Police brutality?

There are a couple of survey questions about views of the police which go back to the 1960s.  One is "In some places in the nation there have been charges of police brutality. Do you think there is any police brutality in this area, or not?"  It was asked in 1965, 1967, a few times in the 1990s, and in 2005.  I have written about it before, and noted that the belief that there was police brutality in "this area" was higher in the 1990s and after than in the 1960s, but I didn't break it down by race, so I'll do that here.*  The individual level data for 2005 are not available, so I use surveys from 1965, 1967, 1991, and 1999.
                  
              Is                   Isn't
        White  Black         White    Black
1965        7%      34%          82%      46%
1967        5%      15%          83%      59%
1991       36%      60%          58%      39%
1999       35%      64%          60%      30%

I computed log-linear models (treating don't know as a middle answer) and got the following estimates of the racial gap in opinions:





 The difference is largest in 1965.  There's enough uncertainty in the estimates so it's hard to say if it's a downward trend or a difference between 1965 and all later years.  But the major thing is that belief in the existence of police brutality in "your area" increased among both blacks and whites.  Why?  One possibility would be that it actually did.  However, I think it's more likely that it's because media coverage increased and people talked about it more.  In support of this interpretation, there were a lot of "don't know's" in the 1960s (20%-25% among blacks), but few in the 1990s.  I think that there's been a general tendency for don't know's to decline, although I haven't studies it systematically or seen any research, but this change is unusually large.


Although the number of blacks in the samples is small, the decline in belief in police brutality between 1965 and 1967 is too large to be plausibly explained by sampling error.  1967 was the "long hot summer" of urban unrest, and the survey was taken in early August, after the Newark and Detroit riots and many smaller ones.  Although the response to those included many examples of police brutality, the riots may have made people more sympathetic to police.  Although many accounts focus exclusively on white backlash, support for a "get tough" approach is a natural reaction to disorder and crime.  


*My figure in that post has a mistake--it shows that belief that there was police brutality was a little higher in 1967 than in 1965, but it was actually a little lower.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

Nothing happened?

A few days ago, Michelle Alexander wrote that "after decades of reform, countless commissions and task forces and millions of dollars poured into 'smart on crime' approaches, the police behave with about as much brutality today as they did in 1966 when a group of young black men . . . created an organization called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense."  She didn't give any source for this claim, but it reminded me of a New York Times story I had mentioned in a recent post, I had mentioned a New York Times story which said that in New York City, the number of people shot and killed by the police had fallen from 66 in 1972 to eight in 2014.  After a little searching, I located the source of those figures:  the NYPD's annual "Use of Force Report" reports, which started in the 1970s as the "Firearms Discharge Report."  It has annual statistics for the numbers killed and injured by police shootings.  Here they are (on a logarithmic scale):



The decline is pretty steady.  It probably has some connection to the crime rate--the number killed and injured rose during the crack epidemic of the late 1980s--but started in a time when crime was steady or increasing.  It also doesn't seem to differ much by mayoral administration. 


The report also gives the number of police killed and injured by shootings.

 


Again, there is a downward trend, and there's a strong correlation between the numbers of police killed or injured and civilians killed or injured by police.  This may provide some insight into why it was possible to change things.  Most killings by police involve situations in which someone is armed and posing some kind of threat, so police are at risk too.  Once the department adopted a policy of investigating and reporting on all incidents, it was possible to learn how to keep those situations from developing or getting out of control.

Of course, this is just shootings--it doesn't show whether there were changes in other kinds of police brutality.  Still, it seems that reform is not as futile as Alexander suggests.   I'm not that familiar with crime and justice data, but there are some surveys about perceptions of police treatment which I'll talk about in a future post. 

