***** Riotville: As Ashcroft Announces He'll Investigate Police Homicides in Cincinnati, Other Cities Smolder Lindsay Sobel
. . . Though some individual departments have taken action to deal with police homicide, there is no national accounting system to compare its prevalence across localities. Without data, it is hard to hold cities accountable. Despite the fact that a 1994 law requires the Justice Department to gather such data, many police departments refuse to collect or report it.
Reflecting the extent to which police departments have resisted the amassing of incriminating data, the Justice department released a report in March titled, "Policing and Homicide, 1976-98: Justifiable Homicide by Police, Police Officers Murdered by Felons." Trying to explain the heavily biased title of the report, the authors write:
Killings by police are referred to as "justifiable homicides" and the persons that police kill are referred to as "felons." These terms reflect the view of the police agencies that provide the data. . . .
According to the admittedly incomplete report, young black males make up 1 percent of the population, but 14 percent of those killed by the police. Likewise, in 1998, police killed African Americans at four times the rate of whites; that's an improvement on 1978, when police killed blacks at eight times the rate of whites compared to each one's percentage of the U.S. population.
It is not only police homicide that leads African American city dwellers to feel victimized by the police. According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics report from a 1999 survey on racial profiling, African Americans nationwide are more likely than whites to experience police threat or use of force. They are more likely to be pulled over (despite the fact that they are no more likely to violate traffic laws). In traffic stops, African Americans are more likely to be searched, ticketed, handcuffed, and/or arrested -- even though searches of white drivers or their cars were more likely to turn up criminal evidence. . . .
<http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/webfeatures/2001/05/sobel-l-05-08.html> *****
***** October 1 - October 7, 2003 Fear Factor By Afefe Tyehimba
All was calm and seemingly routine along the 600 block of South Streeper Street in East Baltimore on a recent Wednesday afternoon. Young kids skipped past crossing guards on their way home from school, folks exited the corner Rite Aid with prescription bags in hand, and a crisp yellow ribbon tied to a curbside tree and American flags hung from rowhouse doorways signaled a neighborhood of patriots concerned for U.S. soldiers abroad.
Five days prior, when Baltimore was battling Hurricane Isabel's aftermath, resident Gloria Hopkins had prayed, in a manner of speaking. Fighting against mental illness that had prompted her to fetch two kitchen knives, she called 911 to get help so she wouldn't "hurt someone." Minutes later, three city police officers arrived. Two minutes after that, Hopkins lay dead from an undisclosed number of bullet wounds. The officers, all three of whom shot rounds, reported that the 48-year-old woman refused to put down the knives and had lunged at them. . . .
This recent killing by city police is nowhere near the first time questions have been raised about use of force by officers whose oxymoronic duties involve protecting and taking lives. Notable incidents include a November 2000 shooting, when Maryland Transportation Authority police killed a man from Raleigh, N.C., at the Fort McHenry Tunnel toll plaza, reportedly for accelerating and aiming his car at them.
"It was likely a legal use of deadly force by police officers, but it sounds pretty stupid," former police lieutenant Charles Key later told a reporter from The Sun. A few months earlier, in September 2000, a citizen in a drug-saturated West Baltimore neighborhood told Sun columnist Gregory Kane that he'd witnessed officers "bang guys' heads into the hoods of cars and grind their noses into the concrete," during search and seizure stops. More recently, in City Paper's July 30 issue (Mobtown Beat), residents concerned about the City Council approving use of civil citations talked about police aggression in high-crime areas, and unrelenting tensions between officers and citizens who feel terrorized by them.
Such stories--from newsprint to porch stoops to barber shops--abound in this city and others with high-crime rates and zero-tolerance policing guidelines. In a March 2001 report on policing and homicide, the U.S. Department of Justice examined a one-size-fits-all policy that police homicide is "justified when it is done to prevent imminent death or serious bodily injury to the officer or another person," resulting in a death toll of about 400 people each year. Its official analysis? Essentially, that police homicide is all in a day's work, exemplified by use of the word "felon" to describe anyone who presents a threat to officers, be they hard-core criminals or someone like Hopkins. . . .
<http://www.citypaper.com/2003-10-01/eye.html> ***** -- Yoshie
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