PEOPLE, COP MURDERS ARE NOT A NEW PHENOMENA. THEY'VE BEEN MURDERING AND RAPING FOR DECADES!
Police violence the sixth leading cause of death for young men in the US
The killing of young men by police in America is a health emergency. Much attention has been given to the rise in recent years of “deaths of despair”—due to drug overdose, alcohol abuse and suicide. However, a recent study ranks police killings of young men as the sixth leading cause of death for young men in the US, regardless of race.
The study was published August 5 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by Rutgers University Newark, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Washington University in St. Louis. It concludes: “Risk of being killed by police peaks between the ages of 20 years and 35 years for men and women and for all racial and ethnic groups.”
The study’s authors, Frank Edwards, Hedwig Lee and Michael Esposito, note that no agency of the government tracks or compiles an official count of peoples’ deaths at the hands of law enforcement. The findings on police “use-of-force” deaths in the study are gleaned by journalists from public records and news accounts and tabulated at the Fatal Encounters web site.
According to the Mapping Police Violence web site, 1,164 people were killed by police in 2018. According to the Washington Post’s Fatal Force tally, there were only 22 days in all of last year in which police didn’t kill someone.
The study’s authors also point to a commonly recognized phenomenon: “Police in the United States kill far more people than do police in other advanced industrial democracies.” Deaths due to police violence have increased a staggering 50 percent since 2008.
The study estimated an overall annual mortality rate from police violence of 1.8 per 100,000 for all men ages 25 to 29, in sixth place among all causes of death.
Number one was a catch-all category of accidental causes (such as drug overdose, motor vehicular accidents, and other fatal accidents), standing at 76.6 per 100,000.
Suicides account for 26.7 deaths per 100,000, homicides 22.0 per 100,000, heart disease 7.0 per 100,000, and cancer 6.3 per 100,000. It is a grim fact of life in America that the top three causes of death for young men involve so-called “deaths of despair” (drug overdoses and suicide) and homicides.
The mortality rate for women from police violence stands at 0.08 per 100,000 annually and does not rank in the 15 leading causes of death in young women.
Deaths caused by law enforcement actions were compiled for the study using data from 2013 to 2018. The authors found that about 52 of every 100,000 men and boys in the United States will be killed by police use of force over their lifetime. This compares to about 3 of every 100,000 women and girls that will meet the same fate. Latino men and boys have about a 53 per 100,000 risk of death by police, similar to the overall risk for men and boys.
The study confirms that black men have about 2.5 times the life risk of being killed by police than white men. Native American men have a lifetime risk of death by law enforcement between 1.2 to 1.7 times that of white men, and Native American women have a lifetime risk of a police-caused death 1.1 to 2.1 times that of white women.
The authors make the false claim that “Policing plays a key role in maintaining structural inequalities between people of color and white people in the United States.” While the police killings of African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans are disproportionate in relation to their percentage in the population, the greatest number of people killed in police shootings are white. Moreover, while this issue is not addressed in the study, other studies have shown that black police are just as likely to kill, and just as likely to kill black men, as white police.
The “structural inequalities” enforced by the police violence are those between the ruling class and the working class and are not of a racial character. All of the racial- and gender-sensitivity training in police departments in cities and towns across America will not lead to a reduction in police violence against the population as a whole.
The study notes: “Austerity in social welfare and public health problems has led to police and prisons becoming catch-all responses to social problems.” In other words, the armed men of the state have become the “first responders” to mental health, poverty and other expressions of the social crisis—with fatal effect.
Of the 570 people counted in the Washington Post’s death-by-police tally for 2018, approximately 20 percent were described as mentally ill. Police often shoot and kill individuals whose loved ones have called for help to deal with a mental health crisis for which they have been unable to obtain help, only to see them gunned down.
Reporting on the PNAS study, Newsweek notes that “Between 2013 to 2017, 11,456 fatal encounters with police and members of the public were reported.” Over the course of a man’s life in the US, he has a 1 in 2,000 chance of dying by police violence—be it by Taser, “restraint” as in a chokehold, “rough” rides in law enforcement vehicles, beatings, chemical agent, or gunshot. For black men, the lifetime risk of a police-caused death is 1 in 1,000.
The crowdsourced Mass Shooting Project counts mass shootings as any incident in which four or more people are killed. By this criteria, 387 people were killed in all of 2018 in mass shootings. Police killings accounted for 2.5 times as many deaths.
