Researcher: Goodson Killing Reflects ‘Disturbing Statistics’ About Black Men And Police!

FEATURED PHOTO: CASEY GOODSON JR. KILLED BY FRANKLIN COUNTY SHERIFF DEPUTY JASON MEADE WHILE ENTERING HIS HOUSE WITH A SUBWAY SANDWICH

Yahoo.com, By Rayshawn Ray-COLUMBUS DISPATCH, Posted January 17th 2022

Franklin County Sheriff Deputy Jason Meade was working on a U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force to track violent suspects on Dec. 4, 2020.

Meade, a 17-year veteran, pursued a suspect he alleged was driving with a gun. Minutes later, Mead shot the suspect multiple times.

The problem is that the victim, Casey Goodson Jr., was not the dangerous suspect that Meade was pursuing.

Goodson, a 23-year-old Black man, was found dead in the doorway of his home with keys still in the lock and Subway sandwiches for his brother and grandmother. Goodson’s grandmother said he had just returned home.

Goodson, a licensed concealed carry permit holder, was armed at the time of the shooting. However, he was not under investigation for any crimes and did not have a criminal record.

Meade said Goodson was brandishing a gun before he was shot. But community members say Meade’s shooting was unjustified, and Goodson’s relatively clean record supports the assertion.

This seems to be the position of the grand jury in Columbus. On Dec. 2, nearly one year after the killing, Meade was indicted for two counts of murder and one charge of reckless homicide.

Goodson’s killing is among the many that add to the disturbing statistics about police killings and race in America.

White people are more than three times less likely to be killed by cops than Black people, according to a study conducted between 2013 and 2017 of metropolitan police departments.

Even more troubling, the racial statistics are worse when factoring in whether someone was unarmed – as Daunte Wright was when he was killed in Minnesota by former Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter.

A Minnesota jury found Potter guilty of first- and second-degree manslaughter Dec. 23. According to her, the incident happened because she mistakenly pulled her gun rather than her Taser.

Recent killings by officers, along with murder charges (such as those for Meade) and convictions (such as the conviction of Potter and Derek Chauvin for killing George Floyd) may give the impression that officers are often held accountable for unjustified killings.

But less than 2% of officers are charged with murder despite the approximately 1,000 people killed in a police shooting on average every year.

Every week, a police officer kills someone during a traffic stop who does not have a weapon and is not under investigation for a violent crime.

Among Black men like Goodson, Wright and Floyd, the statistics are even more dire. Roughly “1 in every 1,000 (Black) men can expect to be killed by police,” according to a study published in 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

And the risk of police violence peaks for people in their 20s and early 30s. For Black males, the risk window is even larger, starting during the teenage years and extending into the 40s. Floyd was 46.

Some people often try to justify police killings by pointing to violent crime.

The problem is that research shows they seem to operate on different continuum. Moreover, they are much less related than people think. An analysis by Mapping Police Violence documents that cities with the highest levels of police violence are often not the same cities with the highest level of violent crime. Accordingly, it is important to decouple police violence from violent crime and realize they are two distinct social problems that need to be addressed.

However, police killings do impact local communities.

Research shows that aggressive policing leads to worse mental and physical health outcomes for people living in overpoliced communities. Police use of force is also more likely to occur at left-wing protests than right-wing protests.

Area residents also pay for police violence with their tax money. Over a four-year period starting in 2015, the nation’s largest police departments paid more than $2 billion for misconduct and other violations, according to The Wall Street Journal.

So, what explains police violence and racial disparities in use of force?

Research highlights that explicit and implicit racial bias as well as an over-reliance on a “warrior mindset” and use of force tactics explain police violence. Law enforcement recruits receive more than 50 hours of firearms training compared with fewer than 10 hours of de-escalation training. Recent technological advances, such as a training program created by Jigsaw – a virtual reality collaborative among the University of Maryland, the University of Cincinnati, Georgetown and Morehouse – provide opportunities for officers to train in safe environments.

Using advanced technology may start helping officers become more objective in their decision-making and use more communication to de-escalate.

Rashawn Ray is a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and professor of sociology at the University of Maryland. He has worked on the Jigsaw project. Follow him on Twitter. @SociologistRay

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why are unarmed Black men the most likely to be killed by police?