Policing and Rights

There are between 800,000 and 1.2 million police officers in the United States, depending on how you define them. As of November 6th of this year, 965 people were killed by police officers this year. Some estimates put this number a little higher, but only marginally. At the same time, 26 police officers had been shot and killed as of September 1st in this country.

I'm not going to try to put down either number, because they are tragedies. I'm going to say this though- there are 300 million Americans, about a million cops, and as of 2012, about 11,665,000 people are arrested annually. In other words, most of the time, arrests don't end in a dead cop or accused person. Usually, the cops do their jobs, the accused don't resist or attack, and things go how we design them. Again, i'm talking most of the time.

With that said, that's cold comfort for the 1,000-ish people who will die at the hands of police or their families. It's even colder company if you're black in America. The likelihood of death at the hands of police is considerably higher for black people than white people, adding a clear racial tint to this discussion. This alone is probably a bigger issue than the raw number of police killings itself.

Police by and large do a pretty good job at doing their job in America. Crime is down, and the overwhelming majority of accused criminals are not killed by police. The problem is that the police officers who do kill in the line of duty tend to kill black people at a considerably higher rate than they kill anyone else. That cannot be accidental, or even semi-accidental. It means there is a race problem in America that is fairly serious, particularly in the world of justice. While some would say that is not a big deal, we cannot have a justice system that is not blind, and expect that system to have any credibility. Failure to address this issue will continue to divide our nation along racial lines, and represent a moral failing. No good and decent person of any race wants that.