Reasonable measures to lower police officers' use of force

On June 10, Heather MacDonald of City Journal spoke to the House Judiciary Committee.

...No police critic has ever suggested a benchmark for evaluating the number of officer use-of-force incidents. Ideally, officers would take no one’s life in the course of their duties. But in light of the number of arrests that officers make each year—around 11 million—and the number of deadly weapons attacks on officers—27 a day in just two-thirds of the nation’s police departments—it is not clear that 1,000 civilian deaths, the vast majority occurring in the face of a potentially deadly attack, show a law enforcement profession that is out of control.

...What about unarmed victims of fatal police shootings? As of June 1, the Washington Post’s data base of fatal police shootings showed nine unarmed black victims and 19 unarmed white victims of fatal police shootings in 2019. That number of black unarmed victims is down 76 percent from 2015, when the Post began keeping its data base. The Post defines “unarmed” loosely to include suspects who have grabbed an officer’s gun or who are fleeing from a car stop with a loaded semi-automatic pistol in their vehicle. Those nine allegedly unarmed black victims represent 0.1 percent of all black homicide victims, which number about 7,500 a year—more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined.

...Nevertheless, there are reasonable measures to further lower officer use of force—above all, more hands-on tactical training, practice in de-escalation, and techniques to control stress. Federal support should go to such practical training, not to implicit bias sessions, which are an insult to officers’ intelligence and street knowledge. Nor should police hiring be based on race. A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Existing efforts to boost minority hiring in many departments have already resulted in the elimination of a clean criminal record requirement and in lowered standards for reading comprehension and writing. These changes risk increasing disciplinary problems, rather than reducing them.

...There are bad cops of all races who must be removed. But the overwhelming majority of officers are motivated by a desire to help the most vulnerable among us. Though many officers work under unimaginable conditions, encountering the worst consequences of pervasive family breakdown, they continue to believe fervently in the good people who support them. If this mania of cop hatred is not quelled, those good people will suffer further and the nation’s cities will become places of fear and decay.

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