by Geo Maher
White people, roughly 60 percent of the population, certainly tend to enjoy more police protection than others, but even this protection is far from universal. When asked in mid 2020 why so many Black people are killed by the police, Donald Trump responded: “So are white people. More white people, by the way.” On the one hand, it’s unsurprising that Trump would echo right-wing fallacies about policing in the age of Black Lives Matter. Yes, police kill numerically more white people than Black people (just under half of those killed in an average year are white), but to take this fact as meaningful betrays an astonishing obliviousness to proportion. While white people are underrepresented in police killings, Black people are—dramatically and indisputably—overrepresented. But on the other hand, this was also strange coming from someone who claims to support the police as vociferously as Trump. Surely there’s no better argument for abolition than the fact that the police murder even those they were established to protect!
Some conservative commentators have gone further, however, seeking to discredit claims of racial disparities in police violence entirely. Writing in the Wall Street Journal after the police murder of George Floyd, Heather Mac Donald, author of The War on Cops, sought to debunk what she calls “the myth of systemic police racism.” Citing a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Mac Donald argued that police killings of Black people are “less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects.”4 You can’t be killed by the police if you are a good, law-abiding citizen who never interacts with the police—so goes the argument. The problem is that the argument is utterly false, and deeply racist in its own right.
Statistical analyses of data from New York City’s stop-and-frisk program make clear that there are huge disparities in who the police target, in what communities, and why—disparities that far outstrip crime rates.5 As Princeton researchers have recently demonstrated, simply combining one racially determined variable (police encounters) with another (police killings) proves exactly the opposite of what Mac Donald and others would have us believe.6 If anything, by increasing the number of nonviolent encounters, the constant harassment of racial profiling has the effect of watering down the data and making police encounters by Black people with the police seem less deadly than they actually are, by “perversely using one kind of discrimination, over-policing, to mask another: the greater use of deadly force against Black suspects.”7 Moreover, according to the Mapping Police Violence project, most police killings begin from interactions involving the suspicion of a nonviolent crime or no crime at all, and “Black people were more likely to be killed by police, more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed.”8 Writing at Slate, data analyst Rob Arthur has shown that even among police killings, Black people are less likely to have resisted than white people.9
When several teams of researchers made this exact point, the authors of the study Mac Donald cites withdrew their article, prompting her to throw a very public fit.10 But the goal of her op-ed and others like it was never rational argument; indeed, we give Trump and right-wing talking heads too much credit if we take their arguments as factual claims to be debated. Instead, adjusting police killings to crime rates is yet another dog whistle that reinforces and relies on the racism of the target audience: of course they are criminals, so they deserve what they get. Nevertheless, the damage was already done: Mac Donald’s piece had been syndicated nationwide, to very concrete effect. Less than a week later, Travis Yates, a high-ranking member of the Tulsa Police Department—which already boasts an astronomical per capita rate of police killings—provoked widespread outcry by suggesting that police are “shooting African Americans about 24 percent less than we probably ought to.” Yates cited Mac Donald and the PNAS study directly.11
Sadly, it isn’t only the right that minimizes police killings of people of color. Some on the left have wasted a great deal of breath and ink doing much the same. The Marxist intellectual Adolph Reed, for example, in his obsessive zeal to discredit a Black Lives Matter movement that he sees only as a “branding exercise,” bends over backward to minimize and explain away racial disparities in police violence.12 As usual, Reed’s facts don’t match his penchant for hyperbole, and rather than simply admit that whites are killed at a lower rate, Reed explains—in tortured prose—that “whites are killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of the general population.” Racial disparity, he argues, is a distraction from the fact that police killings occur in poorer areas (the overlap of race and poverty goes unmentioned), and that many whiter states have higher rates of police homicide. Never mind that he counts New Mexico among these “whiter” states despite its Latinx majority and ongoing police brutality against Indigenous people.13 And never mind that numerous studies show Black people “to be at greatest risk in predominantly White neighborhoods.”14 “Racism and white supremacy,” Reed concludes, “don’t really explain how anything happens.”
Nothing except, say, the clear disparities in who is stopped and searched, who is perceived as a threat, and those all-important split-second decisions about who to shoot or not—all of which, when not explicit policy, are governed by a racial bias demonstrated in countless studies.15 Or how a rich Harvard professor like Henry Louis Gates Jr. can be arrested for allegedly burglarizing his own home. Or that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson perceived Mike Brown as a “demon” in the moments before shooting him dead, or that Derek Chauvin, in Minneapolis, felt that George Floyd could survive nearly nine minutes of sustained pressure to his neck.16 Or that police and others often see Black teenagers (and even preteens) as older and less innocent than white children, and Black girls as larger and more masculine—and thus more threatening.17 Reed’s attempts to minimize racial disparities are hard to distinguish from Trump’s own whataboutism, and he struggles and fails to explain away the fundamental question: Why is it that certain people walk out of their homes every day into a world in which they are more likely to die at the hands of police?