Tolerance--a long-delayed part 2

This post is inspired by the controversy over Tom Cotton's NY Times op-ed which let to the resignation of the Times opinion editor.  Some people argue that liberals have become less committed to free speech (or that "liberals," who are committed to the principle, are being replaced by "progressives," who aren't).   To quote Bari Weiss "the New Guard has a different worldview . . .in which the right of people to feel emotionally and psychologically safe trumps what were previously considered core liberal values, like free speech."  Is there any evidence of this in surveys?  The basic trend is simply increasing support for free speech, as I discussed in this post, which looked at changes since the 1970s in whether certain kinds of people should be allowed to teach in college, make a public speech in your community, or have a  book in the public library.  For four of the examples--a gay man, a Communist, an atheist, and someone who believes in "letting the military run the country"--there were steady upward trends.  For "a person who believes that blacks are genetically inferior" there was no real change.  I suggest that this difference was because there was increasing disapproval of the view that blacks were genetically inferior, and that worked against the general tendency to support more freedom of speech.

What if we look at the trends in particular groups?   Usually, they are about the same--all groups move in the same direction at about the same pace.  But views about whether "a person who believes that blacks are genetically inferior" (I'll say "racist" for short) should be allowed to teach in a college are different*.  Breaking it down by race and education:

 


Support for allowing such a person to teach has grown among whites without college degrees, and among blacks, but has declined among whites with college degrees.  Looking more closely, the trend seems to have stopped or even reversed slightly among whites without college degrees in the last ten years or so.  That may be true for black college graduates too, although the numbers are too small to be sure.  But the basic story is a difference between white college graduates and everyone else.  As a result of the differing trends, there's been convergence among the groups:  in the 1970s, white college graduates were a lot more favorable than others, but now they're only slightly more favorable (and in some years, the black college graduate sample has been more favorable than the white college graduate sample). 


I followed by looking at the differences among college graduates by self-rated ideology.

 


Once again, there are different trends.  For liberals, there's been gradual decline in support.  For conservatives and moderates, it stayed about the same until about 10 years ago, and seems to have declined since then.  Once liberals were more in favor of allowing a racist to teach, but now there's no clear difference by ideology.

This raises a question of whether the change among college-educated liberals is general or limited to issues involving race.  There's no relevant data (as far as I know)--the GSS asks about someone who favors military rule, but that's not an active political issue.  What you'd want is a question on tolerance of something like a person who is opposed to same-sex marriage. 

There is also a question of whether the trends will change.  If you extrapolate from the first figure, within a few years college-educated whites will be less tolerant on this issue than blacks.  That doesn't seem likely to me.  At the moment, I think the position that blacks are "genetically inferior" has come to be almost universally condemned, even among whites--you can't go much farther in that direction.  So support for the principle of tolerance will drive the trends, and I think support for that principle will continue to grow.  I'll discuss why I think that in a future post.  

*There are also the items on whether a person like that should be allowed to make a speech or have a book in the public library.  I haven't looked at them--the one on teaching in college seemed most relevant to current controversies. 

Geography of police shootings: not much change

In 2016, I had several posts on fatal police shootings.  Unfortunately, the issue of killing by police has come up again, so I went back  to the data, which are maintained by the Washington Post and available here.  Of course, they just involve fatal shootings, but there doesn't seem to be any other systematic collection of other kinds of deaths at the hands of police, and presumably the great majority of deaths are by shooting.

There is no trend in the annual totals:

2015    994
2016    962
2017    986
2018    992
2019  1004
2020    400

When I downloaded the data a few days ago, almost exactly 40% of 2020 had passed, so that projects to just about 1000 in 2020.

In 2016, I computed the rates of fatal shootings for the 100 largest cities and noted that there were large differences among them. That is still true--the highest rates are in  St. Louis, Las Vegas, Kansas City, Miami, and Orlando.  The lowest, going from low to high:  Irvine, New York, Greensboro, Plano, Chula Vista.  If we restrict it to cities with a population of over 500,000, the lowest are New York, Nashville, San Diego, Philadelphia, and Boston.  Annual rates per 100,000 ranged from .07 to 1.8.  New York City had a total of 37, while St. Louis had 30, with about 1/25 of New York's population.  I give the whole list at the end of this post.