The police, as the armed representatives of the super-wealthy ruling elite, are in the front line of defense of the system of stark structural economic inequality in which working and poor people of all races, genders and ages are alienated from and robbed of the wealth that they produce.
The violence meted out by police on a daily basis on streets across America is a significant cause of early deaths of young men in particular. As the sixth leading cause of deaths for this group of the population, it is a significant contributor to the falling life expectancy of the US population in the last two years for the first time in half a century.
In the five years since 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot at least six times by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, and left for four-and-a-half hours to die in the street, police have killed an estimated 5,000 Americans. According to the Police Integrity Research Group, since 2005 only 35 officers have been convicted of a crime related to an on-duty fatal shooting.
New York Police Department fires cop who killed Eric Garner
The New York Police Department (NYPD) fired Officer Daniel Pantaleo, the cop who strangled to death Staten Island resident Eric Garner on July 17, 2014.
It has taken over five years for the American state—especially New York City’s Democratic political establishment—to give the perpetrator of one the most visible and notorious police killings in decades even the most minimal punishment available.
Had the administration of the “progressive” Mayor Bill De Blasio failed to do so, the authorities risked sparking mass protests during a hot summer in which working-class New Yorkers have been dumping buckets of water on cops to express their hatred of the NYPD.
That the NYPD brass dismissed Pantaleo grudgingly was plain when Police Commissioner James O’Neill implicitly blamed Garner for his own death. O’Neill prefaced the announcement of his decision to fire Pantaleo at a press conference on Monday with the remark: “some people choose to verbally and/or physically resist the enforcement action lawfully being taken against them … Those situations are unpredictable and dangerous to everyone involved. The street is never the right place to argue the appropriateness of an arrest.”
Protest in New York City over the killing of Eric Garner in 2014 [Credit: Paul Silva, flickr]
O’Neill noted that the NYPD ranks would be unhappy with the decision and Pantaleo’s treatment, and took time to praise Pantaleo as “a hardworking police officer with a family, a man who took this job to do good, to make a difference in his home community [who] has now lost his chosen career. And that is a different kind of tragedy.”
Eric Garner’s daughter, Emerald Snipes-Garner, addressed herself to O’Neill at a press conference: “You finally made a decision that should have been made five years ago.” She promised, “We will be going after the rest of the officers involved because it’s not over.”
Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio announced, “Today, we finally saw a step toward justice and accountability. We saw a process that was actually fair and impartial, and I hope this will now bring the Garner family a sense of closure and the beginning of some peace.” De Blasio said nothing about the “fairness and impartiality” of the grand jury’s failure to indict Pantaleo or the Justice Department’s refusal to bring civil rights charges against him.
During the Democratic presidential debate in Detroit last month, de Blasio received jibes about not firing Pantaleo from fellow candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and was heckled from the audience by demonstrators who demanded that he “fire Pantaleo.”
Pressure has been building in the city’s ruling circles to get rid of Pantaleo. On Sunday the New York Times obtained a 46-page finding by the NYPD’s administrative judge Rosemarie Maldonado, who oversaw the departmental trial of Pantaleo in May and June.
It noted that “[Pantaleo’s] use of a chokehold fell so far short of objective reasonableness that this tribunal found it to be reckless—a gross deviation from the standard of conduct established for a New York City police officer.” The finding also called Pantaleo’s denials of using a chokehold, “implausible and self-serving.” Earlier this month Maldonado had publicly recommended Pantaleo be fired.
Eric Garner died after police arrived at a street corner in Staten Island’s impoverished Tompkinsville neighborhood and sought to arrest him for selling untaxed cigarettes. Garner, who had been a target of police harassment in the past, objected. Police officers attempted to detain him, and Pantaleo applied a chokehold to Garner, who cried out 11 times, “I can’t breathe!”
Garner received no medical attention at the site of the killing, despite the presence of EMTs, and was only pronounced dead at a hospital. Chokeholds, defined as “pressure to the throat or windpipe, which may prevent or hinder breathing or reduce intake of air,” have been banned by the NYPD’s patrol manual since in 1993.
A bystander video-recorded the incident on his cell phone. The video became a political symbol of police violence as literally millions watched in horror as an unarmed man was killed by a gang of NYPD officers.
Although the city’s coroner pronounced his death a homicide, a Staten Island grand jury empaneled by then-District Attorney Dan Donovan did not charge Pantaleo with a crime. Just last month, after stalling for five years, the federal Department of Justice refused to press civil rights violation charges on Pantaleo. The verdict of the ruling class is that Pantaleo will never face criminal charges for his violent and illegal actions.
