Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi, everybody. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway. Keep your hands on the steering wheel. Always say, "Yes, sir." Don't reach for your wallet, your license, or your registration without telling the officer exactly what you're doing, end even then, move slowly. These are the rules. Rules I was taught surely as I was taught a three-point turn and how to parallel park. Rules that my parents felt might save my life if an officer pulled me over. I didn't realize how hard it must have been for them to teach their 16-year-old daughter these rules until I had to teach my own teen daughter the same ones.
According to an investigation by the New York Times in the past five years, police have killed more than 400 unarmed drivers or passengers. Typically, these people are pulled over for common infractions like a broken tail light or speeding. They're not being pursued for a violent crime. How could so many situations where people are being pulled over for something that could be so minor come to such a violent end? We're discussing the findings of this investigation with, David Kirkpatrick, an investigative reporter with the New York Times. Welcome, David.
David Kirkpatrick: Hello.
Melissa: You and your team found more than 400 unarmed drivers and passengers have been killed by police. Why this investigation now?
David: Well, we were struck by what seemed like a pattern of high-profile deaths of civilians at the hands of police, mostly African Americans in cars. Daunte Wright was the one who put us over the edge and got us interested. It was also a case of Lieutenant Caron Nazario an Army Colonel, he wasn't killed, but he was pepper-sprayed at least in a town in Virginia. That got us interested in asking is this happening a lot? Are unarmed people suffering violence at vehicle stops a lot, and if so, why?
Melissa: When you say a lot, let's start there for a second. Is 400 more or less than say the five years prior?
David: I don't know. Let me just say that 400 number was not easy to come up with. We had to start with a list of all 5,000 people killed by police over that five-year period. Then when it went down first to those who died in vehicle stops, and then among those killed at vehicle stops to isolate just those who were unarmed, that is not threatening with a knife or a gun, and also not pursued for a violent crime. We're trying to isolate just the set that are the most questionable. The most likely to make you think this is a death that could have been avoided.
Melissa: I want to pause on this data problem for a moment because it is always striking to me that we have such challenges finding even these most basic data about local policing.
David: Yes. There is not much national-level data about patterns in policing. Most policing is done at the local level and it's only thanks to the Washington Post and some non-profit organizations like Marvin and Police Violence and Fatal Encounters that we're able to come up with a list of people killed by the police at all. Those organizations are working mainly from news reports.
Melissa: We have the data problem. We have a number that you're feeling pretty good about its accuracy, even with the difficulty of compiling that data. Don't quite know whether this means it's gone up or down, but what do you know from these data? Is there a racial component? Is there a gender or age component? Is it likely to happen in one part of the country versus another?
David: Well, it's all over the country. African Americans are disproportionately killed roughly in the way that African Americans are disproportionately killed among all those killed by police, and that is relative to the population. Meaning the percentage of Black people among this set of 400 is about twice as high as the percentage of Black people among the population. This is a big number to us. This is more than one a week over that five-year period or more than six a month, if you want to put it that way.
Melissa: David, help us to understand what it is that police are taught and trained to believe about traffic stops.
David: That's the thing. When we began asking, why is it that these unarmed nonviolent drivers get killed so often? Quickly you come across the fact that police are told that vehicle stops are especially dangerous to the police. That has two consequences. One is that they are trained there. It's really drummed into them that when they show up at even the most routine traffic stop, they should be on the alert. If their hand is not on their sidearm, they ought to be ready to get their hand on the sidearm, so to speak. That makes them sometimes aggressive out of a genuine fear.
Other times we found reviewing videos of a lot of these cases aggressive in a way that fear didn't fully explain. That leads to the second consequence of that overstated sense of risk.
It moves on to a stage where when you go before the prosecutor, and then before a judge and a jury, they also end up believing that vehicle stops are very dangerous to police, that the police, when they approach the car, they don't know who's inside, and so it's very easy for judges and juries and prosecutors to believe that the officer feels afraid, feels threatened at vehicle stops. Under the standards of American law, that makes it very easy for the officers to justify shooting that person. Police are seldom charged with crimes and killings. In a vehicle stop context, it's even more difficult for the courts to hold a law enforcement officer accountable.
Melissa: Acknowledging the challenges with data collection, I still wonder, is there an empirical basis for believing that? In other words, are officers likely to be harmed, shot, killed in the line of duty when they're making a traffic stop?
David: Well, it's definitely scary to the officer. If you look at all those officers deliberately killed by someone they were trying to stop or pull over, that number is big relative to the total number of police killed. In the period we looked at, about 20% of the officers killed criminally on duty were killed at vehicle stops. You think, ''Okay, as a percentage of officers killed, yes, it's big.'' But when you take into account the fact that police officers stop a lot of vehicles, stopping vehicles is the biggest way that police interact with civilians. When you take that into account, the chances of an officer dying at a vehicle stop are actually less than 1 in 3.6 million. Or if it's a routine vehicle stop, less than 1 in 6 million, according to the best studies.
Melissa: Why are traffic stops the primary way that police interact with the general public?
David: I'm not going to say they're the primary way, but if you look at police encounters with civilians, the most common way is at vehicle stops. I guess police just stop a lot of cars. Policing the roads is a big job for American police. Whereas in some countries a lot of that is done by cameras and monitoring to watch red lights or watch speeding, here in the US because of privacy concerns, it's pretty much done by a patrolman pulling up behind you.
Melissa: I'm going to push on this again one more time. I'm also just wondering why. It's just to say that this is like one of those little conversation starters that happens and is like the fire department doesn't come by and knock on your door and check whether or not you've changed the batteries in your smoke detector, even though we know that's important for household safety and public safety, but police will stop you to check if you've paid your fees and fines. I'm wondering why we're having our police departments do so much of that.
David: Well, you're raising another point here, which is what police refer to as pretextual stops. Police officers will tell you, ''Look, if you follow a car for five minutes, you can always find some probable cause to pull it over.'' A question about whether the windows are tinted, maybe this person didn't signal soon enough when they made a turn, whatever reason. You can always find a reason to pull someone over if you wanted. A certain set of these stops are officers pulling over cars mainly to get a chance to search the car. That's a little bit like stop and frisk on wheels, if you will. That's a situation where the subjectivity of the officer really comes into play. Who is the officer going to think looks suspicious? Which are the vehicles that the officer thinks, I need to pull over? What are the neighborhoods where that is most likely to happen? That I think you can answer for yourself.
Melissa: David Kirkpatrick is an investigative reporter with the New York Times. David, thanks so much for joining us today.
David: Happy to be here.
[00:08:54] [END OF AUDIO]
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