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.