by Lee Camp, Consortium News:

Just a few facts will change everything you think you know about American police, writes Lee Camp, with pictures by Eleanor Goldfield from the streets of downtown Washington.

With all the protests and anger and violence across the country, a justified discussion about policing has begun on our corporate media airwaves. (I would say the discussion is overdue, but in fact we’ve had it roughly every three years for the past 40 years.) However, despite all the coverage, a deeper debate sits ignored – A debate about why our American police system exists at all, how it works (or doesn’t), and where it came from.

The following 19 facts about American policing will change everything you think you know. First let’s start with the sheer amount of murder.

1. Police kill roughly 1,000 Americans per year. In 2016 The Guardian found that American police murdered 1,093. That’s three lives extinguished by police every day.


2. In the UK the average per year is three murders by police. Not 300. Just three. This means American police generally kill more citizens in a week than the UK will kill in a year. In 2018 Denmark & Switzerland’s police killed no one. Zero. They literally let everyone live. (You would think they would kill at least a few just to stay in practice.)


3. The vast majority of those Americans killed are not “hardened” criminals (whatever that means). The Treatment Advocacy Center finds that one out of every four people killed by U.S. police was severely mentally ill. If you add in simply mentally unstable or cognitively impaired, the number is much higher. Probably well over 50 percent of the time police murder someone, the victim is not of stable and sound mind.


4. Last year NBC news found that since 2005, only 35 officers had been convicted of any crime after having taken someone’s life. If we assume the U.S. averaged 900 police killings per year (a very low estimate) and that only one officer was involved in each killing (an even lower estimate), this means cops are convicted .28% of the time after killing someone. Less than one percent. But it gets worse.


5. NBC reports, “Only three officers have been convicted of murder during this period [2005 to 2019] and seen their convictions stand.” That’s a rate of conviction of .024% – For all intents and purposes police officers can murder with impunity.

What Cops Do All Day

In the nations’ capital. (Eleanor Goldfield)

Now let’s take a moment to disabuse ourselves of the liberal fantasy of policing. The vast majority of what police do in America is not run around catching the evil-doers like an episode of CSI or Law & Order or Die Hard or Starsky & Hutch or all the other TV shows and movies ever made ever.

1. Professor Alex Vitale notes in “The End of Policing” that most cops average less than one felony arrest per year – meaning almost the entirety of a police officer’s day-to-day consists of standing around and occasionally dealing with small or nothing crimes. These “crimes” such as loitering or “causing a disturbance” are designed to simply “put people in the system.” People of color are far more likely to be arrested for these types of crimes. Once “in the system,” the sentence for a future “crime of loitering” or “atrocity of playing loud music” can be much longer.


2. Vitale continues, “Even detectives (who make up only about 15% of police forces) spend most of their time taking reports of crimes that they will never solve—and in many cases will never even investigate. …Most crimes that are investigated are not solved.”


3. Rather than working harder to solve larger crimes, our government officials have created hundreds of smaller “crimes” for police to nail citizens for. In the past few decades there has been a surge of bans on things like sleeping in public, begging, giving away free food, “camping” in public, and sleeping in one’s car. Laws like these only serve to make homelessness (and helping the homeless) illegal and allow police to insert themselves, often upending lives. (Because people begging for change often have it too easy.)


4.  A study in New York City found that over half of those who cycle regularly through the prison system were homeless. Does anyone honestly believe that endlessly grabbing homeless people and charging them for nothing crimes does anything to help our society or the people involved? The fact that most officers spend their days doing this is equivalent to firefighters walking around spraying people’s cigarettes with water while the actual building fires are left to burn. (More on those in a moment.)


5. When wealthy or even middle class people get caught doing most of these small crimes, they are either ignored by the police or let off with a warning. If a Wall Street trader in a suit and tie takes a nap on a bench, do the police lock him up? If a doctor or a dentist or real estate agent is “caught” sleeping in their car, are they brought down to the station? No. These so-called “crimes” serve to simply enforce the class structure and give police a reason to arrest the poor and the non-white.


6. Meanwhile, the true crimes don’t even garner a glance. The largest crimes in the nation and the world are often legal, and even when they aren’t, they have nothing to do with police. Corporate executives endlessly decide to dump toxins in our water or keep a baby powder on the shelves when they know it contains asbestos or continue sales of an herbicide when they know it causes cancer or push opioids on troubled Americans even as the bodies pile up. Generally in such cases, no one will go to prison, no one will do a perp walk with handcuffs on. And in the incredibly rare moment that a top exec is locked up, it has nothing to do with your average police officers.

Designed to Create Crime

Military police in the streets of Washington. (Eleanor Goldfield)

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