This week, the Department of Justice released a report about use of force by the Philadelphia Police Department (P.P.D.). I found it fascinating, but not necessarily for the reasons that resonated in subsequent headlines.
Yes, the overall numbers were astounding: There were 364 officer-involved shooting incidents between 2007 and 2013, which included 59 unarmed suspects.
And, as we have seen in a similar report, the black community bore most of the brunt of this disparate treatment.
But what I found particularly interesting about the officer-involved shootings report is which of the suspects were unarmed, and in which incidents the officers’ actions were attributed to “threat perception failure” (T.P.F.). The report defines these failures as occurring “when the officer(s) perceives a suspect as being armed due to the misidentification of a nonthreatening object (e.g., a cell phone) or movement (e.g., tugging at the waistband). This was the case in 49 percent of unarmed incidents.”
According to the report:
“Our analysis shows that the suspects in officer-involved shootings were overwhelmingly black. That same pattern was apparent in unarmed persons shot by the P.P.D. Our analysis also shows that threat perception failures (T.P.F.) occur with suspects of all races. Black suspects have had the highest T.P.F. rate (8.8 percent), more than twice the rate of white suspects (3.1 percent). It is clear that the black community is disproportionately impacted by extreme violence involving the police.”
And the report advises:
“Officers should train in scenarios that allow them to hone their threat perception skills and better identify behavior such as ‘waistband-tugging’ where no weapons are present and avoid mistaking cell phones or other shiny objects as firearms. As a whole, the department shot 29 unarmed suspects in T.P.F.s between 2007 and 2013, accounting for 8 percent of all O.I.S.s [officer-involved shootings] in that time period.”
Even more intriguing is the the demographics of the officers doing the shooting: It’s not only white officers shooting black suspects, but all officers.
According to the report, white officers and black officers were involved in the same number of officer-involved shooting incidents with black suspects — 10 — attributed to threat perception failures.
In fact, when looking at shootings by officer and race, white officers’ threat perception failure rate for black suspects was 6.8 percent, while for black officers it was 11.4 percent.
In a way, these findings should shatter the simplistic narrative that the recent discussion about policing and communities of color is only about white officers and minority suspects. It is broader than that: It’s about policing writ large and the use of force against people of color. It is about how sophisticated — and complicated — biases can be, how they inform and activate our fears and how they do not respect rigid racial barriers.
This should force us to think more deeply about the need to bring these numbers down and foster better relationships between police forces and the communities they serve, particularly black ones.
And those solutions may not be as simple as diversifying the police forces themselves.
A fascinating piece in Slate last year put it this way: “For as much as police diversity has value for image and community relations, it’s not clear that it does anything to cure the problem of police abuse and brutality in black and Latino communities. Just because an officer is black, in other words, doesn’t mean he’s less likely to use violence against black citizens.”
The piece continued:
“The best look at this comes from Brad W. Smith, a researcher from Wayne State University in Detroit. In a 2003 paper, he looks at the impact of police diversity on officer-involved homicides in cities of more than 100,000 residents and cities of more than 250,000 residents. Regardless of city size, there wasn’t a relationship between racial representation and police killings — officer diversity didn’t mean much.”
(In Philadelphia, the mayor, the district attorney and the police chief are black. According to the police department in 2012, whites made up 56 percent of sworn personnel and 78 percent of commanders. Blacks made up just 34 percent of sworn personnel and 23 percent of commanders. More recent data from Philly.com’s The Next Mayor series show a similar breakdown.)
Furthermore, data from the Race Implicit Association Test on the Project Implicit website — a project founded by scientists at the University of Washington, Harvard University and the University of Virginia — have shown that racial groups except blacks themselves have a strong pro-white/anti-black bias. But the data have also shown that even a third of blacks have a pro-white/anti-black bias.
The idea that people cannot be biased — consciously or not — against people who look like them is a naïve assumption and doesn’t recognize that we are all part of a single society and all submerged in the same toxic brew of poisoned perceptions.
Neither can we forget that the history of law enforcement in this country was not only part of the architecture of oppression but also a brutal tool of that system. As James Comey, director of the F.B.I., put it in a speech last month, “At many points in American history, law enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often brutally unfair to disfavored groups.”
Erasing the legacy of this culture and this posture may move at a slower pace than some might expect or hope for, and regardless of police force composition.
There is a simple yet profound truth that must be accepted and considered if we are to move forward honestly and productively in these discussions: The race of the officer matters far less than the race of the suspect.