By Christopher J. Ferguson for RealClearInvestigations
In the early 2000s, the United States enjoyed relative racial optimism. Majorities of black and white citizens felt that race relations were improving. Even from the left NPR pointed out the “colorblindness” as ideal. A generation later, race relations collapsed. We regularly hear about “systemic racism” and “white supremacy”. Color blindness is now considered racist. This boost may leave many wondering what happened.
The collapse of race relations in 2014
The collapse of race relations began in 2014. It is unclear why this year was crucial, although it coincides with the “hands up, don’t shoot” framing debunked of the Murder of Michael Brown and a bigger one”great awakeningwhere extreme identity views have become more influential on the political left. Since 2014, little data suggests that racial disparities have worsened. Racist attitudes in the United States are at historic lows. However, media coverage concern about racism skyrocketed.
I studied this problem empirically in 2021. I wanted to see if actual police shootings of unarmed black men correlated with race relations or if media coverage highlighting police shootings of black men was a better predictor. Turns out race relations aren’t tied to actual police shootings, but correlates to media cover, which tends to obsess over shootings of black Americans while ignoring shootings of other individuals.
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The moral panic over race and the police
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the United States experienced a “racial account”. The media claimed that the police systematically targeted black Americans for lethal violence. Defunding or even literally abolishing policing became a serious political proposition. The United States, we were told, was systematically racist.
Data on policing and race is complex and nuanced. Killings by police of unarmed suspects are rare, according to the Washington Post, and they decreased. The number peaks at 95 for all races in 2015, decreasing to 32 for all races in 2021.
When it comes to police shootings against unarmed individuals, white suspects are shot more often than black suspects (in contrast, Asians are rarely shot by police compared to either group). Although more unarmed whites than blacks are killed by police, black suspects are indeed proportionally overrepresented.
However, the commission of violent crimes is also ethnically disproportionate. Black and Hispanic men commit violent crimes disproportionately more often than white or Asian men. That police shootings and the commission of violent crimes follow each other so closely is no coincidence.
One could conclude that, perhaps, the overrepresentation of black Americans as perpetrators of violent crimes could be due to excessive surveillance of black communities. However, when we look homicide victims, most of whom are of the same race as the killers, we see the same pattern of overrepresented black victims. This means that the overpolicing hypothesis does not fit the data.
It should also be noted that most young men in any ethnicity do not commit violent crimes. Race itself is not a determinant of violent crime. In a recent studyalthough the racial composition of neighborhoods predicts violent crime, race no longer predicts violent crime once other community factors such as insufficient food, housing problems, air pollution and the proportion of single-parent households are checked.
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Studies find much the same with regard to the excessive use of police force. In another recent studywe found that class issues, particularly communities with higher levels of mental health problems among residents—not race—predicted excessive police power ratios (with the exception of Latinos, who reported less police force). To be fair, studies on this TO DO vary In conclusion. However, in my view, the weight of evidence suggests that class, not race, predicts excessive police force.
We found that higher levels of mental health problems among community residents predicted reports of excessive police force. That’s likely because the police are likely coming into contact with mentally ill residents who can escalate an encounter that started over something trivial. Other studies also suggest that the chronically mentally ill more often experience physical force in confrontations with the police. The mentally ill may find it difficult to respond to aggressive orders from the police. Thus, relatively minor encounters at the start can escalate into dangerous situations. Better police training in mental illness could help.
Incremental “fixes” often made things worse
Although often ostensibly speaking on behalf of minority groups, progressive theories about race have often made practical situations worse. The most obvious cost to low-income neighborhoods has been the delegitimization or even defunding of the police and the predictable increase in crime that has resulted. Evidence suggests the George Floyd protests and riots were associated with increase in resignations police officers as well as decrease in policing in high crime areas. These, in turn, were associated with increase in violent crime.
There are also more subtle and harmful impacts. Informing people that they are in permanent danger from the police can be traumatic. The research has demonstrated for a long time that convincing people that they are victims makes them see injustice where it may not be happening.
This does not help the Black Lives Matter organization which has undermined trust in its mission through a lack of transparency on financial issues and spend millions on mansions for its leaders, with relatively little evidence of how they helped ordinary poor or working-class black people. There is a wide gap between thinking that the United States is a racial utopia and that it is ae Apartheid state of the century. But if we promote pessimistic narratives that aren’t well-grounded in data, and focus on “solutions” that emphasize our differences and conflicts, we actually risk the exact bad outcomes we hoped to mitigate. .
Christopher J. Ferguson is a professor of psychology at Stetson University in Florida and author of “Catastrophe! The psychology of why good people make bad situations worse.
Syndicated with permission by RealClearWire.
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