News

Imma unpopular opinion

1. How many uses of force are justified? Just the fact that they used force to arrest somebody doesn’t mean an atrocity. It could have been 300,000 armed rapists trying to carjack a mother of 3 to get away, or it could have been 300,000 peaceful Palestinian protestors. The relevant number to track is how many unjustified uses of force there were.
2. Is it possible they’re tracking things better now? When the police document that force was used is HIGHLY dependent on their policies about what has to be documented, which I would suspect is highly correlated with time going by since 2020.
3. “Use of force” and “injuring” are super broad. If they tackle somebody on the grass to arrest them, that’s a use of force. If they taze somebody causing cardiac arrest, that’s an “injury.”

They do dive a little bit into the details, but I think a lot of the details either undercut the headline narrative or are misleadingly presented. E.g.:

despite widespread protests against police brutality following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, overall use of force has remained steady since then – and in many jurisdictions, has increased.

Half of the agencies reported increases in overall force in the two-year period following Floyd’s murder, the report said.

So, basically, it hasn’t changed. And it went up in half and down in half. I mean it is fine if you want to present that result as an indictment of the claims of reform, but the way they wrote the “everything’s getting worse” headline out of that data is weird.

The most common use of force was stun guns, which are considered “less-lethal” but can also have deadly consequences; the organization tracked more than 20,000 stun gun deployments.

In 2022, the group also cataloged more than 8,000 incidents of chemicals being sprayed; more than 4,700 cases of people hit by weapons like batons and beanbags; and more than 2,100 cases of contacts with K9 dogs.

Sounds like, if those are the numbers out of 300,000, then by far the most common use of force (the remaining 264,200) was tackling / wrestling with a suspect. And then they decided to lead with the descriptions of more lurid uses of force that make up 1%-7% of the times that things happened. No?

Then at the very end the whole tone changes:

of the 757 agencies that disclosed types of force used over time, there were 973 neck restraint uses in 2019. By 2021, there were 112 of those cases, a nearly 90% drop.

Jurisdictions with DoJ reform agreements reported a 22% reduction in overall reported use of force, Mapping Police Violence found. And 13 out of 18 agencies that adopted state or federal reforms reported reductions in use of force.

Policies that reduce overall police encounters can be most effective at reducing injuries and killings by police, such as alternative responder programs dispatching mental health professionals to people in crisis, Sinyangwe said. He said he hoped his database would help officials, including a potential Kamala Harris administration, identify agencies in need of urgent intervention. And he hoped to see an expansion of initiatives shown to work.

See this sounds great. It’s like, some reforms are working and some are not (or just aren’t even being attempted in some places), let’s strategize how we can fix the existing and continuing problems. Let’s get a clear eye on what is happening and try to make things better.

If they had led with this, I would have no griping, but the whole headline and 2/3ds of the article is just feeding into the “OH MA GAWD THE POLICE ARE KILLING EVERYONE WON’T SOMEBODY STOP THEM”.

Bring on the downvotes 😃