Pennsylvania State Representative Christopher Rabb (D-Philadelphia) this week proposed legislation to curtail police officers’ ability to use deadly force.
In a memorandum on his upcoming bill, he suggests that current state law empowers police to act as “judge, jury and executioner” of fleeing suspects.
The representative wants to repeal part of the Crimes Code that describes instances in which officers can inflict deadly force on a prospective arrestee. In particular, he takes issue with a section that gives police permission to use such force when the officer deems it “necessary to prevent the arrest from being defeated by resistance or escape and the person to be arrested has committed or attempted a forcible felony or is attempting to escape and possesses a deadly weapon, or otherwise indicates death or serious bodily injury to himself or such other person.”
Rabb also laments the disparity in the numbers of American blacks killed by law enforcement compared with the number of whites killed by officers. According to the representative, approximately 1,000 civilians are killed, justifiably or not, by law-enforcement agents and African-American male civilians are 2.5 times more likely to die in such incidents than white civilian men.
“This is unacceptable, unnecessary, and only erodes community safety and the public trust in law enforcement,” Rabb, a member of the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, wrote in his memo.
Many experts, however, question the use of disparity statistics like the ones Rabb cited to justify narrowing police officers’ rights to use lethal force or to imply that police kill American blacks based on bigotry.
“Racial disparity in and of itself is not proof of racism,” Michael Tremoglie, a political commentator who served as a Philadelphia police officer, told The Pennsylvania Daily Star.
Tremoglie made several observations of crime data that he says should place Rabb’s contentions in proper perspective. For one, young black men are over-represented in the population of those who are observed and/or arrested for committing violence. He also said that police are currently shot and killed 2.5 times more often by black perpetrators than Caucasian ones.
He added that American blacks are disproportionately likely to be victims of homicides and other violent crimes, which are disproportionately perpetrated by African-Americans.
“He is woefully ignorant of the facts,” the former policeman said of Rabb. “All he does is repeat a bunch of fallacious arguments that have been refuted over the years.”
Numerous social scientists, including Roland Fryer of Harvard University, have scrutinized the question of whether law-enforcement agents tend to utilize lethal force against African-Americans in particular and have concluded that they do not. Fryer has found, however, a disproportionate use of nonlethal force by police against black civilians.
Another fault Tremoglie finds with Rabb’s proposal is an overly broad description of officers’ opportunities to use deadly force: Although the law mentions the importance of preventing suspects from escaping, a police officer cannot act as an “executioner” for that purpose and must only prepare to potentially kill a suspect if that individual has established he or she is a deadly threat.
“His prefatory remarks in this are really, really misstating it, and I think that’s done on purpose,” Tremoglie said.
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Bradley Vasoli is managing editor of The Pennsylvania Daily Star. Follow Brad on Twitter at @BVasoli. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Chris Rabb” by Chris Rabb.