Garner's case, along with other high-profile police killings in 2014, such as that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led to demonstrations by workers and students across the US. New York City saw some of the biggest demonstrations since the anti-Iraq war protests of 2003–2005.
Building on the example of his predecessor, now apologist-in-chief for the crimes of Donald Trump, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg continued the “broken windows” program of policing Rudy Giuliani initiated—in which police proactively harass people, particularly working-class youth, to “deter” low-level crimes. This was the practice that led the cops to confront Garner in the first place. It was behind the massive program of stop-and-frisk of hundreds of thousands of mostly minority youth during Bloomberg’s 12 years in office.
New California Law Says Police Should Kill Only When 'Necessary'
Police officers in California will be required to use lethal force only as a "necessary" response to a threat — not merely as an "objectively reasonable" one — under legislation that Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Monday. Under the tighter standard, deadly force is legal only in instances where there are no other options.
"I'm ready to sign this damn thing," Newsom told the crowd at a ceremony in Sacramento. But before he did so, he invited the family members and loved ones of people who advocated for the measure to stand alongside him.
"I would be honored if you would join us up onstage," Newsom said.
Surrounded by dozens of people, the governor said he hopes the law, which takes effect in January, will become an example for other states.
"As California goes, so goes the rest of the United States of America," he said. "And we are doing something today that stretches the boundaries of possibility and sends a message to people all across this country — that they can do more."
The legislation emerged from a push for new rules in response to police killings of unarmed black men such as Stephon Clark, who was shot last year after a police chase that ended in his grandmother's backyard. The officers in that shooting said they believed Clark had a gun; he was found to have been holding a cellphone, and prosecutors said in March that the officers would not face criminal charges.
The new law reflects a compromise between civil rights advocates who say it will save lives and law enforcement groups that want more clarity on the use of force — but do not want to undermine legal protections for officers.
"The whole debate boils down to two words: 'necessary' and 'reasonable,' " Ben Adler of Capital Public Radio reports. "Right now, deadly force is justified if a reasonable officer would have acted similarly in that situation. So in other words, what a typical officer would have done based on his or her training. When the law takes effect in January, that standard will change to when the officer reasonably believes deadly force is necessary."
But Adler also notes that the law mostly avoids offering a specific definition of "necessary" — a move that is widely seen as leaving the interpretation up to the courts, where judges will weigh what is "necessary" in the context of officers' use of force.
Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, D-San Diego, is widely seen as the driving force behind the bill, AB 392. In promoting it, she has said it will boost the public's trust in the police and protect the sanctity of life in all communities. When the California State Legislature approved it last month, she said she was proud of her colleagues.
"Significant change is never easy, but those who voted today looked to their conscience and found the courage to do the right thing for California," Weber said at the time. She added, "I have to thank the families who have lost loved ones to police violence. They have been the energy and the moral compass for making this possible."
On Monday, Weber said the measure "basically changes the culture of policing in California."
Also speaking at Monday's event was Kori McCoy, whose younger brother, Willie McCoy, was killed in February. Police officers had discovered Willie McCoy, 20, asleep in his car in a Taco Bell parking lot in Vallejo, with a gun in his lap and the doors locked. When McCoy started to wake up, the six officers fired a total of 55 shots in 3.5 seconds, killing him.
"The reality is, officers rarely face consequences, and families like mine are left to wonder who is policing the police," Kori McCoy said on Monday.
Of the new use-of-force law, McCoy said, "It offers a ray of solace for my family and hope that it will spare other families from bearing this burden with us."
After Newsom signed the bill into law, California Police Chiefs Association President Ron Lawrence issued a statement saying that along with another measure that deals with training and funding, the new legislation "will modernize our state's policies on the use of force, implementing the very best practices gathered from across our nation."
The law was approved with bipartisan support and was backed by Newsom and leaders in the Legislature. Along the way, it was tempered to allay concerns raised by police associations — and those compromises have prompted criticisms that the legislation doesn't go far enough in mandating change.
The compromises prompted the Black Lives Matter movement, an early sponsor of the bill, to withdraw its support.
"Unfortunately, in efforts to get law enforcement to lift their opposition, the bill was so significantly amended that it is no longer the kind of meaningful legislation we can support," said Black Lives Matter's Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of its Los Angeles chapter.
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