Fatal Police Violence Is Structural, Not Just ‘Bad Apples’.

 On Friday, May 29, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter, after a widely-circulated video showed him suffocate George Floyd on Monday. And on June 3, the Minnesota Attorney General increased the charge to second-degree murder, and announced the three other officers who stood by and watched in the video will also be charged. The days since Floyd’s death have been marked by protests across the country, calling for justice for Black victims of police excessive force and an end to police brutality.

“In explaining these events, the common understanding has been that there are some ‘bad apples’ among police forces who exert excessive force due to personal conscious bias or implicit racial bias,” writes Michael Siegel, professor of community health sciences, in a new article on racial disparities in police use of deadly force published in the Boston University Law Review.

However, he writes, growing evidence suggests that the issue is not only about individual officers and individual Black civilians, something that many cities have tried to address with bias trainings. Instead, it is about structural racism, especially residential segregation—not individuals, but neighborhoods.

In a study published in the Journal of the National Medical Association last year, Siegel and colleagues found that racial residential segregation was the predominant factor explaining why some cities have greater Black-white racial disparities in fatal police shootings—even after controlling for a city’s crime rates, Black median income, racial composition of its police force, and other factors.

In his new BU Law Review article, Siegel examines this and other empirical evidence using critical race theory and the Public Health Critical Race Praxis.

He finds that segregation plays a key role in racial disparities in police violence in part because of the way that officers interact with predominantly-Black neighborhoods. “Interventions, such as inherent-bias training, aim to alter the way police officers interact with Black individuals,” he writes. “The empirical evidence… suggests that training and interventions that change the way police interact with Black neighborhoods are needed.”

That is the immediate action for city policymakers to take, Siegel writes. But ultimately, the issue “can be remedied only by programs designed to racially integrate neighborhoods (where the community favors such an approach) and otherwise to pour resources into segregated neighborhoods to repair the damage that has resulted from racial inequities.”

Read Michael Siegel’s full article in the Boston University Law Review here.

—Michelle Samuels