DeKalb Times

A video on the Chicago Public Schools “equity” website fuels the fairly-widespread belief that police are embarked on a deadly vendetta against black men. In the video, black filmmaker and author Kimberly Jones says: “…there  is this contract that we all have that if you steal or if I steal then  the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But  the person [police] who fixes the situation is killing us.” 

It’s that kind of rhetoric that’s left more than one-third of liberal and very liberal respondents to a Skeptic Research Center survey believing 1,000 or more unarmed blacks were killed by police in the U.S. each year. Another survey found eight in 10 African-Americans and about half of white Biden  voters “thought that young black men were more likely to be shot to  death by police” than be one of the 7,500 blacks to die in a car accident each year.

The reality is far different. In  2020, a total of 243 blacks were shot and killed by police nationwide  with 18 of them unarmed, according to The Washington Post’s Police Shootings Database. (For comparison, 459 whites were fatally shot by police, 26 of them unarmed). 

Drill down into Chicago’s numbers and  you’ll find the city doesn’t match its reputation. No more than one  unarmed black Chicagoan was killed by police in any given year since  2015. 

Of course, that’s still tragic, but infinitesimal compared to the extreme narratives Kimberly Jones and others promote.

National data

Data from the Washington Post shows there were 1,020 police-involved fatal shootings in 2020. Of the  900 shootings where race was identified, 51 percent, or 459, were  whites; 27 percent, or 243, were blacks; and 19 percent, or 171, were  Hispanics.

A  concern of activists is that at 27 percent, fatal shootings of blacks  by police are disproportionate to the black share of the overall  national population, which in 2020 was 12.4 percent. However, the 27 percent fatal shooting rate is in line with federal data for 2020 that shows 26 percent of reported arrests made nationally were of blacks. 

What’s little known to the public is  that most people killed by police are armed. Ninety-four percent of  2020’s 1,020 fatal police shootings were of those armed: 960 armed vs.  60 unarmed. For blacks specifically, the results were 225 armed vs. 18  unarmed. 

Overall, the 2020 data follows a  similar pattern to the average from 2015 to 2020. Confirmed fatal police  shootings of unarmed civilians averaged 67 per year. For blacks, the annual average was 22.

Blacks  are 33 percent of the unarmed civilians fatally shot nationally by  police over six years. This could suggest bias relative to their share  of population or arrests. But the overall numbers are so small that it  is impossible to conclude racial bias is the primary cause. In any case  “proportionality” arguments are weak because they avoid individual  choices and actions in favor of formulaic behavioral quotas by race.

Fatal police shootings in Chicago

Wirepoints analyzed the 2021 deaths  of seven civilians – six armed and one unarmed – in officer-involved  shootings in Chicago. According to our examination of the document archive of the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) and the Washington Post’s data, only  one of the seven was an unarmed black man, Michael Craig. The remaining  six were armed and failed to follow police instructions to relinquish  their weapons and surrender.

Five of the seven civilians slain*  were black and two were Latino, Anthony Alvarez and Adam Toledo. Both  were being pursued in separate foot chases by police. Those cases led to  a new CPD foot chase policy which restricts circumstances under which  officers may engage in a foot chase. 

The hard truth: the real threat to black lives is from other blacks, not police

The real threat of murder for black  men comes from within the community. Four of every five murder victims  in Chicago have been black, and more than 70 percent of known Chicago  murder perpetrators have also been black. That’s according to victim  data by race in 2017-2020 annual police reports, and the 1991-2011 CPD report “Chicago Murder Analysis.” That adds up to a big black-on-black murder problem.

In Chicago the majority of murders are of blacks and by blacks. This is what the police brutality rhetoric of Jones and many others is meant to mask. 

Unquestionably, Chicago’s police have had to answer for major abuses and serious unforced errors. These include $130 million in settlements and judgements tied to reports of confessions coerced with torture by detectives working under Commander Jon Burge. Other black eyes for Chicago Police have included excessive use of force, plus egregiously mistaken raids on civilians at home, and mismanagement of public safety during the riots of 2020. In addition, a code of silence around misconduct and retaliation against whistleblowers is an ongoing problem, as are sometimes highly politicized promotions described as “a reward for cronyism.” 

But Chicago cops have also been buffeted by growing political hostility from elected officials, including being called “white supremacist” by the Democratic Socialists of America Chicago chapter representing six city aldermen. Chicago police have endured violent attacks, the ongoing revocation of days off, and a steady drumbeat of tragic officer suicides while the department is struggling to raise plummeting arrest rates and improve worrisome response rates to high-priority 911 calls. 

Like the rest of us, Chicago Police  face challenges, and they remain a work in progress. But perceptions and  rhetoric around police brutality in Chicago and nationwide are very far  from the reality of what happens on the ground.

Chicagoans implicitly seem to know that. A 2020 Wirepoints/Real Clear Opinion Research survey showed 77 percent of black Chicagoans want to see police in their  communities as much or more than at present, very close to the 80  percent of all Chicagoans who answered the same way.

It is to the great discredit of  Chicago Public Schools that they advance inflammatory claims of deadly  racial bias by police at a time when growing violent crime – by the community against the community – continues to rend the social fabric of Chicago. 

*The  seven civilians identified by Chicago COPA who died in officer-involved  shootings in 2021 included federal fugitive Losardo Lucas, who was  fatally shot after pointing a gun at a federal agent trying to take him  into custody. Because a Chicago officer was part of the fugitive task  force, COPA had to report on the incident. The Washington Post database  did not include this incident. The Post’s 2021 data on Chicago counted  one case not in the COPA database. That of Jamar Jayson Taylor. He was a  Bay Area fugitive wanted for murder, who was fatally shot by an Amtrak  police officer after firing at authorities trying to arrest him at  Chicago’s Union Station.

Appendix