Ultimately, however, numbers tell only part of the story. After all, nearly all those killed by police are men, but it would be absurd to argue that this is due to some underlying anti-male discrimination. Let’s not entertain the same absurdities when it comes to white people: while white people are killed by police in unacceptably high numbers, they are not killed because they are white, but despite being white. They are killed in increasingly outrageous numbers because, faced with an expanding policing apparatus that thrives on total impunity—on the ability to brutalize and kill anyone, anywhere—not even their whiteness can protect them.
In From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, a book that Reed has derided, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor shows that it is possible to take police racism seriously while also recognizing the broader devastation that the police wreak across many different communities. While Black Americans, she observes, “suffer most from the blunt force trauma of the American criminal justice system,” the increasingly heavy-handed nature of law-and-order politics means that even white people are jailed at rates far higher than in other countries, and “thousands of white people have also been murdered by the police.”18 We don’t need to erase these differences in order to build solidarity against the police, nor does this solidarity begin from denying police racism. It comes, rather, from confronting it head on.
Solidarity means recognizing that policing has always been about both economic profit and racial control, that police have always been strikebreakers and a uniformed lynch mob at the same time, and that law-and-order politics emerged as a strategy that was not only overtly racist, but also sought to destroy those social movements capable of uniting the poor. It means recognizing—as Taylor does—that racist policing has conscripted both poor whites (from the beginning) and Black officers and elected officials (more recently) int
o functional roles, and that, far from proving that racism is irrelevant (as Reed insists), Black leaders have functioned both as mouthpieces for condescending sermons and as foot soldiers of oppression against the poor. And solidarity means understanding that the racism of the police is more than skin-deep, that Black and Brown officers are just as likely to be violent and racist (sometimes more so), and that the racist function of the police spans the entire (multiracial) pig majority.
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Our calculations are just getting started. We know that the police protect wealth and private property, not the poor—this, too, helps explain the massive and growing number of white people killed by police. Since the late 1960s, moreover, when wages stagnated and American capitalism began to rely on ballooning real estate, consumer, and student debt, funneling wealth to the top while generating mass impoverishment at the bottom, fewer and fewer Americans have had any wealth left to protect at all—especially not the millennials and zoomers leading the struggle against the police in the streets today. You don’t call the police to protect your student loan debt or the cramped apartment you don’t even own. An estimated 9 percent of white families have zero or negative net wealth—literally nothing for the police to protect. Leaving aside the fact that this number skews far higher for younger generations, even this very low bar brings the “serve and protect” ratio—those who enjoy some small property the police might deign to protect—down from about 60 percent to around half of the population .
But we aren’t done yet. The nationwide dismantling of access to mental health care and treatment, especially among the poor and people of color, has meant that those suffering a mental health crisis and their families “have little choice but to call 911—and it’s typically the police who respond.”19 Police are not trained mental health workers, however, but trained violence workers. The results have been predictably devastating. In October 2020, the videotaped killing of Walter Wallace Jr. just blocks west of my home in Philadelphia reignited the wave of mass protests that had exploded months earlier, provoking several more days of looting and the return of the National Guard. Wallace was suffering a mental health crisis, and despite the fact that he was apparently holding a knife, none of his friends, family, or neighbors considered him a serious-enough threat to warrant deadly force. After Wallace’s brother called an ambulance, the police arrived instead. “They weren’t trying to help us, they didn’t give a damn about us,” his mother Cathy recounted.20 Despite her efforts to calm the tension, two officers fired a total of fourteen shots, killing Wallace.
A Washington Post database counts 1,244 people with confirmed mental illness killed by police just since 2015, while another report indicates that one in four deadly police encounters involve mental illness. This would make those with untreated mental illness an astonishing sixteen times more likely to be killed by police, and even this is almost certainly a low figure. Extrapolation from other studies suggests a much higher rate of one in two—a full half of all fatal encounters.21 Nearly half of all Americans will suffer a mental health crisis at some point in their lives, and some 4 million are untreated today. While mental illness and access to treatment overlap heavily with race, class, age, and sexuality, these figures nevertheless take another significant slice out of that “serve and protect” pie, and there are plenty of examples of just how quickly racial and class privilege can evaporate once the police arrive on the scene of a crisis. Moreover, because police violence is itself a key trigger for further mental health problems, policing and mental illness constitute a vicious cycle.22
The police don’t protect the homeless, either, and just as mental illness has been increasingly criminalized, so too has the epidemic of homelessness sweeping the United States since the 1980s. Rather than attend to the root causes of homelessness, cities nationwide—under pressure from real estate developers and newly arrived gentrifiers—have simply banned homeless people from existing in public spaces, creating another vicious cycle in which the very same forces making homes too expensive for the poor pressure local leaders to make criminals of those forced onto the streets. This criminalization has powerfully dehumanizing effects as well, turning the poor into lawbreakers and vagrants. Under law-and-order capitalism, this means they are responsible for their own misfortune.