My initial idea was to look for changes in the rates, but there wasn't much to see there.  That was partly because the numbers are small in most cities, so it's hard to distinguish possible trends from random variation.  There are three in which there is moderately strong evidence of a decline--  Indianapolis, San Francisco, and Oakland--and none in which there's clear evidence of an increase.  However, as mentioned above, the totals have hardly changed.

People often speak of states and cities as "laboratories of democracy"--the idea is that they can try out different approaches and adopt the ones that work best.  Organizational change is difficult, but it is possible:  according to a NY Times story  "In 1972, New York officers fired 2,510 bullets and killed 66 people. By 2014, there were 288 shots fired and eight people killed."  You might think that after police killings began to get more attention, that public officials in places like St Louis would start seeing if they could emulate places like New York or Nashville.  But that doesn't seem to have happened.  Why not?  I would guess that it's people who are interested in politics have become increasingly focused on the national level.  Moreover, most people who are engaged in politics are middle class, so when they pay attention to local issues, it's of things that are of more concern to middle class people, like schools.

PS:  There are some data on police department policies involving the use of force in the 100 largest cities.  It would be interesting to see whether they are related to the rate of deaths.

Rate of police killings (annual, per 100,000), 100 largest cities:

 1            Irvine      0.072
2          New York       0.080
3        Greensboro       0.130
4             Plano       0.131
5       Chula Vista       0.139
6       Jersey City       0.140
7           Lubbock       0.149
8        Chesapeake       0.157
9         Lexington       0.177
10        Nashville       0.198
11        San Diego       0.199
12     Philadelphia       0.201
13           Boston       0.222
14    Winston-Salem       0.230
15          Hialeah       0.234
16   Virginia Beach       0.245
17          Detroit       0.246
18          Raleigh       0.246
19           Dallas       0.256
20          Chicago       0.259

21       Fort Wayne       0.285
22   Corpus Christi       0.286
23          Buffalo       0.287
24   St. Petersburg       0.288
25           Laredo       0.290
26          Gilbert       0.299
27       Pittsburgh       0.304
28      Minneapolis       0.315
29    San Francisco       0.321
30           Toledo       0.331
31          Lincoln       0.334
32        Cleveland       0.334
33          Seattle       0.352
34         Chandler       0.355
35        Charlotte       0.358
36         San Jose       0.361
37     Indianapolis       0.369
38          Madison       0.372
39       Fort Worth       0.378
40          El Paso       0.381

41      Los Angeles       0.387
42  North Las Vegas       0.394
43          Oakland       0.398
44          Fremont       0.399
45        Riverside       0.402
46       Washington       0.413
47      New Orleans       0.428
48        Milwaukee       0.432
49       Cincinnati       0.434
50          Houston       0.452
51          Memphis       0.452
52       Sacramento       0.453
53            Omaha       0.459
54           Irving       0.470
55           Durham       0.503
56          Wichita       0.522
57          Norfolk       0.526
58         Portland       0.527
59          Anaheim       0.528
60      San Antonio       0.542

61          Garland       0.547
62       Scottsdale       0.547
63            Tampa       0.552
64         St. Paul       0.554
65        Anchorage       0.558
66        Baltimore       0.566
67           Austin       0.576
68        Henderson       0.583
69           Newark       0.591
70        Santa Ana       0.607
71           Fresno       0.641
72    Colo. Springs       0.649
73         Columbus       0.654
74            Boise       0.679
75         Honolulu       0.682
76       Louisville       0.692
77       Long Beach       0.703
78     Jacksonville       0.704
79        Arlington       0.716
80         Stockton       0.727

81          Atlanta       0.798
82           Denver       0.814
83             Mesa       0.824
84             Reno       0.844
85           Aurora       0.876
86    Oklahoma City       0.880
87          Phoenix       0.889
88      Baton Rouge       0.891
89         Richmond       0.925
90         Glendale       0.925
91           Tucson       1.010
92      Bakersfield       1.090
93            Tulsa       1.101
94   San Bernardino       1.114
95      Albuquerque       1.159
96          Orlando       1.230
97            Miami       1.260
98      Kansas City       1.286
99        Las Vegas       1.306
100       St. Louis       1.877