Is the Terence Crutcher Shooting Primarily About Race?

A friend shared a powerful essay in Salon about the shooting of Terence Crutcher, which the author compares to a lynching and to the perils suffered by African-Americans traveling in the Jim Crow South.

Maybe I am being ignorant here, but comparisons of contemporary police shootings of black men to the Jim Crow era don't sit right with me. I would argue that painting these incidents solely as matters of race ignores a good deal of relevant context, and makes it more difficult to get at the root causes of police-involved shootings.

According to the Washington Post, of the 706 people killed by police so far this year, 172 are African-American, or about 25 percent. This is much higher than the percentage of African-Americans in the population, and that is deplorable, but it does not change the fact that three-fourths of people killed by cops are of other races.

If the percentages of police-involved shootings can be shown to correlate with arrest rates (normally triggered by 911 calls), then it is harder to make the argument that cops are institutionally racist. In a gun-saturated society, anyone more likely to come in contact with law enforcement is more likely to be shot by law enforcement. Police deal on a daily basis with armed people in chaotic situations, and are themselves shot all the time.

In the Terence Crutcher case, the officer who fired her weapon, Betty Shelby, said she was “terrified.” Anyone who has watched the video of the Philando Castile shooting will notice the near-hysterical state of the officer after the shooting; one of the most chilling things about that video is the contrast between the officer and the calm, collected manner of Castile’s girlfriend.

This is not Bull Connor stuff. This is not, on the street level, white supremacist oppression in the way Southern apartheid was. Obviously, there are truly bad cops (witness the horrific shooting—execution, really—of Walter Scott in North Charleston), but what I frequently see are cops fearing for their own lives.

The core problem is firearms. Because any police encounter can, and sometimes does, quickly escalate into a gun battle, it is inevitable that at least a small percentage of encounters will end tragically. (Law enforcement made an estimated 12,196,959 arrests in 2012. Of these arrests, 521,196 were for violent crimes.)

The best we can do is reduce the likelihood of shootings. Better police training, gun control measures, and a major overhaul of drug laws thrown in for good measure would go a long way to accomplishing this.

Radicalized Anti-Police Rhetoric

I understand that many will disagree with this view. An essay recently posted on Facebook by another friend reads, "The police exist to protect white people and respond to white fear. That is their core function. That is what white supremacy means in practical terms."

The most cogent rebuttal to what I have written above that immediately comes to mind is that one cannot simply look at overall statistics of police killings, but must examine the psychology of law enforcement-minority interactions and the likelihood of minor or even trivial situations escalating into lethal violence compared to when police encounter white people.

I do not wish to minimize the problem of systemic racism among police or society at large, nor deny that the lives of black people have been and still are undervalued, but do hope to introduce a parallel narrative to the one principally put forth in the wake of these shootings.