Osita: first off, thank you so much for taking part in this. More than ever, I think it is crucial that people with different perspectives make genuine efforts to talk to one another.
My takeaway from the George Floyd protests is two-fold. First, police departments are rife with abuse and corruption. Of the 50 million (or so) police-civilian interactions that take place every year, most go off without a hitch, but a significant minority end with a cop unnecessarily using force on a suspect. What’s more, it is vanishingly rare to see a cop disciplined, much less prosecuted, for such abuse. The push for reasonable reforms (universal bodycams, outside review boards, and changing qualified immunity, for example) that these protests have called forth is entirely a good thing.
Second, the founding premise of BLM—the notion that racist cops are killing unarmed black people—is a pernicious myth. For every unarmed black person killed by the cops, there is at least one (but usually many) unarmed white person killed in almost exactly the same way. For every George Floyd, there is a Tony Timpa. We have heard the names Breonna Taylor, Tamir Rice, and Michael Brown, but not the names Derek Cruice, Daniel Shaver, and Dylan Noble. The truth is that there are many more white names (in absolute numbers) than black names. But they never get elevated to national news, so many people get the false impression that this only (or overwhelmingly) happens to black people. On a per-capita basis, it’s true that black people are more likely to be killed while unarmed—i.e., black people comprise 14% of the American population but about 35% of unarmed people killed by cops. But without controlling for confounding variables, this fact alone tells us nothing about racial bias. (If it did, then you could show an overwhelming sexist bias in deadly shootings by observing that over 90% of victims are men). Studies that have controlled for confounding variables consistently find no anti-black bias in deadly shootings (1, 2, 3, 4), and some of them have even found anti-white bias. To be clear, these studies have found anti-black bias in other aspects of policing, such as a cop’s likelihood to put his hands on a suspect. But not in shootings. Our failure to have an evidence-based conversation about this issue is tearing the nation apart. There are bad cops. And there are racist cops. But there is also an ever-growing moral panic about racism and white supremacy. People are hoping to find racism even where it does not exist. Others are terrified to express even the slightest skepticism of the BLM narrative for fear that their careers will be destroyed. And some have actually had their livelihoods destroyed by riots that were caused (in part) by this widespread falsehood.
We have to push for reasonable reforms of police departments. But we also have to correct the deeply-entrenched false narrative that racist cops are killing black people.