culture
politics

After George Floyd, Where Do We Go From Here?

Fellow, Manhattan Institute
Writer, The New Republic
Genesis
Response
Penultimate
Finale

Osita Nwanevu

Writer, The New Republic

June 12th, 2020
First, I’d like to thank Pairagraph for their invitation and Coleman for participating in this discussion. Debates on race and policing often devolve into circular and abstruse fights about the research literature, so I appreciate that you’ve kicked things off by conceding one of the points on the data I probably would have made eventually. “Studies have found bias in other aspects of policing, such as a cop’s likelihood to put his hands on a suspect,” you wrote. “But not in shootings.” Well, George Floyd was not shot by the police. Freddie Gray was not shot by the police. Eric Garner was not shot by the police. The protests we are here to discuss, like some of the other waves of demonstrations against police violence we’ve seen, were spurred by a fatal instance of hands-on, physical abuse. If it’s true that there are racial disparities in the physicality of police interactions, it’s entirely reasonable for protesters to see Floyd’s death as an extreme signifier of broader tendencies in police behavior.
As far as shootings are concerned, a variety of criticisms have been leveled at Roland Fryer’s 2016 paper, which you referenced, and some of them are broadly instructive. One of the larger ones is that even if there aren’t disparities in shootings or killings at the point of interaction with police, African-Americans can still be disproportionately harmed relative to whites if they’re more likely to be confronted by the police in the first place. We know that they are and that the disparities aren’t fully explained by differences in criminal activity. African-Americans are more likely to be arrested for marijuana use, for instance, even though they use the drug at comparable rates to whites. Black drivers are more likely to be searched even when whites are more likely to be found with contraband. There are piles of studies substantiating these and other differences in police treatment before one even considers the disparities African-Americans face within our courts and carceral system -- in sentencing, pretrial detention and access to bail, wrongful convictions and so on.
This is why many of the protesters who’ve taken to the streets these past few weeks have been demanding more than diversified police forces, accountability for particular officers, and targeted reforms to specific practices. There’s a movement now to fundamentally transform or dismantle law enforcement as we know it in this country. And there’s a sense all around that the tragedies capturing national attention have been the products of systemic inequality, not just the actions of racist individuals. That’s ultimately the upshot of Sendhil Mullainathan’s piece for the Times, which you also referenced. ”The deeper you look,” he wrote, “the more it appears that the race problem revealed by the statistics reflects a larger problem: the structure of our society, our laws and policies.”
0 Comments