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Memphis’s Problems Are Only Going to Get Worse

Memphis’s Problems Are Only Going to Get Worse

A

New York Times

article last week on Tyre Nichols managed to work multiple references to “the old Confederacy” into a news story about the death of a black suspect pummeled by black police officers in a city with a black police chief. Such is the desire of the media to shoehorn this tragedy into a predetermined racial narrative.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about what happened to Nichols, and the investigation is ongoing. If the media wanted to play a constructive role it could provide some context and remind the public that fatal encounters between police officers and civilians—including black civilians—are rare in America, even though annual contacts between police and the public number more than 60 million. In recent years, these incidents have gained more attention because of social media, but that doesn’t mean they’re happening more often.

In a 2021 report published by the Manhattan Institute, the political scientist

Eric Kaufmann

noted that “police killings of African-Americans declined by 60%-80% from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and have remained at this level ever since.” A study published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Surgery in 2018 looked at more than a million service calls to police departments in Arizona, Louisiana and North Carolina and found that officers used physical force in the course of arrests less than 1% of the time. Moreover, 98% of suspects who were arrested using force “sustained no or mild injury.”

In New York City, home to the nation’s largest police department, police shootings have declined by about 90% since the early 1970s. Nationwide, police killed 999 people in 2019, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post. The victims, almost all of whom had weapons, included 424 whites and 253 blacks. Twelve of the black victims and 26 of the white victims were unarmed.

Even assuming the worst—that the police officers in the Tyre Nichols video are as guilty as they appear to be—it would be wrong to generalize about policing based on this incident. The data simply don’t comport with the criticism of cops as racist and prone to excessive force. What we do know from recent past experience is that violent crime in Memphis, Tenn., where the incident occurred, is likely to get worse before it gets better.

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