It has been a little over a year since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on the neck of George Floyd. Floyd, a 46 year-old black man, alerted the attention of the police when he attempted to use a forged $20 bill in a nearby store. Floyd’s reluctance to comply with his arrest led to an altercation with Chauvin. The protracted length of Floyd’s restraint played a role in his death. Floyd’s last minutes of life were filmed by a local resident. It didn’t take long for the video to make its way around the world. Soon every American with access to the news or the internet had developed an opinion on Floyd’s death. To all in the racial justice movement, it was yet another example of centuries-old institutional racism towards black people.
As it currently stands, the claims of racism are untenable. Little evidence exists that Chauvin — a white man — acted in a way motivated by prejudice or hostility towards Floyd’s skin colour. It was his actions, not his beliefs, that led to his conviction. Chauvin may have caused Floyd’s death, but the medical records, ex post, preclude certainty. The coroner’s report proves Floyd died of “cardiopulmonary arrest”, potentially caused by a number of serious heart problems: “severe arteriosclerotic heart disease” and “hypertensive heart disease”. He also had a potentially lethal combination of drugs in his system — the report mentions “recent methamphetamine use” and “fentanyl intoxication”. It is perhaps no wonder that Floyd was claiming he could not breath long before he was put onto his front on the ground.
Whatever conclusion people draw from Floyd’s death — I for one view it as a tragic event that should never have happened — the situation ought to have ended in his arrest rather than his untimely demise. But one thing was certain: there was never a better time to discuss and debate sensible and practical solutions to police overreach.
Not for Black Lives Matter (BLM). Following Floyd’s death, the group began a series of protests. Although some were peaceful many, especially in Minneapolis, erupted into rioting, looting and violence. Ironically many of the businesses that were burnt down and looted were black-owned. Of the dozen or so people who died in the riots, a 77 year-old black veteran policeman named David Dorn was shot and killed whilst trying to protect a jewellery store from looters. If the aim was to help save black lives, then this was a strange way of showing it.
An almost identical situation to Floyd occurred in 2016. A 32 year old man called Tony Timpa died when a Dallas police officer pressed a knee into his back for 13 minutes until he suffocated. In Timpa’s final moments he’s heard pleading for his life. Not many people have seen this video. It’s at least conceivable that this was because Timpa was white.
Simply framing Floyd’s death as a racial issue is wrong. The reason the death of a black man at the hands of the police receives more media attention is that it elicits more condemnation and outrage. It is an example of what Nobel Prize-winning academic Daniel Kahneman calls the availability heuristic — a mental shortcut employed by humans when our intuitions are shaped by events we can easily recall: news, personal stories, etc. It makes us prone to mistake rare events for trends. In short, it’s a form of cognitive bias —allowing us to quickly form judgements. Perhaps if Timpa had been black maybe it would be his name that would be synonymous with police brutality.
This appears to fall on deaf ears with BLM. With so much attention focused on skin colour, racial justice activists believe black people are killed by police all the time. In one survey, among people who identify as very liberal, 8 per cent of respondents believe officers killed more than 10,000 unarmed black men in 2019 in the United States. The actual number of unarmed black men who were killed that year was 27.
When you include armed and unarmed individuals, data shows that U.S police kill on average 1,000 people a year — roughly a quarter of whom are African-American. When you factor in the demographic makeup of the United States — black people constitute roughly 13 per cent of the population — this figure would appear disproportionate. But is this alone enough to demonstrate racial bias? After all, in 2019, 95 percent of all people shot by police were male and it would be ridiculous to argue this is evidence of institutional misandry.
A more likely causal factor is poverty. In America, black people are two-and-a-half times more likely to be living in poverty than whites. With police more likely to use deadly force in poor neighbourhoods, black people are not only more likely to encounter law enforcement but also to be the victims of a police shooting. Where poverty resides, crime is not far away. One uncomfortable fact is that although making up just 13 per cent of the population, African-Americans are responsible for 53.1 per cent of all murders. These murders are not being committed by toddlers or pensioners, but more likely by young men — something BLM seriously need to focus their attention on.
However you perceive the American system of policing, whether you view it as racist or incessantly heavy-handed and in need of reform, the situation in Britain is not the same. Which is perhaps why I found it so perplexing that his tragic death was so quickly picked up on here. On the first anniversary of Floyd’s death, numerous local authorities, including my own city council in Norwich, lit up buildings in purple in solidarity. In one act that showed an egregious lack of self-awareness, Rochdale lit up their war memorial.
Besides being 4,000 miles away, British policing is very different to that in America. The Sewell Report on race and ethnic disparities provided us with a well researched and thorough analysis of race relations within Britain. Over 258 pages it clearly makes the case that discrimination within the UK is extremely low. Overall, we are not a country beset with racism.
The report was met with hostility. Notably from one MP, Clive Lewis, who posted a photo of the report’s authors below a photo of a Ku Klux Klansman in front of a burning cross with the caption “Move along. Nothing to see here” #RaceReport. It should come as no surprise then that Lewis is MP for Norwich South — home of the lit-up council building.
The two countries do not make for a fair comparative analysis. Again, this isn’t the view of BLM this side of the Atlantic. One prominent BLM activist here claimed hat British police were no different to the KKK.
This is the hill that so many racial justice advocates appear ready to die on. They are quick to cite over-representation in bad things like prison population and stop and search and under representation in good things like elite education and senior professional positions.
As I have written about in TheArticle before, attributing every disparity to discrimination is an example of what the black American thinker Thomas Sowell calls the “invincible fallacy”. Further and deeper examination will yield better answers. For example, it is true that whilst only making up 3 per cent of the British population, black people make up 12 per cent of all prisoners. But when you factor in that they account for 15 per cent of all murder convictions, the discrimination falls away. The same is true for stop and search: the police go where crime is reported. In London, more black youths will be stopped than in Devon, where the demographic makeup is different.
As for a lack of black British youths studying at our Russell Group institutions, the situation is showing signs of improvement. While more whites currently go to elite universities compared to black, the number of British black undergraduates going to Oxford rose to 684 in 2020 — a 23.6 per cent rise from 2019. Overall, young black people are more likely to go to university than whites.
It would be naive to assume racism does not exist in Great Britain, but we are not the same as America. Race is certainly one lens with which to examine society, yet BLM often places far too much emphasis on it. It is often culture, community and class that give us a more nuanced and detailed answer to such questions, including those about policing.
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