Public outcry victimizes the police. Research shows that police institutions are not racist. A study by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Reports that suggest otherwise do not account for crime rates and civilian behavior during police interactions.
The argument
Proponents of this view argue that the conclusions drawn after the deaths of people like George Floyd, and the wave of Black Lives Matter activism that followed them, confuse the conduct of individual officers with the character of an institution. On this account, many of the activists and politicians now concluding that police institutions are racist are not responding to some newly discovered feature of how policing works; they are taking advantage of the current situation to push an agenda they held already. The history is offered as evidence against the institutional claim: race relations between police and black communities have ebbed and flowed over the decades, improving in some periods and worsening in others, which is difficult to square with the idea that racism is a fixed structural property of police organisations rather than a failing found in some of the people who pass through them. The distinction between an individual and an organisation is what carries the argument. Attorney General William Barr put the point this way: “I frankly think that we generally have the vast, overwhelming majority of police are good people. I think that there are instances of bad cops. And I think we have to be careful about automatically assuming that the actions of an individual necessarily mean that their organization is rotten.” The inference the argument resists is the step from a wrong committed by one officer to a verdict on every officer and every department, and it holds that acknowledging instances of bad cops is compatible with denying that systemic racism exists within police institutions. The conclusion drawn is that the direction of harm has been reversed. Officers who are doing the job of protecting society find that job recast as complicity, and the profession as a whole is made to answer for conduct it did not commit. On this reading it is the police who are being victimized — by politicians, by activists, and by much of the public.
Premises
Counter-arguments
The public recognition of systemic racism within police institutions is the first step toward ending racially motivated police violence. Numerous policy departments recognize this reality and have implemented programs to help officers eliminate any implicit biases they have. With the ubiquity of smartphones, ignoring the problem of police violence has become impossible. Police are not victims; the men and women who die at the hands of police are.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The premise answers a claim that was not made. "Systemic" describes how rules, incentives, training and review processes shape outcomes, not what proportion of officers are ill-intentioned, so the observation that the overwhelming majority are good people is consistent with the claim it is offered against. A statement by an attorney general is a position, not evidence for one. [Rejecting P2] Attributing a motive is not an argument about the facts: that campaigners have an agenda leaves entirely open whether the pattern they describe exists. The premise also treats criticism of an institution as victimisation of the people in it, a move that would place any publicly accountable body beyond examination.