The year 2022 has been the year in which the American police have killed the most people for at least ten years: 1,176 deaths have been recorded according to the report of the American association Mapping Police Violence, which identifies and maps police violence from NGO reports, articles and figures. That’s more than three deaths a day. Unheard of, according to the association created in 2015.
Samuel Sinyangwe, the founder of Mapping Police Violence, nevertheless asserts that this increase was not a big surprise, specifying that “researches [de l’association] suggest that the past decade has had the highest rate of fatal police brutality in at least forty or fifty years.”.
Many victims, but few violent criminals
One of the main conclusions from these figures is that there is no correlation between violent crime and the number of deaths caused by the police. “Only a third of those killed were committing or had committed a violent crime. In the rest of the cases, the people were involved in misdemeanors or non-violent crimes, or for that matter were not even suspected of a crime at all. A third were fleeing when they were killed.”
Most of the interventions that caused fatalities were thus “road checks, interventions following episodes of mental disorders, for domestic or public order disturbances and in situations where no crime had been reported”.
No link either between the crime rate in a certain geographical area and the number of deaths attributed to the police. Cities with a similar crime rate may therefore have very different rates of police violence. Example: Samuel Sinyangwe, who lives in Orlando, Florida, believes that “it’s not at all the worst city when it comes to crimes or homicides”. However, the police there kill an average of 7.5 people a year, which places the city in twelfth place in a ranking including the fifty largest American cities.
For the founder of Mapping Police Violence, “so there is another factor that determines how the police react. Why, in the same situation, some police departments will respond with violence and others will not. He evokes a track: the differences in policies vis-à-vis the police according to the States and the cities.
The situation is getting worse in the most conservative cities
The analysis of the effects, on the statistics for 2022, of the various measures recently adopted concerning police violence tends to prove him right. After the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, many wanted to cut police numbers and redirect funds to other spending. Since then, Samuel Sinyangwe has noted that“There has been progress on police brutality in progressive cities that have moved in this direction. But on the other hand, the numbers have worsened in the most conservative areas of the country.
Thus, the number of people killed by police in more progressive urban areas has fallen in 2022. In contrast, the number of deaths in rural and more conservative areas, with county sheriff departments, is at its highest. level never recorded. The expert observes in particular that “County sheriff departments accounted for 36% of all police-caused deaths in 2022. Ten years ago, they accounted for just 25% of cases. And the rise was gradual, so it’s possible it will continue for years to come.”
African Americans and Hispanics more often targeted
Not only does the rate of fatal police violence vary greatly from one geographical area to another, but it also differs according to the origin of the victims.
Thus, people from the African American or Latino community are much more often killed by the police than white people: in 2022, 24% of people killed by the police were black, while African Americans represent only 13% of the country’s population. A black person is thus three times more likely to be killed by the police than a white person. Those of Hispanic origin are twice as likely as whites to pass.
“If someone is homeless, they don’t need to go to jail, they need help with housing. If someone is addicted to a substance, toxicological support.”
“This observation is valid throughout the country.insisted Samuel Sinyangwe. Black people aren’t killed the most in just two of America’s fifty largest cities [Los Angeles et Houston, ndlr]. And in these cities, it is people of Hispanic descent who are most often victims of fatal police violence.”
alternatives to the police
When it comes to possible solutions to this unprecedented police violence, the Mapping Police Violence founder thinks there are two main avenues to explore.
First, he believes that systematic arrests for non-violent misdemeanors or crimes should be reduced. For him, this would prevent police violence and would also reduce “the number of people sent to prison, which are also very violent places, for non-violent crimes, which is another very big problem with the American penal system”. Indeed, it is estimated that 80% of those imprisoned are behind bars for misdemeanor or non-violent crimes. According to the Prison Studies association, the United States even has the largest prison population in the world, with more than two million people incarcerated in 2019.
A second solution is to develop alternatives to the police for situations in which it is not necessary to mobilize one’s forces: Samuel Sinyangwe is convinced that founding other organizations that can respond to emergency situations “would avoid the majority of deaths”.
Some states have already launched such programs, with promising results. The Support team assisted response (STAR) program in Denver (Colorado) is probably the most developed and best known in the country. Instead of dispatching the police, the city’s emergency dispatchers can now choose to dispatch clinicians who know how to care for the mentally distressed, the homeless and people suffering from addiction.
A program report from mid-2022 indicates that STAR teams handled almost 3,000 calls between January and June of this year. They never needed to call the police for help and violence was never used in any case.
1% of police officers convicted
Samuel Sinyangwe would like this kind of program to be democratized in the rest of the United States. Not only to reduce police violence, but also to allow the people concerned to be properly taken care of. “If someone is homeless, they don’t need to go to jail, they need help with housing. If someone is addicted to a substance, toxicological support. If someone has mental problems, psychological help.”
Finally, he stresses the importance of holding accountable police officers committing violence, particularly when it leads to the death of someone: for the moment, only 2% of police officers are indicted following fatal violence. , and only 1% are sentenced – often to lighter sentences than civilians who have committed the same crimes. In short, Samuel Sinyangwe criticizes the American legal system for “endorse[r] this violence and these deaths”.
