Let the record show that Dr. Pinker draws this conclusion from an article that contains the following quote: “The data is unequivocal. Police killings are a race problem: African-Americans are being killed disproportionately and by a wide margin.” (original emphasis) We believe this shows that Dr. Pinker is willing to make dishonest claims in order to obfuscate the role of systemic racism in police violence.
In 2017, when nearly 1000 people died at the hands of the police, the issue of anti-black police violence in particular was again widely discussed in the media. Dr. Pinker moved to dismiss the genuine concerns about the disproportionate killings of Black people at the hands of law enforcement by employing an “all lives matter” trope (we refer to Degen, Leigh, Waldon & Mengesha 2020 for a linguistic explanation of the trope’s harmful effects) that is eerily reminiscent of a “both-sides” rhetoric, all while explicitly claiming that a focus on race is a distraction. Once again, this clearly demonstrates Dr. Pinker’s willingness to dismiss and downplay racist violence, regardless of any evidence.
|
White |
Black |
|
|
Total |
68.9% |
27.2% |
|
Murder and Nonnegligent Manslaughter |
44.2% |
53.1% |
|
Rape |
67.5% |
28.7% |
|
Robbery |
43.6% |
54.3% |
|
Burglary |
67.5% |
29.8% |
|
Violent Crime |
58.5% |
37.5% |
|
Weapons; carrying, possessing, etc. |
53.7% |
43.9% |
|
Prostitution and Commercialized Vice |
56.0% |
37.6% |
|
Sex Offenses (except rape and prostitution) |
70.9% |
24.9% |
|
Drug Abuse Violations |
70.4% |
27.1% |
|
Driving Under the Influence |
81.7% |
14.0% |
During that same year, here are the people killed at the hands of police (going by data collected from MappingPoliceViolence.org):
2017 = 1,095 deaths by Cop
White: 506
Black: 276
There Were 100 Unarmed Deaths by Cop
White: 52 deaths via
- 9 Taser
- 1 Beat/Restrained
- 42 Shot
Black: 48 Deaths via
- 10 Taser
- 3 Beat/Restrained
- 34 Shot
While there were over 1,000 deaths at the hands of police, a mere 100 of them were of unarmed people. If you look up their names, also available on MappingPoliceViolence.org, you can see that in most of these cases, as well, the victims were actively attacking the officers at the time of their death, were committing crimes, and often had violent criminal histories (which further highlights the fact that police killings are a problem within the criminal population, not the law-abiding American population as a whole; in which death by police is an extreme rarity for all races).
Pinker is making this about "both sides" being in danger of the police because it is both sides who are in danger of the police (one no more than the other, at least). Thus far, there's no evidence to suggest that these police killings are racially motivated (and, as Pinker correctly points out, several reasons to assume they're not).
It's obviously the LSA complainers who are dismissing evidence, as it runs contrary to their pre-established beliefs.
Relevant Occasion #3
The Complaint:
Pinker (2011:107) provides another example of Dr. Pinker downplaying actual violence in a casual manner: “[I]n 1984, Bernhard Goetz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car.”---Bernhard Goetz shot four Black teenagers for saying “Give me five dollars.” (whether it was an attempted mugging is disputed). Goetz, Pinker’s mild-mannered engineer, described the situation after the first four shots as follows: “I immediately looked at the first two to make sure they were ‘taken care of,’ and then attempted to shoot Cabey again in the stomach, but the gun was empty.” 18 months prior, the same “mild-mannered engineer” had said "The only way we're going to clean up this street is to get rid of the sp*cs and n*****s", according to his neighbor. Once again, the language Dr. Pinker employs in calling this person “mild-mannered” illustrates his tendency to downplay very real violence.
Here, Pinker's adversaries are really scavaging for material to become outraged over. In his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, Pinker listed off a quick series of examples of the "flood of violence from the 1960s through the 1980s" that reshaped American culture. Within these examples, Pinker mentions the story of the villainous Mr. Goetz. Below is the entirety of what Pinker had to say about the man:
The flood of violence from the 1960s through the 1980s reshaped American culture, the political scene, and everyday life. Mugger jokes became a staple of comedians, with mentions of Central Park getting an instant laugh as a well-known death trap. New Yorkers imprisoned themselves in their apartments with batteries of latches and deadbolts, including the popular “police lock,” a steel bar with one end anchored in the floor and the other propped up against the door. The section of downtown Boston not far from where I now live was called the Combat Zone because of its endemic muggings and stabbings. Urbanites quit other American cities in droves, leaving burned-out cores surrounded by rings of suburbs, exurbs, and gated communities. Books, movies, and television series used intractable urban violence as their backdrop, including Little Murders, Taxi Driver, The Warriors, Escape from New York, Fort Apache the Bronx, Hill Street Blues, and Bonfire of the Vanities. Women enrolled in self-defense courses to learn how to walk with a defiant gait, to use their keys, pencils, and spike heels as weapons, and to execute karate chops or jujitsu throws to overpower an attacker, role-played by a volunteer in a Michelinman-tire suit. Red-bereted Guardian Angels patrolled the parks and the transit system, and in 1984 Bernhard Goetz, a mild-mannered engineer, became a folk hero for shooting four young muggers in a New York subway car. A fear of crime helped elect decades of conservative politicians, including Richard Nixon in 1968 with his “Law and Order” platform (overshadowing the Vietnam War as a campaign issue), George H. W. Bush in 1988 with his insinuation that Michael Dukakis, as governor of Massachusetts, had approved a prison furlough program that had released a rapist, and many senators and congressmen who promised to “get tough on crime.” Though the popular reaction was overblown—far more people are killed every year in car accidents than in homicides, especially among those who don’t get into arguments with young men in bars—the sense that violent crime had multiplied was not a figment of their imaginations.
In 2014, a student murdered six women at UC Santa Barbara after posting a video online that detailed his misogynistic reasons. Ignoring the perpetrator’s own hate speech, Dr. Pinker called the idea that such a murder could be part of a sexist pattern “statistically obtuse”, once again undermining those who stand up against violence while downplaying the actual murder of six women as well as systems of mysogyny.