Studies Show Black Officers are Harder on Black Suspects
August 27, 2014 by Daniel Greenfield 11 Comments
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. He is completing a book on the international challenges America faces in the 21st century.
This isn’t surprising to anyone who lives in an actual urban area. Fit it into John Perrazo noting that…
Most cases where police killed suspects during 1976-98 were same-race incidents: When W&H officers were the killers, the suspects were usually W&H (63%). And when black officers were the killers, the suspects were usually black (81%).
In 1998 specifically, 3.2 out of every 10,000 black officers killed a black suspect sometime that year, whereas only 1.4 out of every 10,000 W&H officers killed a black suspect.
… so it’s not surprising that diversity isn’t the answer…
But do racially-balanced police forces actually treat their communities any more fairly than those as skewed as Ferguson’s?…
From the studies that have been done, however, there’s no conclusive evidence to show that white and black police officers treat suspects differently — if anything, some of the studies show that black officers can be can be harder on black criminal suspects.
In 2004, for instance, criminologists found in an analysis of observational and survey data from St. Petersburg, Fla., and Indianapolis, Ind., that in resolving conflicts, “black officers are more likely to conduct coercive actions” — which could mean anything from verbal orders to physical confinement — than white officers. A 2006 study of Cincinnati police records concluded that white officers were more likely to arrest suspects than black officers overall — but it also found that black officers were significantly more likely to make an arrest when the suspect was black.
What’s more, polls show that black communities do not necessarily trust police forces more when they are more racially representative. In Washington D.C., according to a 2011 Washington Post poll, the police department got a relatively low 60 percent rating from black residents, despite the fact that the force is highly integrated. The New York Police Department’s demographics are close to those of the rest of the city, but a Quinnipiac poll from 2014 found that only 54 percent of black residents approved of its performance. The Detroit police department is so dominated by African Americans that it’s been sued for discrimination against whites, and yet only 18 percent of black Wayne County residents approved of its work in 2009.
The determinant is not how black the police force is… but how criminal the local residents are. If the locals have a lot of contact with police, they aren’t going to like them very much.
“There is a sense of security in joining the police force, and being on the ‘protected’ side of the line,” says Nguyen. “If you join the police force because you feel like it’s the only way to protect yourself, that is the cycle that is reproducing itself in the name of public safety.”
Strip away the community organizer garbage and that’s semi correct. Professionals are often members of a profession first. Black cops are cops. And cops and civilians are almost races unto themselves.
And if anything they’re likely to have less patience and more suspicions.
Anecdotally speaking, my own experience has been that black cops are less likely to behave thuggishly than white cops. But of course that’s anecdotal and based on a rather small range of experience in one place.
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Rann Xeroxx • 8 hours ago
This is the same that I saw in the military, esp. In basic training with black drills. They were really hard on the black guys that came off as street wise or punks almost as an embarrassment to them. But maybe it was tough love.
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