On the Other Side of Freedom

by DeRay Mckesson

  In ways large and small, we cede aspects of individual autonomy when we choose to live with one another. From the stop signs and traffic lights that create order on our roads, to trusting the FDA to ensure that the foods we eat are safe, we acknowledge that there are some things that individuals should not be able to decide on their own, as the impact on the larger community is too great.

  * * *

  —

  CHIEF IN OUR DESIRE for a well-functioning community is, among other things, the desire that order be preserved, that conflicts be managed in ways that both make us safe and make us feel safe. No one wants disorder or chaos—not in their home, not in their neighborhood, not in their life. Sometimes, though, the compromises we make to purportedly keep order imperil us in unexpected ways. This is true of the way that our desire for safety has manifested. In a cruel twist, it has led us to make sacrifices that make us less safe, that increase the conflicts in our communities, and that empower a set of citizens to create conflict with impunity.

  And it is our desire for safety, combined with measures for conflict management that prize the whims of the most privileged among us, that have led us to the state of policing in this country today.

  The police in America have positioned themselves to be the first defense in addressing conflict. And that evolution has coincided with the fact that conflict is treated uniformly for people of color and other marginalized groups, while conflict is treated with nuance for white people. In theory, the police are the neutral party that responds to conflicts. But power, especially unchecked power, is never neutral. We know that the police function altogether differently depending on who you are or where you come from. The theory of policing is quite far from the reality of policing. For us, at least, that is.

  They primarily wield negative power—that is, they take away to purportedly give. They seize, detain, arrest, imprison, and kill to maintain law and order in society, in order to manage conflict. What does it mean that the institution we’ve created to respond to conflict primarily uses means that are expressly for destruction and not for building? They do nothing to equip people with tools and resources to make better choices in the future, to learn how to manage conflict in the absence of intervention, to understand how their decisions impact the larger society.

  Some people would argue that this is not their role. And given the way they have been allowed to function to date, these people are right. From movies to TV shows, to stump speeches and rallies, they have come to convince society that the only way to ensure safety is to employ negative power with both discretion and impunity. But we know that this does not increase the reality of safety, even if it increases the perception of safety. In many ways, the police are the gateway into the larger system of incarceration. They are not arbiters, they are ushers, shepherding men and women, and increasingly children, into subjection.

  It is the people on the margins who are most aware of the dissonance between the theory and practice of the police and policing. There are three reasons for this: first, because they have intimate knowledge of the difference between conflicts of survival and conflicts of choice, and of how the police respond to both; second, because they have endured the presence of negative power as a means of control in the name of order, stability, and community for ages; and last, because they know that their instances of conflict in community almost always involve the weight of the police, whereas those of other members of the community, namely those who are white, do not.

  Conflicts of survival arise as a result of the conditions created by the inequity in society, conditions like poverty and its concentration, mass incarceration, mass supervision, or the structural lack of access. This is not to excuse any range of conflicts that arise as a result of personal failures in judgment, but to note that some are a result of choices that have been made or allowed at the structural level. So there are high amounts of reported theft in places where poverty is the most stark, high levels of drug use and distribution in places where poverty and incarceration coincide, gun crimes in communities of densely concentrated poverty, and assaults in places where the traditional justice system has failed and a system of street justice is all anyone knows.

  Conflicts of choice are those that are primarily the result of the personal decisions of an individual and not the result of systemic failures resulting in inequity. These are things like tax fraud, domestic abuse, insider trading, arson, embezzlement.

  As a society, we have control over the conditions that lead to the conflicts of survival. And as a society, we have largely made the choice that we will allow them to continue. We could choose to end poverty; end homelessness; develop a robust program for addressing mental illness; guarantee that every adult and child has food and shelter; and institute a living wage and work opportunities for everyone. We could make these choices at a much larger scale in society. But we choose not to.

  The consolidation of negative power, especially with no oversight or accountability, is the gateway to totalitarianism. Communities of color and marginalized communities have experienced the realities of how the heavy presence of negative power can fundamentally alter life forever. We’re increasingly seeing unrest that either begins with police violence or is sustained because of the absence of the police. It is important to remember that this negative power is not used in white communities with as much frequency or with the same intensity that it is used in communities of color. And this matters, because white people experience a host of diversion programs and their like when they engage in similar types of conflict. We also see the police create a conflict in order to then solve the conflict—the escalation of conflicts involving actors with mental illness is a ready example of this.

