Public Safety vs Policing • Perspectives Media

The ACLU did a big picture data study in 2020 and found that, “Fatal shootings by police are so routine that even during a national pandemic, with far fewer people traveling outside of their homes and police departments reducing contact with the public so as not to spread the virus, police have continued to fatally shoot people at the same rate…[as previous years].”

We did our own updated analysis here including an annualized projection for 2021.

Big Picture Data Explanation

On average, 6 Black people a year are killed by police for every 1 million living in the US from 2015 to June 2021.

There are approximately 1M native people in the US and an average of 14 natives are killed at the hands of police each year. 14! I consider myself an avid news follower and as I crunched the numbers, I was shocked by the underreported nature of the magnitude of these police killings for Native communities.

In spite of the disparate impact of police killings on Indigenous and Black people, the policing system kills 3 people per 1 million regardless of racial group and the systemic violence of the policing system can easily turn to any community.

One story that stood out to me last week was We Are Mitu’s Anthony Cano story, a Latinx teenager who was shot in the back while lying face down. The officer was interested in being promoted and showing “toughness” while on his beat.

The Glass is Half Full…Maybe

The Perspectives Media annualized projection for police killings in 2021 based on a half-year of data shows that we could be on pace to decrease black killings from 6 per 1m to 4 per 1M. While this morbid improvement is welcome, there is still a ton of work to do.

Reformers

On one hand, some argue that the system of police needs training and oversight. Sometimes that training and oversight can also sound a bit like defunding some activities. For instance, the Portland Racial Equity Steering Committee suggested training and oversight changes but also, “Committee members said there was unanimous agreement that the role of the police department is too broad.” This is just a report so we will stay on this story to understand implementation.

As hard fought reports from racial equity committees like the one in Portland trickle in across big cities in America, people are still being shot by police. Progress on reducing police killings has been tough and slow as shown by the chart above. According to the ACLU, a major impediment is big money lobbying from police unions.

Big System Change

The slow pace of change brings us to those who call for big system changes.

“Public safety is public health and public health is public safety,” said Representative Cori Bush on NPR. Rep. Bush is talking about a reform bill that calls on non-carceral health centered federal investments in public safety. It would build a federal agency of first responders composed of doctors, nurses and social workers to combat public health issues like gun violence and mental health episodes.

This new public safety agency would report to the Department of Health rather than the Justice Department creating a counterweight and dialogue between public health, public safety and policing on a more equal footing rather than public safety always being subordinate to policing.

Abolish

Abolition organizers are still working to win support. When people think about abolishing the police they have been conditioned to think it means no one answers if you call 911 at best and complete anarchy at worst. That couldn’t be further from what activists imagine. Professor Jen Jackson stated in a Vox interview that abolishing the police is about, “…building a world where we do not rely on anti-Black, white supremacist institutions of order to regulate society. This means that alternative forms of order might be embraced, like community care networks and justice structures rooted in restoration rather than punishment.”

Actions for You

Whether you influence policy at your work or in the public sector, Congresswoman Cori Bush’s legislation on the People’s Response Act is worth a read. It sits at the intersection of public policy, agency management, and new equity-based system design.

Representative Bush weaves equity language and policy together which can be template for your own equity work. You can also consider calling your congress person and asking if they support the Peoples Reform Act and taking the action to the local level at your city or town budget meetings.

Is voting a right or nah?

For me, the big picture question on equitable voting system design is—

Is the burden of proving a voter’s identity on the individual person or on the state systems we pay for with our taxes?

Justice Alito admonished voting rights advocates to, “Consider a states interest in preventing voter fraud.” Yet studies show voter fraud does not exist and researchers have shown repeatedly that voting laws are creating undue burden and disparate impact to historically marginalized groups.

A 2009 study from the University of Utah showed the intricacies of how these laws work. “…[B]arriers [to voting precincts] might include lack of signage or poor visibility, lack of adequate parking, no outside lighting, insufficient or poorly trained poll workers, or lack of stability in precinct location. This research has examined precinct accessibility and quality throughout Los Angeles and found that voters encounter wide variation in the quality of their assigned polling places. More troubling, the findings here suggest that low-quality precincts are not randomly distributed across the city and instead are more likely to be found in low-income and minority neighborhoods.”

Moving around precincts so that people cannot find the correct place to vote and creating laws that outlaw turning in a ballot at a different precinct has nothing to do with preventing voter fraud yet it is justified through this supreme court ruling. In a local Texas news interview, a legal scholar noted that, “Native Americans on average travel hundreds of miles to vote.” Now imagine if you have other barriers like an hourly work schedule, unaffordable travel options, and kids school hours to manage. Somehow you overcome all of those barriers and make it to your polling place only to find out that polling place has moved 50 miles in another direction. This scenario is common, inequitable, and infuriating.

If you’re feeling fired up and want to take action on voting rights, remember the June 28th Perspectives on Equity newsletter has ways to help you get involved with voting rights.
Equity Economics

Black business ownership is surging in 2021 but the fundamentals underneath that surge are not solid. Some of the surge comes from owners reopening to capture post-pandemic economic opportunity. Others are “necessity startups” versus “opportunity startups. Check out this article from the LA Times for a deeper dive.

During the racial uprising last summer after George Floyd’s death, a lot of historically white large banks made promises that have yet to be followed through. The successful new business owner of R&L crab summed it up best to me, “At this point we just need capital. Capital is what’s important,” LaShone said.

With a gender equity lens, I found a lot of substance and evidence of progress in this Business Insider article. They state, “Consider that 10 years ago $1 of every $12 was invested in companies or funds that had an ESG — environmental, social, and governance — lens to it. [Now its 1 out of 3.]” Gender based funds are starting to pop up with specific focus on closing the equity gap as it relates to valuing women-owned ventures.

Lastly, check out this great roundup private and public sector gender parity commitments coming out of the Generational Equality Forum convened by U.S. Women.

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