Before we examine the topic of police brutality in America, we must pay tribute to those who have lost their lives to police brutality. They are not just statistics, but rather individuals who fell victim to a system riddled with injustice. Even though their deaths were a moment in time, the scars inflicted upon their communities, their families, their livelihoods, will forever remain ingrained in our history.
We must say their names.
This project examines collected data on police brutality incidents between 2013 and 2020. It accounts for Black, White, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American races, as well as the Hispanic ethnicity.
A geographic view of police brutality does not account for population densities. To accomodate for this, we first examined the proportion of police brutality incidents with a racial breakdown. In this graph, the inner ring represents the rate of total deaths at the hands of the police, while the outer ring represents the percentage of the US total population for each race.
Black people make up 13% of the US population. They also make up 26% of police deaths - that is 1,957 people. They are killed at double the rate of their population percentage. Additionally, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders make up a small percentage of the total population, yet their death rates are unproportionally high, more than three times the size of their population.
This highlights the disproportionate impact of police brutality on communities of color in comparison to other races.
Violent crime and police homicide incidents are an extremely small percentage of the total population. To show more reasonable numbers, we define violent crime rate with a 10^3 multiplier, and police brutality rate with a 10^6 multiplier.
Hover over different points to see which city corresponds to these rates.
It's not about crime. We see that there is no relationship between violent crime rate and police brutality rate.
If violent crime has no effect, then what does?
Take a look at these four major cities that implemented de-escalation policies in their police departments in 2016. Included in these policies are specific tactics that officers should use to minimize the need to use force during an incident and increase voluntary compliance of a subject.
Although there is an obvious improvement trend in Cincinnati and Denver, it is important to recognize that there are so many factors that affect police brutality rate; the decrease is not necessarily caused by the policy, but it iss necessary to consider whether or not the implementation of a widespread de-escalation policy could help lower police brutality rates.
The next scope of exploration was heavily influenced by the current movements movements that fiercely call for cops to be held accountable for their aggressive actions. Policies are not able to carry as much weight if they are not regularly enforced and if those who fail to follow them are not correctly reprimanded. We have already lost so many individuals to such an inequitable system of policing, and it is only just that brutality against innocent civilians has strict consequences. Our exploration investigates how much accountability is held against officers who abuse their authority.
You guessed __ officers.
After looking into 8543 cases that happened from 2013 to 2020, only 117 officers were charged, meaning that only 1.4% were held accountable for controversial actions. Moreover, of those small numbers of officers, the official record shows us the results of only 48 officers in which a total of 19 were convicted with 29 were aquitted.
Having only 19 out of 117 officers sentenced within the past 7 years on record shows the immense amount of power exercised at the expense of the victims. Many of these use of force incidents are clear faults of the police officers involved, like that of George Floyd, who was weaponless, and killed from persistent and excessive use of force, and disregard by other officers. But even in cases where there is no malicious intent behind the deaths, police need to be held accountable to prevent careless misuse of power in the future. As of today, police are barely held accountable.
Throughout the whole process as we worked with public data, we had to be deliberate about how we merged datasets and the type of connections that we drew from the numbers. The datasets we used for this project had many limitations which only allowed us to determine associations rather than causations.
For example, the lack of transparent police data that examines the effects of policies on police brutality rates does not allow us to make any causal assumptions of any relationships between policies or budgets and police brutality rates as there are no indicators of which, if any, of the department's policies were used. Not only from a data perspective but also from the perspective of an American citizen, data transparency would educate our population about what is actually happening in our country, but access to this data is limited by systems at play within police departments
Having explored data regarding police brutality and racial equity, we have come to the conclusion that due to the lack of details in the data, there is so much vulnerability for justice. At the end of the day, we need to remember that once an incident of police brutality occurs, even if a report is required, the cops complete that report without a single word from an arrested, potentially innocent, civilian.
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