This is the second edition of what will be an occasional newsletter focusing on government and elections but really power in Louisville and Kentucky, helping explore who has it, who is gaining it, who is losing it and why. (For example, Jefferson County Public Schools and Humana are very powerful forces in Louisville, even though they are not “political” institutions.)
The Intractable 1000
In 2014, after a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri shot and killed Michael Brown in the incident that brought the Black Lives Matter movement to the center of American discourse, news organizations started tracking how often on-duty police officers shot and killed civilians. (Neither the federal nor state governments were doing detailed counting of these incidents.)
In 2015, that number of fatal police shootings of civilians was 994, according to the Washington Post. In 2016, it was 962. In 2017, it was 986. In 2018, it was 992. In 2019, it was 1,004.
So far, in 2020, that number is around 375, per the Post. Perhaps the COVID-19 outbreak will dramatically reduce violent police interactions with civilians this year. But for now, I would expect that around 1,000 Americans will be killed by officers this year too. These 1000 killings each year are from a wide range of incidents. In some of them, I suspect many Americans would believe that the officer legitimately felt that there was a threat to his or her life. Other cases raise concerns that the officer was not justified in killing the civilian. The incidents happen all over the country, as you can see on the map on the Post’s website. (There have been 93 fatal shootings of civilians by police in Kentucky since Jan. 2015.)
But there is one very distinct pattern--black people are killed by the police at much higher rates than whites and at a disproportionate rate compared to their numbers in the U.S. population. The Washington Post data suggests that around 27 percent of people who have been shot and killed by police the last five years are black Americans, who are about 13 percent of the U.S. population. The majority of people (around 50 percent) killed by police officers are white, as are the majority of Americans (60 percent). Hispanics are also killed by the police at higher rates than white Americans, although that disparity is not as large as the black-white one.
All of this is relevant in the wake of the fatal shooting of a black woman named Breonna Taylor by three white Louisville police officers in March in an incident that has recently drawn national attention and resulted in the resignation of the city’s police chief.
Exactly what happened that night is still under dispute, with both state and federal officials now investigating it.
The data from the Washington Post suggests Taylor’s death is part of a surprising and troubling pattern. America has now had a six-year national discussion about police killings, with a focus on the fact that those killings are disproportionately of black Americans. But the number of fatal shootings has not decreased. The data suggests that either this problem is somehow intractable, that there is not a sustained effort to solve it or perhaps a combination of those two things.
So why isn’t the number of police shootings of civilians going down? One explanation offered by the Post is “probability theory. “It holds that the quantity of rare events in huge populations tends to remain stable absent major societal changes, such as a fundamental shift in police culture or extreme restrictions on gun ownership,” the Post wrote.
That explanation hints at some other theories beyond probability (perhaps reducing gun ownership in America might change this pattern.) The most obvious explanations for the stability of the number of fatal police shootings of civilians are
1. Police practices haven’t really changed since 2014, despite all the attention on police shootings of civilians.
2. Police practices have changed and officers are trying to reduce the number of times they kill civilians, but around 1000 times each year in America, one of these incidents is unavoidable.
But there could be other explanations. I’m going to keep writing about this subject, so please reach out to me (perrylbacon@gmail.com) if you have expertise or have read other research on why the number of police killings of civilians has not gone down. Also, the number of police killings may not be the place where change has happened as a result of Black Lives Matter activism. You could imagine that perhaps the number of killings has not changed, but the scrutiny of them has--so there are more formal investigations of police killings of civilians; more officers are suspended, fired or even prosecuted as a result of these killings; police chiefs or other police leaders are more likely to face political repercussions in the wake of these incidents.
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More on the fallout from Breonna Taylor’s death--Civil rights advocates want the officers who shot Taylor to be fired and charged with crimes.
"We've been winning little battles. But there's a major war, and that war is that the officers responsible for taking Breonna's life and for terrorizing Kenny's life, have to be held accountable,” said national civil rights activists Tamika Mallory, per the Courier-Journal.
Meanwhile, Berl Perdue, head of the Kentucky State Fraternal Order of Police (the union for police officers) told the Courier Journal, “The actual facts of this case paint a much different picture than what has been portrayed nationally. The false reports have further divided the community from the police. Rumors and misnomers have led to death threats to officers and their families.”
The effigy--There has been a lot of attention on the incident in Frankfort on Sunday in which someone hung an effigy of Gov. Andy Beshear on a tree on the grounds of the state Capitol building, near the governor’s mansion where Beshear and his family live. That incident happened as others held a rally to protest some of the restrictions Beshear has imposed on the state’s residents to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
Many Democratic elected officials in the state criticized the effigy and linked that action to the broader Republican Party, which both in Kentucky and nationally has criticized measures enacted by Beshear and other governors that have kept businesses closed and limited large gatherings. Many Democrats in the state legislature urged Kentucky Republicans to condemn the effigy. Many Republicans, including Mitch McConnell, did so.
I wasn’t surprised to see Republican elected officials condemn the effigy display. Not only was it clearly offensive, but the protesters at the state capitol on Sunday and those who have held previous protests have somewhat different positions on the underlying issues around these restrictions compared to GOP elected officials.
In fact, there are essentially three different Republican positions on these measures:
Rank and file Republicans aren’t that opposed to COVID-19 restrictions. When Southeast Christian Church in Louisville has in-person services, that is probably one of the largest numbers of people who voted for President Trump gathered in one place in Kentucky each week--the state’s largest church is theologically conservative, evangelical and has a lot of white members. Southeast Christian didn’t have in-person services on Sunday, as WDRD’s Eric Crawford reported this weekend, even though President Trump has been urging churches to start meeting in person.
That’s likely because the church’s members are not clamoring to meet in person. (Crawford noted in his piece that the church’s pastor says that members are split on the question.) National polls suggest that while Republicans are more leery than Democrats of some of the COVID-19 restrictions, they have been social distancing and are wary of getting the coronavirus. I would suspect that’s generally the same for Kentucky Republicans. A recent poll suggested that Beshear’s initial handling of the outbreak was overwhelmingly popular with Kentuckians (81 percent approved), and you can’t get to 81 percent support in Kentucky without the backing of a lot of Republicans/conservatives/Trump voters.
GOP elected officials are opposed to them, in part because businesses are. The Republican Party, both nationally and in Kentucky, is probably best understood, at least in its current incarnation, not as the party of Trump, or small government or white, Christian identity politics, but the party tightly allied with businesses, business groups, large corporations and other economic elites. So the main reason that Republican officials are leery of the COVID restrictions, in my view, is that businesses don’t like them.
I doubt McConnell is clamoring to do large public events, which Beshear is discouraging. But he is not supportive of major restrictions on businesses in any context. I’m not saying all Republican elected officials are taking this kind of approach, but I think that explains much of their behavior.
The protestors seem to have very broad, ideological opposition to the COVID restrictions. It’s hard to precisely distill the views of the protestors, both because they don’t have a single spokesman and because I haven’t personally been to Frankfort to interview them.
But they seem to be wary of say, wearing masks (in contrast, McConnell has been wearing a mask.) They are making broad claims around “freedom” and seem much more personally enraged at the governor than GOP elected officials. Their stances have some logic---”I will not attend a large church service in the midst of a deadly virus outbreak” and “I do not support the government banning large church services in the midst of a deadly virus outbreak” are, in my view, both positions that can held by a person at the same time.
That said, the tone of the protests on Sunday was scary.