Nearly 1,100 Americans were killed by police in 2022
There have only been 14 days in all of 2022 that an American wasn’t killed by a police officer.
A demonstrator holds up a poster depicting Amir Locke, a Black man who was shot and killed by Minneapolis police's SWAT team, at a protest in Minneapolis, Feb. 4, 2022. (Tim Evans/Reuters)
There have only been 14 days in all of 2022 that an American wasn’t killed by a police officer.
According to data from Mapping Police Violence, of the nearly 1,098 gun deaths at the hands of law enforcement, 24 per cent of those who were killed were Black, despite making up just 13 per cent of the country’s population.
Black people in the United States are three times more likely to be killed by a police officer while being 1.3 times less likely to be armed than white people.
Mapping Police Violence says Black people are being disproportionately killed by police in as many as 48 of the 50 largest U.S. cities.
Their data shows most killings by police officers often begin with traffic stops, mental health checks, disturbances, non-violent offenses, and situations where no crime was alleged, indicating most law enforcement killings are preventable and unwarranted.
At least one in every three people killed by police were running away, driving away, or otherwise trying to flee. Black and Brown people were more likely to be killed by police while fleeing.
The issue isn’t just about the victims. Police impunity continues to protect the same members of law enforcement who are violating protocol and, in the case of police shootings, are often committing crimes themselves.
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According to Mapping Police Violence, less than two per cent of killings by police in the last decade have resulted in officers being charged with a crime.
Officers have shot and killed 16 more people compared to last year.
Classifying police brutality as ‘torture committed by public officials’
Meanwhile, researcher Nadia Banteka published a study in the UCLA Law Review back in March analyzing police brutality through the lens of torture.
Banteka’s findings show that while legislatures and courts have made efforts to prevent officers who conduct police brutality from being granted immunity in civil cases, "police impunity continues to represent a peculiar gap in our otherwise over-inclusive legal system."
Rather than addressing police brutality in terms of the offense — like assault, battery, or homicide — Banteka’s study suggests a reform of America’s criminal justice system that recognizes incidents of police brutality as "torture committed by public officials."
"If the limits of our language are the limits of our world, our legal system has failed to understand the full horror of police brutality in part because we lack the proper language to describe it," Banteka wrote.
That kind of reform would not only change the lens through which judges try cases of police brutality, but also set a higher standard that reflects the harm caused by those meant to protect and serve.
The statute, as defined by Banteka, would "ban acts committed with the intent to cause severe physical or mental pain or suffering during searches and seizures as well as within jails and prisons."
"The proposed statute provides a name for a particular kind of terror and cruelty that police brutality inflicts without creating yet another offense that can be deployed against private individuals," she wrote.
The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder at the hands, or in this case, the knee of a police officer in 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement saw an unprecedented rise in support across the globe.
But while the idea of reallocating funds away from policing entered the social consciousness in a big way, reporting from The Marshall Project shows police brutality has only increased since Floyd was killed.
After House Democrats passed legislation to reform police practices across the country, the bill, known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, died on the Senate floor. That is, until President Joe Biden signed an executive order in May that also sought to reform policing while also establishing a national database of police misconduct. The law, however, only applies to 100,000 federal law enforcement officers, not at the state or local levels.
Ticketing and voter turnout
Researchers from Cambridge University published a study on Dec. 2 exploring how lower-level police contact, like ticketing, can have a direct impact on voter turnout in U.S. elections.
The study, Ticketing and Turnout: The Participatory Consequences of Low-Level Police Contact, was conducted by Jonathan Ben-Menachem and Kevin T. Morris. The researchers noted that while numerous studies have found that criminal legal contact reduces turnout, there is little understanding of how traffic stops and ticketing affect political participation.
The study analyzed ticketing data from Hillsborough County, Florida, between the 2012 and 2018 elections. Researchers concluded that fines and fees are "increasingly recognized as a form of racialized revenue extraction connected to marginalized communities’ alienation from government."
The idea of "policing for profit" is nothing new. Municipalities and cities have become "more reliant on fines and fees to fund government functions," meaning police are not only tasked with keeping communities safe, but also benefiting the economic bottom line.
Too often, that bottom line comes at the cost of lives: in this case, 1,098.