We’ve all heard the term “driving while black.” It’s been in the public consciousness for quite some time. While this doesn’t (usually) translate to police brutality, the concept of being pulled over for driving while black, as well as the numbers backing it up, are indicative of many of the more problematic areas of policing that open black people up to being killed with more frequency than white people.

In 2015, there were 53,469,300 people 16 or older with police contact of any kind (including police initiated contact, self-initiated contact, or contact initiated by others). Of these interactions, fewer than 2% of them included use of force or threat of force (a rate of roughly 1,842 uses/threats of force per 100,000 interactions overall). For white people, this rate was approximately 1,300 uses/threats of force per 100,000 interactions. For black people, this jumped up to 3,271 uses/threats of force per 100,000 interactions.

In the same report, it is shown that out of the entire population of black drivers in the United States, 9.8% were stopped, whereas only 8.6% of white drivers were stopped. When calculating how often people experienced interactions with police as a passenger, race seemed to simply not matter that much (with a total disparity of 0.3% between all races).

During stops with drivers, 38% of white drivers received a warning, whereas only 33.6% of black drivers did. This switches when it came to tickets and searches/arrests, a trend we will continue to see. These more punitive measures were taken for white drivers 49.7% of the time (46.4% were tickets and 3.3% resulted in arrests and/or searches) whereas the number rose to 54.3% of interactions involving black people (49.9% were ticketed and 4.4% were arrested or searched).

For those of you looking at the data, you may have noticed a few numbers I don’t want to gloss over: black people have no enforcement action taken in 14.6% of stops as opposed to 13.5% of stops for white people. While it still doesn’t cover the total disparity between white people receiving more warnings than punishment, it’s a fair question. My guess would be that it lends itself to the idea that black people are pulled over for literally no reason more often than white people. A study from May 2020 analyzing 100 million traffic stops supports this. It found a significant disparity between black and white drivers being pulled over, but that “black drivers were less likely to be stopped after sunset, when a ‘veil of darkness’ masks one’s race, suggesting bias in stopping decisions.” Additionally, the study noted “the bar for searching black and Hispanic drivers was lower than that for searching white drivers,” further indicating that there is likely a racial bias in how police handle drivers in day-to-day interactions.

Philando Castile, E.J. Walters, and road rage

Let’s compare a single instance of driving while white and driving while black. This, obviously, isn’t indicative of everyone’s interactions with the police, but it’s helpful to remove abstractions and put a face to the data.

E.J. Walters was pulled over for waving a gun during a road rage incident. He had a gun and alcohol visible in the car and refused to exit the vehicle. He was forcibly removed by police. He also had a criminal record, having been out of jail on bond a two months earlier. That arrest? A drunken road rage incident involving a detective. As you can see from his mug shot, he survived to get hauled back to jail.

Philando Castile, on the other hand, was told he was being pulled over for a broken taillight (or a “wide-set nose” that matched the description of a robbery suspect, depending on which version of the story you subscribe to). He informed the officer he was carrying a legal weapon and was shot.

I originally posted this elsewhere on July 24, 2016. It is May 31, 2020 as I write this and it appears this issue has not gone away or even started to get better. I have changed aspects of the article to make corrections and updates based on new statistics and research. Also, I am aware that this introduction is a bit more in the “feelings” camp and, as the saying goes, facts don’t care about my feelings. Don’t worry, we’ll dispense with feelings soon.

Which Lives Matter?

Black Lives Matter was founded in 2013 after the murder of Trayvon Martin and subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman. After Michael Brown was murdered by Darren Wilson, the Black Lives Matter movement quickly gained more prominence throughout America and became somewhat of a household name. It was at that point that #AllLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter made the rounds.

While All Lives Matter would like to make it appear as if they are expanding on the Black Lives Matter stance to make it more inclusive, they are literally attempting to detract from the statement and movement, drowning them out and telling black people to “know their place” in the process.

After all, and this will be repeated, All Lives Matter supporters may agree that police brutality is a problem, but they are not fighting against it. Seemingly the raison d’etre of All Lives Matter is to protest black people protesting police brutality and systemic racism.

Their list of demands is simple: black people need to shut up about police violence against them.

The insidious part of All Lives Matter is the name of it is pleasant – all lives do, in fact, matter. But, as we will see, they often use easy statements and bumper-sticker talking points to obfuscate facts that run contrary to their sole purpose of telling black people they’re wrong.

All lives do matter. This is not in dispute. The concern that is being raised is that black people’s lives are not being treated as if they matter in the same way as other peoples’.

Here’s a video with a great analogy of how All Lives Matter is intentionally distracting from the issue (and, in a way, working as a contributing factor in police brutality against people of all races):

@officialsimphypehouse

@cogtcs #feminism #feminist #womensrights #mensrights #blm #prochoice #barbz #viral #equality #trending #viral #fyp #foryou

♬ original sound – The Simp Hype House

But what about Blue Lives Matter? Surely that is a legitimate movement. After all, the United States Bureau of Labor and Statistics rates “Protective Service Occupations” as the sixth deadliest occupation grouping (by which I mean what each occupation is grouped by, otherwise I’d be counting “Construction and Extraction Occupations” twice, as supervisors in that occupation have a higher fatality rate than the average worker in that field, which seems disingenuous to do). As the table didn’t have a fatality rate for officers (rather, it was combined with fire fighters and other prevention workers), I had to go to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting table for full-time law enforcement employees. Narrowing it down to just the officers, not civilians, we can say that in 2018, there were 686,665 full-time officers in the United States.

While the BLS study states that there were 127 law enforcement worker deaths in 2018, the FBI’s statistics only state that 106 actual officers died. In the second sentence it is noted that “55 officers died as a result of felonious acts, and 51 officers died in accidents.” The Blue Lives Matter narrative would have you believe they were by and large murdered.

Per the BLS’s 2018 Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, the food service and construction industries have more fatalities as a result of “violence and other injuries by persons or animals.” And if that equivalence strikes you as wrong somehow, it is. But we’ll get to why it’s wrong and why All Lives Matter likes to use a similar fact dishonestly in order to create a narrative that white people are actually the ones being oppressed by state violence.

It’s also worth asking whether comparing the dangers of the sixth most deadly job in America to deaths of minorities at the hands of people who are meant to protect Americans is more telling than it is meant to be.

Montrell Jackson and a dual identity

Let’s talk about one of those blue lives. If his life mattered so much to the Blue Lives Matters crowd, surely his opinion will. Otherwise, he quickly falls into the “I have a black friend” camp of racist deflection tactics.

Officer Montrell Jackson was a Baton Rouge police officer who was murdered in a shootout that left himself and two other officers dead. He expressed worries about his dual role as a black man in a blue uniform by saying “In uniform, I get nasty hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat.”

One of the most important things about the duality of Montrell Jackson was that he made the choice to be an officer and endure that danger. He did not choose to be a black man. Both are dangerous jobs but only one of them people get to sign up for.

People accused people from the Black Lives Matter movement of shooting Montrell Jackson and many other officers. They weren’t, but would it matter if they were? That’s simply deflecting the question of whether the facts are on the side of Black Lives Matter. They can be correct and also shoot someone. Detractors extend that leniency to cops, the military, and people like George Zimmerman.

Hell, they’ll even extend it to certain armed protesters standing off against police.

It seems to be a very literal interpretation of “if it ain’t white, it ain’t right” for some people.