportionality:
. . . .it remains true that black people are killed at a rate disproportionate to their percentage of the population. Does this decisively demonstrate racial bias or murderous animus on the part of American law enforcement? Blacks represent about 13 percent of the US population but about a quarter of victims in cop killings. Whites constitute about 62 percent of the population but only half of those killed by the police. With slight fluctuations, these trends have been broadly consistent.
But you can’t say that this itself is prima facie evidence that cops are racist, and that they murder men like George Floyd because they’re black. As McWhorter notes:
However, these figures are not necessarily evidence of police racism. According to the Washington Post‘s database, over 95 percent of the people fatally shot by police officers in 2019 were male, and no serious-minded person argues that this is evidence of systemic misandry. So what, then, accounts for the disproportionate representation of black men among those killed by cops?
McWhorter gives lots of examples of both black men and white men killed by cops in nearly identical circumstances, but the deaths of whites gets much less attention because it doesn’t play into a narrative of police racism. One is Tony Pimpa, a 32-year-old white man who suffocated in 2016 when a cop put a knee on his back for 13 minutes. Timpa’s crime was calling the cops himself for help because he feared he might be a danger to himself when he was drunk. That’s just the first example, and McWhorter gives others:
Timpa was, of course, just one case and might be dismissed as an anomaly. On the other hand, we are told that what happened to George Floyd is what happens to black people “all the time.” But because the killing of black suspects by white police officers receives more media attention and elicits more outrage, such instances leave us vulnerable to the availability heuristic—a cognitive bias that leads us to form judgements about the prevalence of phenomena based on the readiness with which we can recall examples. Had Tony Timpa been black, we would all likely know his name by now. Had George Floyd been white, his name would likely be a footnote, briefly reported in Minneapolis local news and quickly forgotten. In fact, white people are victims of police mistreatment “all the time” too. And just as the Timpa case tragically parallels the Floyd one, there are countless episodes paralleling those we hear about involving black people.
In 2014, John Crawford, black, was shot dead by police while waving a BB gun. In 2016, Daniel Shaver, white, was waving a pellet gun out of motel window and suffered the same fate. In 2015, officer Michael Slager shot Walter Scott, black, in the back and killed him as he was running to evade a traffic ticket; the following year, Andrew Thomas, white, was shot in the neck by a police officer and killed as he climbed out of the SUV he had crashed trying to evade arrest. In 2015, Sam DuBose, black, was shot dead as he tried to escape a traffic summons in his car; the same year, Michael Parker, white, was shot dead in the same way while trying escape a ticket for a moving violation. In 2016, Philando Castile, black, was shot dead in his car by a cop as he reached under his waistband for his license and registration during a traffic stop; the same year, Dylan Noble, white, was shot dead under almost identical circumstances. Also in 2016, Alton Sterling, black, was shot dead in front of a convenience store as he was being detained for unruly conduct; the same year, Brandon Stanley, white, was shot dead in a convenience store for trying to avoid a warrant.
Of course these are just parallels and don’t answer the question we want to know: are black people more likely to be murdered by cops on a per capita basis, in a given set of encounters, with controls from white suspects in similar situations, with all other things roughly equal? If that’s the case, then racism is implicated. Anecdotes like those above won’t answer that question.
But the point McWhorter is making is that there are other causes for higher per capita rates of blacks being shot by police, and we have to work out why this is the case. He mentions some alternatives (I’ve bolded the crux of his thesis).
The socioeconomic gap between blacks and whites is doubtless an important contributing factor. Police are called to poor neighborhoods more often, so poverty makes someone more likely to encounter law enforcement. From the 1970s through the 1990s, many conservatives argued that too many black people were on welfare. Liberals and progressives replied that, firstly, more white people were on welfare and that, secondly and more importantly, a greater proportion of the black population is on welfare because a greater proportion of black people are mired in poverty. In this context, former Washington Post journalist Wesley Lowery observed that black people are about two-and-a-half times more likely to be killed by cops than their representation in the population would predict. Today, the percentage of black people living in poverty is about two-and-a-half times that of whites (22 percent and nine percent, respectively, in 2018).
This disparity in poverty rates means black people are also disproportionately represented in rates of violent crime. Poverty can lead to dangerous survival choices that include lucrative criminal activity. Furthermore, outstanding warrants can cause suspects to flee law enforcement when stopped for other trivial infractions. This disparity cannot explain every fatal police shooting, including some of the most notorious examples, such as the shootings of Tamir Rice and Philando Castile. Nevertheless, the tragedy remains: Higher aggregate crime rates lead to more encounters with police officers overall which increases the likelihood that a proportion of those encounters will get out of hand. Entrenched socioeconomic disparities should concern us all, and are as intolerable as cop murders. But the idea that the police murder out of racist animus is much less clear than we are often led to suppose.
This is not to say that McWhorter thinks that no cops are racists, or that there isn’t a systematic form of racism among some police departments. He notes, for example, that blacks are disproportionately pulled over by cops for drug searches, and that must be due to race since the disparity with whites disappears after dusk when race is harder to identify. Further, blacks are more likely than whites to be handcuffed, put up against a wall, or confronted with drawn weapons. If one can indeed show that the same disparity holds for murder with the appropriate controls, then, Houston (and Atlanta and Minneapolis), we have a problem.
Here’s McWhorter’s ending:
Police officers are too often overarmed, undertrained, and low on empathy. Some police officers are surely racist and act like it. But it does not follow that white cops routinely kill black people in tense situations out of racist animus. This scenario may seem plausible—I believed it until only a few years ago. But there are times when facts are counterintuitive, and it is important to get the facts right and to analyze them with clear eyes and a clear mind (the enlightening work of criminologist and ex-cop Peter Moskos is helpful in this regard). Rhetoric has a way of straying from reality, and to get where we all want to go, it is reality that we must address.
McWhorter’s message is that we shouldn’t rush to judgment about racist killer cops. It may be too late: the claim is largely taken for granted by many. But McWhorter can get away with saying this only because he’s black, and thus can’t be called a racist (I suspect he’s already suffered that, though). That only African-American can argue this way without opprobrium is, as they, problematic. To paraphrase Dr. King, the validity of an argument should not depend on the pigmentation of the person who makes it.
