State violence against unarmed minorities has four times the impact of other homicides.
Police killings have a social and psychological significance beyond their sheer numbers, since law enforcement officers occupy a unique role as agents of the state authorized to wield force on domestic soil. New research from Desmond Ang, an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, suggests the impact extends to the academic performance of black and Hispanic children.
It’s been well established that nonwhite Americans have considerably less confidence in the police. Qualitative work from the 1968 Kerner Commission and onward has shown that police misconduct is a major driver of broader feelings of social alienation. But it’s generally challenging to quantify the effects of police violence on a given community, as police killings tend to happen in neighborhoods with high crime rates and other social challenges that make it difficult to precisely isolate the impact of the killing itself.
Ang got his hands on detailed information about every high school student from 2002 through 2016 in “a large urban school district in the Southwest,” as well as data on “officer-involved killings in the surrounding county.” After coding the exact location of each officer-involved killing, he was able to calculate the exact distance between every student’s home and where the incident took place.
Nearly 80 percent of police killings were not even mentioned in local newspapers, according to Ang, suggesting that awareness of the event could be limited to friends and family of the person killed, those who witnessed the event and its immediate aftermath, or those who heard about it from family members and neighbors.
Consistent with that theory, he finds a whole bunch of interesting things:
There are many more criminal homicides than police killings in the US, so the traumatizing effects of those homicides on high school students are likely larger in aggregate. But the basic findings here — that the per-incident impact of police killings is unusually large, and that police killings of unarmed subjects in particular have a much larger negative impact compared with that of criminal homicide victims — seems to confirm that these incidents have a special and racialized significance in American life.
Fear and trauma are never pleasant for children, but there is a particular form of trauma — and a loss of social legitimacy — associated with police officers killing people that has a marked and quantifiable impact.
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Author: Matthew Yglesias
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