Earlier this summer, Michael Shermer wrote a column for Scientific American to explain Why Do Cops Kill?. I was rapturously unaware of it because he’s an author I long ago decided I could ignore, but just recently a reader had to destroy my state of ecstatic ignorance by pointing it out to me. I read it with growing disbelief, my jaw sagging further and further at the dreadful illogic and the scientismic insipidity of the thing. How does he still get published?
To make it short, for those who prefer not to read anything associated with The Shermer, his answer is…it’s not racism, it’s because they have brain circuitry. No, really. It’s even illustrated with a cartoon of a clockwork murder-bot.
The ongoing rash of police using deadly force against minority citizens has triggered a search for a universal cause—most commonly identified as racism. Such soul searching is understandable, especially in light of the racist e-mails uncovered in the Ferguson, Mo., police department by the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation into the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown.
When black people are being killed at a greater rate than white people, and we actually have racist documents written by perpetrators, then why yes, racism does seem like a likely explanation. What more do you need?
Since that’s the opening paragraph, you know what’s coming next: a great big enormous “BUT”.
To whatever extent prejudice still percolates in the minds of a few cops in a handful of pockets of American society (nothing like 50 years ago), it does not explain the many interactions between white police and minority citizens that unfold without incident every year or the thousands of cases of assaults on police that do not end in police deaths (49,851 in 2013, according to the FBI). What in the brains of cops or citizens leads either group to erupt in violence?
Oh. Start by diminishing the problem: it’s only a few cops
in a handful of pockets
, and we are so much better than we were 50 years ago. You can tell right away that this was written by a white guy who wants to handwave away the problem.
But then comes a line of reasoning that has me wondering what drugs he was on while he was writing this piece. We can ignore racism as an explanation, because white police don’t shoot all the black citizens they meet, and the majority of interactions between police and citizens don’t involve violence. Police kill about a thousand people per year, but we should ignore that because they don’t usually kill people? That makes no sense. No one argues that racism is only expressed in the form of murder sprees against black people, so telling us that the police don’t kill every black person they meet is awfully poor evidence that racism isn’t a factor.
Likewise, telling us that almost 50,000 instances of non-lethal attacks on police officers occurred is a total non sequitur. It is irrelevant. The article starts with the problem of the police killing black people, declares it a small and shrinking problem, and then tells us that there were a lot of cases of people fighting against police officers? It makes no sense. That datum does not address his thesis in any way.
He also selectively cites that data. 50,000 attacks sounds like a lot — those poor oppressed policemen — but that figure includes all incidents of resisting arrest, not the ones where an officer was killed. That number is smaller: 76 officers died in the line of duty in 2013. Of those, 49 died in traffic accidents, and 27 as a result of criminal attacks. 27 is still too many, but if we’re going to compare murder scores, the police are winning.
But even those numbers don’t let racism off the hook. Shermer needs a non-racist scapegoat, so he digs down and comes up with an even more irrelevant and stupid explanation. It wasn’t racism, it was their brain that made them kill.
An answer may be found deep inside the brain, where a neural network stitches together three structures into what neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp calls the rage circuit: (1) the periaqueductal gray (it coordinates incoming stimuli and outgoing motor responses); (2) the hypothalamus (it regulates the release of adrenaline and testosterone as related to motivation and emotion); and (3) the amygdala (associated with automatic emotional responses, especially fear, it lights up in response to an angry face; patients with damage to this area have difficultly assessing emotions in others). When Panksepp electrically stimulated the rage circuit of a cat, it leaped toward his head with claws and fangs bared. Humans similarly stimulated reported feeling uncontrollable anger.
Jeepers, that sounds so sciencey. Look at that! Networks and circuits, generally obscure polysyllabic neuroanatomical terms, and cats with electrodes planted in their heads!
OK, so who’s been going around installing chronic stimulating electrodes into cops’ amygdalas? If only we could get them to stop doing that, it would end this epidemic of seeming racism.
Once again, like throwing random numbers around in the first part of his essay, this neurobiological explanation is empty and useless. I don’t deny that there is brain circuitry involved in violent responses…of course there is. But it doesn’t explain why one cop gunned down Michael Brown.
I would ask the obvious question. Does Michael Shermer have a rage circuit in his brain? Yes, he does. Does that explain why he’s a raging racist? That latter question is not implied by the fact that behavior is driven by neurons. Having this circuitry does not mean you are determined to murder black people. I have a rage circuit. You have a rage circuit. All the victims of execution by the police had a rage circuit. His explanation is as pointless as telling us that there is are motoneurons in our spinal cord that excite the flexor digitorum profundus to contract, causing our trigger fingers to bend.
You cannot reduce people to a collection of proximate causes. That Shermer thinks you can, and that this is a profound explanation, is as much a case of useless babble as claiming that it was sin or demons or an imbalance of humours that is causing inequities and racial tension. It is not helpful. It has no explanatory power. It is fucking stupid.
But this man has a column in Scientific American.
Oh for Fuck’s Sake, of all the blind, idiotic…there aren’t even words. If white folks aren’t dropping like flies, why, there’s no problem, no problem at all! Really. Truly.
Apart from all the other definitely not good things that articles is, it’s also embarrashing…wow….
