A Decade After Garner's Death, an Explosion of Knowledge — But Limited Progress

What has changed in policing in the 10 years since Eric Garner’s death at the hands of NYPD officers on Staten Island? Other writers have considered the extent to which police practices may have changed, in New York and nationally. I want to take the opportunity instead to highlight an important development that hasn’t received much attention: Over the past decade, the amount of knowledge we have in this country about police violence, in the form of academic studies, reports, books, newspaper articles and works of longform journalism, has expanded tremendously.

There are many possible ways to measure this growth. Consider just one: change over time in references to police violence and related terms in the enormous body of American English texts indexed by Google Books. From the mid 1980s until 2014 or so, one finds a slow but fairly steady rise in use of the terms “police brutality” and “police violence,” signaling growing interest in these issues among people who write books — intellectuals, broadly construed. From 2014 until 2019, however — the latest year currently covered by Google — usage of those terms as well as the phrase “killed by police” rose dramatically, and there’s every reason to expect that as more years of data come online, we’ll continue to see strong interest.

An Overdue Awakening

What is driving these patterns? The overall upward slope since the 1980s may reflect, in part, an underlying change in Americans’ attitudes toward police use of force. Research I’ve been conducting with Ethan Fosse and Christopher Winship (not yet published), analyzing questions from the General Social Survey, shows that each successive cohort of people born since the mid-20th century has expressed less support for police using non-lethal force in a variety of hypothetical scenarios. (The survey doesn’t include questions on lethal force.) This is a very long-term trend, not a reaction to any particular event, and speaks to the ongoing if uneven liberalization of social attitudes in the U.S. It’s not altogether surprising that as more young people with these attitudes became producers of knowledge — professors, journalists and so on — police brutality would register as more of a concern.

By contrast, the sharp spike in interest after 2014 is probably best explained by what social scientists call a period effect: namely, the rise of Black Lives Matter, which surged following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, just a month after Garner was killed. Many people in the knowledge business were outraged by the deaths of Garner, Brown and others, felt inspired by Black Lives Matter activists and the protests they helped to organize, and resolved to do their part by documenting, quantifying and explaining what they saw as a profound injustice, sometimes eliding the distinction between killings that were legally unjustified, avoidable and perhaps even criminal and those where it really was a choice between the life of an officer and the life of someone who was trying to kill them.

Intermingled with these altruistic motives may have been the more quotidian ones that affect all producers of knowledge. Suddenly there was a robust intellectual market for research, writing and advocacy on police violence. More students wanted to take relevant classes; academic departments wanted to hire newly minted PhDs with expertise; philanthropies made grant funding available; newspaper readers were eager for stories; public audiences wanted to bring in speakers; status was to be gained in activist circles as someone committed to the cause who also proved good with data. The supply of knowledge rose to meet demand, and rose once again after the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

For example, in 2014, reporters at the Washington Post realized that national statistics on police shootings were hard to come by. So they began compiling a database that would track these shootings as they occurred, based on news reports coming in from across the country. The database proved an incredibly useful resource, allowing Post reporters to write penetrating stories about surprising patterns they uncovered, like the fact that people suffering from mental illness are more likely to be shot by police in smaller communities than in large cities. But other people made good use of the database as well: activists, researchers, policymakers — even the general public, who could now see the facts for themselves. The database project and associated stories garnered the Post a Pulitzer Prize in 2016.

Although I haven’t comprehensively mapped the organizational landscape, my sense is that this example could be multiplied many times over with accounts of the birth of other data-gathering projects, the founding of academic research centers and colloquium series devoted to the study of police violence, think tanks that decided to allocate staff time to the issue, and so on. Google Scholar shows a sizable increase in the number of police violence-related studies published each year since 2014. In short, a large, multidisciplinary intellectual movement on police violence arose in tandem with Black Lives Matter. 

This is a major social achievement. The police are an opaque institution and have long protected and counted on their opacity as a way to avoid accountability. If the public doesn’t know how many people are killed or injured by police each year or have access to other vital statistics, it becomes much harder to press for change. Yet neither the U.S. government nor state governments have historically been reliable sources of information on police behavior, except for that which can be gleaned from arrest records. Now, in effect, civil society institutions have stepped up to fill the knowledge gap, and there is a more or less stable information ecosystem in place. Today, reams of data on policing are at our fingertips. 

Beyond simply quantifying aspects of police behavior, however, the body of knowledge we now have about police violence allows us to better understand it: to grasp the situational factors that tend to provoke police use of force, the neighborhood contexts in which it is most likely to occur, its roots in history and more. While serving to inform the public, this expanded knowledge base should in principle also allow experts to design policy interventions that would curb the problem. And indeed, in recent years, researchers have identified some such interventions, from the simple but effective strategy of making police use of force policies more restrictive to non-police-based crime prevention efforts such as bolstering neighborhood nonprofits that have the knock-on effect of changing how officers perceive the areas where they work and hence their propensity to resort to force. 

What Hasn’t Happened Yet

Why, then, haven’t these interventions been more widely adopted by cities to reduce the incidence of police violence (which, by most accounts, has remained relatively constant at the national level in recent years)? One answer, certainly, is resistance to change from police departments and police unions. Political gridlock is another part of the story. But I believe that an additional factor may be at play: the ecosystem that emerged to monitor and study police violence is far more geared toward highlighting problems with policing than identifying practical, scalable solutions.

For example, a police chief in Georgia who I wrote about for my last book developed protocols and training for a “shoot to incapacitate” approach when officers are faced with lethal threats. 

In this model, which is used in other countries, officers aim at the pelvis and upper thigh areas of those who pose an imminent threat (if the situation allows for it) rather than aiming for the head or chest, as officers are currently taught to do. The model has the potential to reduce the lethality of police violence, and the chief I studied rolled it out in his department to considerable fanfare. Yet there are few U.S.-based academic studies assessing the effectiveness of this approach or exploring how it might be taken up by other departments — while last year Google Scholar indexed more than 8,700 academic articles or book chapters related to police violence.

To put this in more general terms, only a small fraction of the research that has been carried out recently on police violence appears to be in what sociologist Monica Prasad has called “problem-solving” mode. The majority of the studies that I have read address the extent, causes and broader effects of police violence, perhaps including a few throwaway policy suggestions at the end, perhaps not. Testing the efficacy of various policy interventions isn’t the main point. Sometimes the studies conclude with vague calls for structural change.

On reflection, this isn’t altogether surprising. The current knowledge system arose to fill major gaps in official statistics and respond to the outrage felt by researchers and millions of other Americans over the killing of civilians by police officers. It was often undergirded by an abolitionist impulse, not a reformist one. Still today, more professional rewards accrue to knowledge producers who document injustices in policing. If you’re a reporter, you’re not as likely to win a Pulitzer with a piece on what’s working in police reform.

And yet without a focus on workable solutions, we will not make headway. Promising policy experiments won’t be evaluated as carefully as they should. Word of successful innovations and reforms may not spread to the thousands of U.S. police departments; police accrediting bodies may not take note; and states and the federal government won’t begin to insist that departments adopt these innovations as a condition for the receipt of grant funding.

One way of honoring the legacy of victims of police violence like Eric Garner would be to ensure that, in the decade to come, we reverse this focus.