  Will we always need a response to conflict? Yes. Do we need the police as they currently exist? No. It is not simply that policing is broken. This isn’t like a toy. Policing isn’t something to be bandaged up and fixed. The institution of policing is built on an overly simplistic understanding of conflict, flawed assumptions about reducing conflict over time, and a denial of the way that structural bias influences the way conflict is addressed. Policing as we know it is the wrong response to the challenges of conflict that we experience in communities. I think of policing today as a drinking glass with holes in it. No matter how many times you plug a hole here, mend one there, water continues to leak. At some point, you need to acknowledge the glass is faulty. That’s policing.

  Importantly, the problem is not limited to a few bad apples, but rather a bad barrel—today’s culture of policing simply doesn’t match the needs of communities.

  It’s also not a matter of a bad policeman or good policeman. Indeed, this is not about individual people. It’s about a system, an institution, that is responding in ways that don’t actually make sense for the people they purport to serve. We hear the police tout the notion of being a guardian or a warrior in communities. But we don’t need guardians if the guardians kill us, and we don’t need warriors at war with the people needing protection.

  We have been convinced that we will not know safety if we do not know the police. But says who? They are the thin line between a complete overhaul of the system and a tinkering at the edges of the status quo. And this is why people double down on their power. But we must be able to conceive of another way to respond to conflict that is not rooted in negative power—we have done it elsewhere, in homes, in classrooms, in communities. We have seen models of restorative justice, in which communities manage conflicts that arise among themselves, without needing the intervention of a government agency. We have to be honest and imaginative about where we are and where we need to be.

  Like all institutions, policing wants to convince you that it is permanent, the only way forward, and in its best form now. But the truth is obvious.

  In January 2015, Leon Kemp, Reggie Cunningham, Brittany Packnett, Johnetta Elzie, and I, a group who met during the protests and had since begun collaborating on soluti
ons, realized that we were playing a game with only half of the pieces, a quarter of the board, and without knowing the rules, if there were any. In the days following the initial protests, we all heard more and more stories shared on the streets and through Twitter of black men, women, and children who were victims of police violence. It was becoming clearer that our collective demand that officers be indicted and hope that they were convicted was being roundly ignored. There was no accountability anywhere across the country, and we were trying to understand the how and why of it. Understanding the scope of what we were grappling with seemed like a necessary starting point.

  What we quickly realized was that the federal government could tell you how many inches of rainfall there was in rural Missouri in the 1800s, but it could not provide reliable statistics on the number of people the police killed last year, let alone all the other forms of police violence impacting communities.

  Around this time, Samuel Sinyangwe, a young policy expert and data scientist in San Francisco, reached out via Twitter with an interesting proposal. He’d been engaged in policy, and though he hadn’t been with us in the streets in Ferguson, he knew that if the protests were ever to have substantive impact, we’d need data to inform a set of demands that had yet to emerge. He thought it would be possible to build the first comprehensive database and analysis of fatal police violence in the United States, including data on all types of violence that resulted in death. He wanted my help. A tweet turned into a phone call and then into Sam becoming part of our team.

  The difficulty with building the database was that the police actively resist sharing this kind of information. If you get killed by a police officer in this country, the only way that you currently appear in a data set is if a newspaper or other media outlet records your death. Any data that you can readily recount about police violence is the result of media outlet aggregation—there is no official government tally in which all police departments must participate. To this day, this reality has enabled politicians on both sides of the aisle to avoid addressing actual solutions while feeding the narrative that there is nothing that can be done besides offering platitudes. While the FBI technically collects data on killings by police through its annual Supplementary Homicide Report, this report is flawed in fundamental ways. For one, the data is self-reported; it relies on each of the nation’s eighteen thousand police departments to submit data, which means that if a department doesn’t report it, then there simply is no data at all. Florida, for instance, reported zero instances of police violence across the entire state between 2004 and 2014, which a simple Google search demonstrates is false.

  As if that weren’t problematic enough, the definition of police killing is so narrow that if it doesn’t meet the bar of justifiable homicide, then it is grouped into regular homicide data. In practice, this means some of the homicides the federal government attributed to civilians were actually perpetrated by police. Even if the data was accurate, the way the government makes it accessible limits the type of analysis that can be done. It would be impossible to undertake analyses by place, race, and circumstance, as we ultimately did.

  The Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 actually mandated the reporting of this data by police departments to the Department of Justice, and allowed the Department of Justice to cut 10 percent of funding to departments that did not comply. But reinforcing the complicity of the government in hiding the actions of the police from the public, this act has never been enforced and there remains no incentive for departments to provide accurate data.