The results are predictable: vigilante killings of homeless people run rampant, and the 2011 death of Kelly Thomas was a painful reminder that the intersection of homelessness and mental illness can be fatal once the police get involved. Thomas, a white man with diagnosed schizophrenia, was unarmed when he was repeatedly tased and viciously beaten by six members of the Fullerton, California, police department. In gut-wrenching videos of the assault, Manuel Ramos, who would eventually face second-degree murder charges, can be seen taunting Thomas: “Now you see my fists? They’re getting ready to fuck you up.” Thomas can be heard crying, apologizing, and screaming for his father. A paramedic would later testify that officers demanded treatment for their minor (and self-inflicted) injuries while their victim lay nearby, beaten to a bloody and unrecognizable pulp. He died five days later. Ramos and another officer were acquitted of all charges.
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By far the largest constituency left unprotected by the police is women. This might seem ironic, since the most frequent response to calls to abolish police and prisons today asks: What about the rapists? But while the specter of sexual assault is deployed to justify the need for police to prevent rape and arrest rapists, and prisons to lock them away, this has never been the reality. The police don’t prevent sexual assault or other forms of violence against women; perpetrators are rarely investigated, indicted, or convicted; and mass incarceration does nothing to “keep society safe” from the “worst of the worst.” In reality, the police inflict far more violence on women than they prevent.
For the anti-lynching campaigner Ida B. Wells, lynching—often the result of spurious rape accusations—was designed to send a message not only to Black men but to white women as well. If lynching claimed to protect the “honor” of white women from the sexual appetites of free Black men, it also contained a tacit threat: that such protection could be withdrawn. Lynching was therefore key to patriarchal power, because it served to conscript white women into a devil’s bargain not unlike that which bound poor whites to their class enemies. White women were forced to sacrifice certain freedoms and rights in exchange for protection from imaginary threats. For more than a century, police have enforced the same bargain. From vagrancy laws to criminalize nineteenth-century sex workers in New York to “vice squads” targeting interracial nightclubs in South Central Los Angeles a century later, policing has long sought to enforce an ideal of moral purity by disrupting interracial intimacy and solidarity.23 Moreover, the devil’s bargain Wells identified more than a century ago has been reborn in the carceral feminism of today, which appeals to police and prisons to protect the vulnerable.24 The tendency to see police as the only possible protection against rape today, and rape as the last-ditch argument for policing, reflects this longstanding double bind.
But today as in the past, the numbers are absolutely clear: not only do police not prevent sexual assault, they rarely even investigate it, much less does the criminal justice system deliver the convictions that are its raison d’être. Most sexual assaults—some two-thirds—are not reported, and even when they are, investigations are often halfhearted.25 According to a 2019 investigation published in The Atlantic, 200,000 rape kits were found sitting untested across the country. That’s 200,000 women who, after 200,000 assaults, jumped through the emotional and procedural hoops to report an assault only for nothing to happen. In one case, a serial rapist in Detroit committed eleven assaults in eleven years while his DNA sat untested in police custody.26 After mass public outcry about the untested kits, significant progress has been made in working through the backlog, but this is only the first step. Despite the fact that most survivors of sexual assault know their attacker, official police “clearance rates” (me
aning arrest, not even conviction) remain abysmal (an estimated 32 percent nationwide in 2017), and even these are exaggerated.27 Once so-called “exceptional clearances” are excluded, the true clearance rate is likely only half the official rate, and as low as 8 percent in some cities, including Chicago.28 Once you do the math, less than 6 percent of rapes lead to arrest, and less than 1 percent to conviction.29
Even this is only half of the equation at best. Not only do police fail to prevent violence against women and sexual assault in particular, they contribute actively and disproportionately to gendered and sexual violence both on and off the job. Sexual assault by on-duty officers is what former career cop Norm Stamper calls policing’s “nasty little secret,” something that “happens far more often than people in the business are willing to admit,” as shown by his vivid descriptions of his own stomach-turning experience. His “cautious guess” is that around 5 percent of officers will commit sexual assault at some point—which amounts to some 50,000 predators walking around with a badge and a gun every day.30 According to the conservative Cato Institute, the second most common complaint against police, after excessive force, is “sexual misconduct”—which, once we strip away the sanitized copspeak, means “rape by cop or attempted rape by cop,” or more accurately still, “police sexual terror.”31
Rape by cop, moreover, is not simply a sexual assault that happens to be carried out by a police officer. It is a specific and pervasive technique that takes advantage of the greatest power disparities in American society. Police intentionally and systematically target the young and the powerless, those with a history of drug addiction, mental illness, or run-ins with the law—in short, those most vulnerable. One study suggests that a full half of survivors are minors, and according to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, “rape and sexual abuse by police [in the United States] are primarily reported by women of color.”32 Rape by cop is itself a form of policing, and here the case of Daniel Holtzclaw—“the most famous of all police rapists”—is especially instructive. As David Correia and Tyler Wall explain,