Videos of state-sponsored killings have been going viral for years. Little has changed.
Six years ago this August, Michael Brown, a black 18-year-old who had just graduated from high school, was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo. His death, along with those of so many others, set off a national debate about how to reduce police violence. But the deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis this week and of Breonna Taylor in March are a painful reminder of just how little has changed:
Why has there been so little progress, and what needs to happen for these numbers to go down? Here’s what people are saying.
Many proposed solutions to curb police violence have not proved effective, according to Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy analyst at Campaign Zero. After the uproar over Mr. Brown’s killing, hope mounted that technology could fix a broken system: Wouldn’t requiring officers to wear cameras enable more accountability? By 2015,95 percent of large police departments reported they were using body cameras or had committed to doing so soon. But research has now shown that they have almost no effect on officer behavior.
[Related: “A journalist explains the promises and failures of high-tech policing”]
Some common strategies for reducing racial bias also don’t seem to work. In the United States, black people are three times as likely to be killed by the police than white people. Some criminal justice reform groups have argued that diversifying police forces might close this gap. But Jennifer Cobbina, a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University, has found that it probably doesn’t: The police force in Baltimore, for example, is mostly made up of officers of color, but the department was still found in 2016 to have engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional, racially biased policing.
The jury on whether implicit bias training works is also still out. As Jack Glaser, a Berkeley psychologist who researches racial stereotyping, told Scientific American, “You can raise people’s awareness about the possibility that implicit bias exists and affects them, but that’s not the same thing as stopping it from influencing their judgments.”
Although the number of police killings hasn’t fallen significantly on a national level since 2013, things have improved in some parts of the country, especially in cities. How did they do it? In particular, tighter restrictions on when and how police officers can use force — putting someone in a chokehold, for example, or shooting at a moving vehicle — appear to substantially reduce killings. After making such reforms in 2016, the San Francisco Police Department saw a 30 percent decline in the use of force by 2019, and, as of last May, had gone more than a year without a single officer shooting.
Equipping officers to recognize and handle cases involving mental illness is another front for reform. The San Antonio police have received national attention for developing their own mental health unit, and every officer is required to complete 40 hours of training in crisis intervention — far more than the national average of six.
[Related: “When Mental-Health Experts, Not Police, Are the First Responders”]
Criminal justice scholars have also called for an end to the Pentagon’s practice of donating military equipment to local law enforcement agencies, which research suggests leads to more violence against officers and higher numbers of fatal shootings by the police.
