by James A. Bacon
Along with the surge in homicides and assaults on police officers, the number of police shootings in Virginia jumped 43% last year, according to data from the Virginia State Police 2022 Crime in Virginia report. The shootings resulted in 22 fatalities, up from 18 the previous year.
The increase since 2019, the year before the George Floyd riots unleashed a wave of anti-police denunciations, anti-racism rhetoric, and criminal-justice “reforms” designed to reduce mass incarceration, amounted to 79%.
That raises a critical question: how is it possible that, despite all the media attention, all the police cultural sensitivity indoctrination, all the de-escalation training, and all the other criminal-justice “reforms” in Virginia, officer shootings increased so markedly over three years? Have none of the reforms worked? Or could the left-of-center critics of policing, who have driven the policy changes, be overlooking something?
Police-shooting incidents need to be viewed in a larger context. Although general crime rates have remained stable or even declined since 2019, the number of homicides has spiked by 73% and the number of assaults on officers has jumped 41%. I would suggest that these numbers are related.
The common thread, I would hypothesize, has been media- and politician-fueled rhetoric that has fed the perception among those inclined to criminal conduct that policing, the criminal-justice system, and society in general are systemically racist and illegitimate. If individuals engaged in encounters with the police are fearful that they will become victims of police violence or believe that they are being unjustly targeted for police attention, they are more likely to resist arrest or otherwise escalate confrontations with police.
The total number of criminal “incidents” reported to the State Police has actually declined somewhat since 2019 — from 376,000 to 355,000, or nearly 6% — thanks largely to the decriminalization of marijuana. The rise in police shootings does not seem to be associated with trends in the general crime level.
I suspect the number of shootings is connected rather to the number of assaults on police, which jumped 62% between 2021 and 2022. My colleague Dick Hall-Sizemore has noted that that figure is likely overstated, noting that a change in State Police methodology for aggregating data resulted in “a higher number than reported in recent years.” I have queried the State Police about that methodology change and the impact it might have had on the numbers, so we’ll keep an asterisk by that number. It is worth noting however, that not only has the reported number of assaults on police increased, so has the reported number of both minor and major injuries from assaults.
Whatever the precise numbers, it seems clear that interactions between police and elements of the public have become more contentious.
If the number of assaults on police (subject to revision) increased from 1,787 in 2021 to 2,903 in 2022, it stands to reason that the number of incidents in which police felt compelled to use their weapons, though a small fraction of the total, would increase as well.
In some quarters, the temptation will be to blame the police rather than individuals assaulting police. Left-of-center critics will blame continued racial bias and inadequate police training. One prominent conservative commentator, Heather MacDonald, has suggested that the problem might be traced to the tendency of short-staffed and over-stretched police departments to hire less qualified officers to replace departing veterans. Newcomers in police forces have less experience and, as seen in the Memphis police killing of Tyre Nichols, a few have been hired despite having criminal backgrounds.
We could get a clearer picture if the State Police reported the race of the individuals involved with assaults on police and involved in police shootings. If the increase occurred primarily in the African-American population, it would tend to confirm that police-are-racist rhetoric plays a role. If the jump in assaults and shootings involved Whites as well, it would suggest that we look for other explanations.
Normally, Ruling Class media relish stories like this — a surge in police-involved shootings and killings can easily be interpreted to reinforce the Racial Oppression Narrative. For some reason — perhaps newsroom understaffing — Virginia media have overlooked that storyline. But if police shootings are on the rise, it surely should be a matter of interest to the general citizenry, and the cause of that increase should be a topic worthy of analysis and debate.
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