Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

up, a very large number of citizens will get roughed up during the year. Thus,their violence may seem occasional to individual policemen, when in fact for theforce as a whole it is routine."71Of course, the propensity for violence is not distributed evenly throughoutpolice departments. The Independent Commission on the Los AngelesPolice Department (also called the Christopher Commission) noted:Of nearly 6,000 officers identified as involved in a use of force ... fromJanuary 1987 through March 1991, more than 4,000 had less than fivereports each. But 63 officers had 20 or more reports each. The top 5 percentof officers ranked by number of reports accounted for more than 20percent of all reports, and the top 10 percent accounted for 33 percent.72These numbers may not be as comforting as they first seem. For onething, 6,000 cops is still quite a lot, even when the occasions of their violenceare spread over four years. In fact, it seems the Christopher Commissionfell into precisely the trap that Rodney Stark described: by emphasizingthe idea that most officers rarely use force, they demonstrate that brutalityis individually rare, while obscuring the fact that it is collectively common.Four thousand officers, with fewer than five reports each, together couldhave nearly 20,000 such reports. Moreover, the unruly 5 percent, in numericalterms, would add up to about 300 officers.73 One retired LAPD sergeanttold the Christopher Commission that there were at least one or two copsin every division who regularly use excessive force,74 This would imply thatnot only is brutality routine, it is widespread.But, however common police brutality may be, its victims are not a perfectcross-section of the American public. In 1999, for example, 86.9 percentof the victims of police violence were male, and 55.3 percent were betweenthe ages of sixteen and twenty-four."' While most victims were White (58.9percent) , Black people and Latinos were victimized in numbers significantlyout of proportion to their representation in the general population. Latinosmake up 10.2 percent of the population nationally, but accounted for 15.5percent of those victimized by the police. Black people constitute 11.4 percentof the population, and 22.6 percent of those facing police violence,76 Ofthose killed by police from 1976 to 1998, 42 percent were Black?7These figures, which I have recited with relatively little comment, offeronly a very limited representation of police violence. The studies producingthese numbers, with their statistics and their charts, seem altogether toosanitized. They should, to do the subject justice, come smeared with blood,with numbers surrounded by chalk outlines. The real cost of police violence,the human cost, is too easily forgotten, figured away, buried under a mountainof decimal points. We must not allow that to happen. We must bear inmind, always, that each of these statistics represents a tragedy. Behind eachthere lies real pain, humiliation, indignity, often injustice, and sometimesdeath. Our understanding of police brutality relies on our ability to hearthe scream behind the statistic. Once we do, the rage of L.A, of Miami, ofCincinnati becomes comprehensible. Their fires may burn inside us.15