Black Lives Matter and the Mechanics of Conformity

 

^{Via Quilette. The Views and Opinions of the Authors are purely their own}

The death of George Floyd circulated in a bystander’s excruciating video clip, reignited furious and sometimes violent protests demanding reforms to address police brutality against ethnic minorities. According to the Center for Police Equity’s 2016 report “ The Science of Justice,” black Americans are disproportionately affected by the amount of force used against them by police. Additional investigations have found that black suspects are more likely to be manhandled, pushed to the ground, handcuffed, threatened, or pushed against a wall during a police interaction than their white counterparts. Bias against the black community appears to extend in all kinds of directions, from the courtroom to the maternity ward, where black women are 10 times more likely than white women to have their newborn baby taken from them if they test positive for an illicit drug. The apparently inequitable use of force against ethnic minorities, meanwhile, has unleashed a torrent of emotion and allegations against police departments across the United States in the wake of Floyd’s death, spurred on by celebrities and activists alike. Actress Julianne Moore and actor Aaron Paul joined other celebrities in a short film made in conjunction with the NAACP to protest “systemic bias.” Moore beseeches viewers to understand that, “Black people are being slaughtered in the streets, killed in their own homes,” to which, Paul adds: “Killer cops must be prosecuted, they are murderers. We can turn the tide, it’s time to take responsibility.” In an earlier celebrity video entitled “ 23 Ways You Could Be Killed If You Are Black in America,” Pharrell Williams, Alicia Keys, Rihanna, Chris Rock, Pink, and a litany of other celebrities describe 23 cases of black lives lost to police shootings in different scenarios, and demand “radical transformation to heal the long history of systemic racism so that all Americans have the equal right to live.” But, for all their zealous advocacy, celebrities and protestors alike are reluctant to acknowledge or discuss the nuances of the empirical literature on the racial biases they are protesting. As part of an effort to quantify racial bias in police killings, a 2016 study in the journal Injury found that black Americans are not more likely to be injured or killed by police than white Americans during traffic stops. And, despite the general finding in the Center for Police Equity report that police officers use greater force against black suspects, it also found that blacks are no more likely than whites to be subject to lethal force. In fact, it found that white people face a higher risk of being killed during an arrest. Researchers have also turned their attention to shootings, in particular. An early study provides some evidence of a racial disparity, but not in the expected direction—it found that police fire more bullets at white than black suspects. Things get even weirder when we try to probe psychological biases in police officers. Under multiple intense psychological simulation experiments carried out at Washington State University, police were found to exhibit a propensity to fire on white suspects faster than black suspects, and were also more likely to shoot unarmed whites (these experiments measure split second differences in reaction times that the researchers believe are not susceptible to conscious control). However, it is the work of economist Roland Fryer that has attracted the most attention and discussion of late. An obvious question arises—if black people are more likely to be roughly treated during an encounter with police, how is it possible that they are less likely to be killed? When a female Chicago police officer was beaten by a black man in 2016, she was asked in hospital by her superintendent why she didn’t draw her weapon and defend herself when she could have done so. “She looked at me and said she thought she was going to die, and she knew that she should shoot this guy. But she chose not to because she didn’t want her family or the department to have to go through the scrutiny the next day on national news.” While a white death at the hands of a police officer rarely makes headlines, a black death is likely to incite immediate media coverage, outrage, and protests or riots that last for weeks or months. Researchers have hypothesized in an article for Criminology & Public Policy that the apparent “reverse racism” bias of police shootings reflects law enforcement fear of the consequences of a minority death, “the underlying causes of the reverse racism effect is rooted in people’s concerns about the social and legal consequences of shooting a member of a historically oppressed racial group. . . . . . “There’s so much we don’t know,” says author Sam Harris in a recent podcast, “And yet, most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago.” Harris, known for his staunch atheism and critique of faith-based religion, asks some troubling questions about the Black Lives Matter movement by pointing out that it disguises empirically fragile claims with absolute conviction and then stonewalls any attempt to examine the evidence: “Like most religious awakenings, the movement does not show itself eager to make honest contact with reality.” Just as sticks propped against one another are kept upright by mutual inter-dependence, false beliefs may acquire spurious validity in the public square from the confidence engendered by their popularity. When one is brought up in a society where everybody practices a religion, there is scarcely any reason to question that religion, even though it may have no contact with reality at all. Over the past few months, I’ve asked friends and acquaintances if they believe in an epidemic of killings by police, and if so how they came to believe this. I tended to receive answers such as “everyone knows,” or “literally nobody disagrees.” These are the words of believers who have relied on cues from their peers to form the belief. Informational cascades are then reinforced as they interlink with our psychological biases and other social mechanisms. Because white Americans are more likely to commit crime than Asian Americans, they are twice as likely to interact with police and to be killed while doing so. Black Americans are seven times more likely to commit murder as white Americans, and the majority of murders and robberies in the United States are carried out by black Americans even though they are a minority. Thirty-five percent of police officers are killed by a black offender. As Roland Fryer and other scholars are aware, levels of criminality are independent variables that must be controlled to determine the dependent variable under discussion—police violence motivated by racism. “Of course, black lives matter as much as any other lives,” wrote Fryer some years ago, “Yet, we do this principle a disservice if we do not adhere to strict standards of evidence and take at face value descriptive statistics that are consistent with our preconceived ideas.” Susceptibility to informational and availability cascades varies according to an individual’s preconceived beliefs, levels of knowledge, intuitions, visions, values, and desires ..... This has been a truncated summary, you can read the full extensive article at Quillette