September 13, 2018
Here is an interesting speech on luck by a Harvard luminary for a commencement some years back.
http://www.harvard.edu/president/2012-baccalaureate-service-updraft-inexplicable-luck
What about those who happen to pay with their lives for being less privileged? (Bad) luck, random event, coincidence? Organizations like Black Lives Matter believe that the frequent police violence against Blacks is anything but. So did many other people, at least when surveyed in 2015.
Law enforcement officials, as you might have anticipated, disagree. Maybe a look at the numbers would help to figure this out. Except that numbers are hard to come by.
Just yesterday The Atlantic published an article that offers some statistics about crimes committed by police, on- and off-duty, collected by private individuals, stating “Former FBI Director James Comey went so far as to say in 2016 that “Americans actually have no idea” how often police use force, because the federal government has not bothered to collect the relevant data. Although the FBI now plans to track the number of people killed by police across the United States, by early 2018 only 1,600 of the more than 18,000 state and local law-enforcement agencies had agreed to submit data for the project. And initial data collection had not yet commenced. “
Here are the numbers collected the private database ( I can, of course, not vouch for how comprehensive they are or whether correctly collected. But they agree with other patterns I have seen from other sources.) The numbers ain’t pretty.
But what about the racial bias? The tightest case analysis I could find comes from a 2017 report in the Tampa Bay Times. (Actually I didn’t find it – I’m just lucky to live with guys who bring them to me…) The reporters examined every Florida police shooting between 2009 and 2014 (so even before the Trump disinhibition pattern of racial animosity officially set in) using police reports, law suits, news articles and autopsies to determine the patterns.
There were 827 people shot, 673 of them were either black or white. More (343) black people were shot than white ones (330) – despite the fact that in Florida Whites outnumber Blacks 3:1. If you conservatively disregard all cases that involved violent crimes or threats against police officers, you are left with 147 shootings. Of those 97 were black victims vs 50 white ones.
If we look at unarmed people being shot, Blacks outnumber White 2:1. Pulled over for traffic violation? Blacks shot twice as many times as Whites. They are three times as likely being shot if there was a chase on foot. Same for being suspected of a minor crime, smoking pot or no crime at all. Blacks are four times as likely to be shot in the back.
And if you look at cases where many of these factors intersect, you have the scenarios for many of the more controversial police shootings in the nation.
http://www.tampabay.com/projects/2017/investigations/florida-police-shootings/
Unlucky numbers.
Telltale numbers.
Photographs are from Miami Beach.
Sara Lee
I thought Drew Gilpin Faust’s – she’s a historian; ray! – piece was superb. Thanks for calling it to my attention.
And I LOVED the comment from the former dean of the faculty: “… the main, if not the only, purpose of education is to know when people are talking “rot.”” Clearly, the world has a lot more educating to do!