Black Lives Matter

This article is based on a quick search or the Internet and things I saw and was told while working in the US in 2002-2004. I can’t guarantee that all of it is correct, but I’m fairly sure that there’s at least an element of truth in it. Treat it as a stimulus for thought rather than an authoritative statement.

The following table shows a quick grab of statistics from the Internet.

There are a few stand-out features. The first is that, although black people in the US make up just 13% of the population, they make up 29% of those who are killed by police. It would appear that black people are more than twice as likely to be killed by the police as the general population and 3.5 times as likely as white people (29/13 ÷ 41/64). There seems to be ample anecdotal evidence that black people are more likely to be harassed by the police than white people and more likely to be treated badly whether or not they have done anything wrong. This evidence supports the above conclusion.

However, it should be noted that black people make up about the same proportion of those in US jails as white people. If this is taken to mean that black people commit about as many jailable crimes as white people, then it would maybe follow that police should have about the same number of interactions involving arrest with black people as with white people.

As fewer black people than white people are killed by the police (29% of killings vs 41%), then this could be interpreted to mean that police are actually less likely to kill a black person during an arrest than they are to kill a white person.

Many killings of black people no doubt happen at least in part because of the attitude of the police who kill them to their race. One might suspect that there is an element of white supremacist thinking in the police force. But, if this is the case, there must also be a majority of the police force who would be less likely to kill a black man than a white man in the same situation. One possible reason why such might be the case is the publicity repercussions that are likely from the killing of a black person.

I am going to suggest that preferential police brutality towards blacks may not be the main issue here. (Though of course, that doesn’t mean that the police don’t harass blacks more than other groups in non-lethal ways.)

Another stand-out from the table above is the fact that black people make up just 13% of the population, but 40% of those in jail. A black person is 5 times more likely to be in jail than a white person.

Although George Floyd had a checkered criminal history, the crime for which he was arrested and murdered (using a forged $20 bill to buy a packet of cigarettes) really looks like a crime of poverty. Average income for black families in the US is significantly lower than average income for white families and many crimes by black people would be committed because they find themselves in situations that far fewer white people find themselves in.

In 2002 to 2004, I worked as a classroom coach with maths teachers in middle schools in the Bronx. I saw a lot of teachers in a lot of classrooms in several schools. I lived with my family on Long Island and my children went to school on Long Island. We were thoroughly impressed with the education they got. The classroom culture was generally one of learning with very little disruption. The teaching was good and the facilities were excellent. What’s more, everything was free: all books and stationery were provided and there was no cost for uniforms or the school bus. Even excursions were free: our son in Grade 5 was taken with his class on a three-day field trip to Washington DC, for which we were asked to contribute not a cent.

Where I worked in the Bronx, however, was a different story. There was little in the way of facilities; many teachers were inexperienced and had little control over the class. In many of the classes I observed, 80% of the kids didn’t engage at all in the lesson, there was a lot of deliberate disruption and frequent fights. Admin provided no help with such situations. At times, up to a quarter of the students were out of class during lessons, hanging around in the corridors and stairwells.

In most of the disorderly classes, there was a handful of students, usually girls, who wanted to learn and who sat together at the front of the class. But, because the teacher was generally so pre-occupied with what was going on further back in the classroom, even those students learnt very little.

At the end of Year 8, all students did a standardised test which they were supposed to pass before going on to high school. At one school where I spent a lot of time, the pass rate for both of the previous two years had been 2%.

To some extent, one can blame the students for not engaging in the lessons, but there was another significant difference between schools in the Bronx and those on Long Island. In the US, schools are funded by the local authorities rather than by the state or federally. The funds came mainly from rates and land tax and depended on the value of people’s houses. Houses on Long Island are worth far more than the apartments in the Bronx. Consequently, education got far more money on Long Island than in the Bronx. Teachers were paid about 20% less in the Bronx for doing a much more difficult job. Consequently, most teachers tried to get work in the more well-to-do areas and schools in the Bronx were largely staffed by teachers who couldn’t get work elsewhere. School buildings and facilities were also far shabbier in the Bronx.

As a consequence, people who grew up in the Bronx were unlikely to achieve good educational outcomes. Most of their parents had grown up in the Bronx and had similar educational experiences and many had to rely on illicit activities (often gang- and drug-related) to make a living. The kids had little concept of the lifestyle of the more affluent: their security relied more on being in the right gang. They didn’t see education as anything terribly relevant or important to them.

Of course, the kids in the schools our children went to on Long Island were mostly white. Most of the classes I worked with in the Bronx didn’t have a single white kid in them.

To me, this makes it very clear why black people are more likely to end up in jail than white people. I believe that police attitudes aren’t the basic problem. The basic problem lies in the way that education and other social services are funded in the US. There is no equity – not even equality – not even close to it. From my experience in New York at least, the majority of the population were not racist. After all, it’s hard to be racist when everyone is a minority. The problem lies mostly in the way the country’s resource are so inequitably shared among its citizens.

That is my main point, but I will add one further point. People in the US are about 100 times more likely to be killed by the police than people in the UK. In the UK, people don’t generally carry firearms, not even most criminals. In the US, over 80% of people killed by police are armed. Police in the US face a far higher chance of being shot while attempting to apprehend a suspect than police in the UK. Because of this, they have to be much more ready to shoot in self-defence.

Obviously not all killings by police are in self-defence – George Floyd wasn’t showing any signs of being about to kill anyone – but the fact that most criminals have guns would undoubtedly be a major contribution to the high numbers of killings by police in the US. America’s gun culture is the second problem.