  * * *

  —

  MAPPING POLICE VIOLENCE (mappingpoliceviolence.org), as it was later named, sought to build on the work of Fatal Encounters and Killed by Police, the two major databases on police violence that attempted to do what the government could, but seemed not to want to, do. They pioneered a methodology for finding cases online without having to go through the police departments themselves. They set up elaborate ways of finding reports of police violence—compiling data from crowdsourced databases, local media reports, social media, and public records requests—and then logged them, which was especially important given that police departments are not required to publicly report instances of police violence.

  Mapping Police Violence (MPV) merged these databases and then filled in missing information about race (40 percent of the data from those databases didn’t include race), and added an armed/unarmed category. Our work involved analyses of the hundred largest cities in the country and visualized the data by race, city, and state in ways that had never been done before. MPV was the first comprehensive national analysis of fatal police violence in the United States, and it was in a format that made the information actionable. We had to do the work the government was unable or unwilling to do.

  A few months following the release of Mapping Police Violence, the Washington Post and the Guardian released their own versions of the database. However, each had certain limitations: the Washington Post, for instance, only included instances of killings by officers who used guns, meaning that if an officer choked someone to death, that death would not be included; the Guardian omitted some off-duty killings. And each of those versions has data going back only as far as 2015, limiting the ability to identify trends and patterns over time.

  In spite of the challenges, different methodological choices, and the likelihood that a small proportion of police violence incidents slip past media outlets, especially in smaller towns without newspapers or digital media, the overall findings were clear and compelling. We found that police kill twelve hundred people each year in America,* meaning one in every three people killed by a stranger in this country is killed by a police officer.* An additional fifty thousand people are hospitalized each year after being injured by police.* This violence disproportionately impacts black communities. Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts and are more likely to be unarmed when killed.* Black people are more likely to be stopped, searched, arrested,* and subjected to police use of force.* Police violence is so prevalent in black communities that the majority of black youth have either personally experienced or witnessed police violence in their lives. And there was no accountability for this violence: in 97 percent of all police killings, the criminal justice system does not charge officers with any crime, and in 99 percent of cases the officer is not convicted.*

  There were three even more striking things that we learned from the new analysis provided through MPV: The first is that place matters—police violence varied by city in notable ways; second, police violence wasn’t explained by crime rates as some had suggested; and last, police violence was more constant than we had previously understood.

  In Baltimore, we found that every person killed by a police officer for as far back as our database went, to 2014, was a black man. In Cleveland, we showed that everyone killed since 2012, all ten people, were black, and seven were unarmed. We found that St. Louis has by far the highest rate of police violence in the country. Black men in St. Louis are killed by police at a rate twice as high as the US murder rate.

  It made sense, then, that when we were in the streets during the protests, so many people had stories about a previous encounter that either they or a friend had had with the police. The St. Louis region was literally unlike any other when it came to the violence of the police.

  We also found that in these hotspots of police violence nobody was focusing on it or intervening.* The Department of Justice was responding to where the most high-profile crisis was happening, largely as a result of unrest, but not always the places where police violence was most acute—like in Oklahoma City, where one in six homicides were committed by police; or Orlando and St. Louis City, which had the highest rates of police violence overall.

  In each place where there was an uprising or a sustained protest, there was a history of police violence beyond the sparking incident. In each case, we had the data to show a patter
n of racism and police violence in that city to help people understand that this was a systemic problem, and that these were not isolated incidents.

  Importantly, the data also provided us with the ability to confirm what we knew to be true anecdotally. We knew that the violence of the police was constant, but the data allowed us to tell the story of police violence in new ways. In 2015, for instance, there were only fourteen days where a police officer didn’t kill someone. And of the sixty police departments in the top one hundred cities with available data, only the Riverside Police Department in Riverside, California, did not kill anyone in 2015.*

  One of the analyses we did that still stuns me was to chart cities where only black people were killed by police. We already knew that police violence was disproportionately targeted to black people—black people are 41 percent of the victims despite being only 20 percent of the population in those sixty cities. But we also found out that fourteen police departments exclusively killed black people in 2015: Minneapolis, St. Louis, Baltimore, Atlanta, Kansas City (Missouri), Cleveland, Virginia Beach, Boston, Washington DC, Raleigh, Milwaukee, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Charlotte-Mecklenburg.*

  As we reflected on the sustained, unchecked violence against black bodies at the hands of law enforcement, we realized just how intentional the control of this information was. In the absence of such information, police departments and their advocates were free to tell any story that served their interests. White America’s deference to police served to shield it from interrogation, and the stories woven by the police only served to amplify their standing and delegitimize grievances.