Well I don’t see anything wrong with his logic here! After all, it’s exactly the same logic that tells you Shermer isn’t a rapist, because he doesn’t rape every woman he meets. And surely no-one could quarrel with that.
Coming in at #3, Nick Gotts wins the thread.
Cops kill black, native and latino people at an inordinately higher rate because they have a rage circuit? That begs the question, why do black, native and latino people’s presence trigger aforementioned cop brain rage circuitry in a way that being white doesn’t?
Thanks, Shermer, for not actually explaining anything, and basically just writing a bunch of words which boil down to “Black people make cops mad but that’s totally not racism because science.”
Only a fool would claim this isn’t a racist society. I would like to see research done into why racists are racist in the hope that perhaps it could be fixable. It’s possible that it is a circuitry issue, at least for some people. There may be different causes for different people. Since I don’t believe in free will, I would find the circuitry argument at least facially plausible, at least for some people.
But I think there’s a danger in “othering” even someone as repulsive as a racist cop. He or she got that way somehow, whether by bad circuitry, bad parenting, social influences, or whatever. Obviously steps need to be taken to limit that amount of damage racists can do to other people, and obviously the problem should be fixed if it can be, but that requires figuring out how the problem arose in the first place.
Resisting arrest is also a bad metric for what constitutes violence against police officers. In many cases resisting arrest may be talking back to a cop or just being understandably an arrest.
Long story short inherently racist stop and frisk policies will lead to resentment of the police who may or may not be racist themselves to interpret that resentment into resisting arrest. so on so forth blah blah blah.
sieve! @7
I know of several instances where a cop said “You’re under arrest”, the arrestee said “Why?” and was charged with “resisting arrest.” Apparently asking a question is resistance.
Shermer appears to disregard the non-fatal interactions of police with civs. And the overwhelming difference in the racial population of the apprehended. I don’t understand, completely, how one can blame the “rage circuit” on the astoundingly huge number of “driving while black” incidents.
Shermer appears to be going extremistic with Gladwell’s hypothesis that the cops were trained to launch with overwhelming force any perceived threat resulting in feedback unable to break out of it (re “41 shots”).
Gladwell was speaking of a singular event. Racism accounts for why the training, he spoke of, still currently focuses on POCs as inherent threats while POnC [People Of non-Color] have to demonstrate their danger.
Shermer is doing one of those fallacies (still innamed, I think) of going “things were worse then, so problem not existant anymore”. Yes, racism was more blatant 50 yrs ago. Racism still accounts for the population of POCs in prison disproportionate with their actions.
To focus only on the killing of POC, vs attacking POC (without fatality), is ignoring the real problem of racist LEOs. Yes, even POC LEOs can be racist against civilian POCs (see that “training” mentioned above).
eeyore @ 6:
Racism, like sexism, has always been with us. The only way to effectively deal with it is to expose, educate, and fight it at every turn. It’s really not helpful to shore up Shermer’s nonsense in any way. Toxic beliefs get passed on, and passed around. It’s easier to rely on stereotype than it is to think. It’s easier to label whole sets of people than it is to think. It’s pretty much always easier to other, rather than consider how you might be contributing to an ongoing problem.
I think the simplest answer suffices the question of why cops kill: because they can. It has been pointed out, time and time again, that the increasing militarization of the police is making things worse. It has been pointed out, time and time again, that police forces weeding out high intelligence is making things worse. It has been pointed out, time and time again, that the resistance in police forces to er, enforce internal rules and deal with problem cops is making things worse. It has been pointed out time and time again that white people continue to shore up bad actions because they aren’t happening to white people. It has been pointed out time and time again, that white people take refuge in othering and stereotyping, rather than face the everyday bigotry in themselves (hello, respectability politics!). The list goes on.
You can be sure that if white people were being killed at the same rate as POC by cops, there’d be a very different discussion going on, and it wouldn’t have jack shit to do with brain circuits or other mealy-mouthed bullshit as to why those poor, put upon cops are going about killing people.
I can only assume from these fragments (since I’m not about to actually go read that crap) that Shermer’s eventual argument is that as part of the enrolment process PDs should begin requiring the routine severing of the connections between these brain regions, thereby preventing police from ever pulling their guns in a blind rage.
For those who have not seen this, here is a database of people killed by police this year. Click on “Total” under Race/Ethnicity to see the grand totals by race.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database
@Onamission5 #5:
Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? It’s because cops *know* that these are the people amongst whom the vast majority of criminality lies. You only have to look at the disproportionate number of non-white people the cops have arrested to see that this conclusion is true.
Why, it’s an obvious application of fundamental Evolutionary Psychology: in the Era of Evolutionary Adaptation, when someone visibly alien to one’s breeding group (for instance, someone with darker skin or kinkier hair) suddenly arrived riding on a (pre-domesticated!!!) quadruped, it was adaptive for males to kill them immediately before they could breed with the local breeding stock of women (and domesticate the local hunting stock of quadrupeds)! That’s just Science.
Well I stopped reading there. Any conclusion from there is incoherent because it starts with some ridiculous assumptions.
I’m having trouble with the “uncontrollable rage” part. I’ve experienced uncontrollable rage a couple of times in my life, and one thing I noticed about it is that it was the rage that was uncontrollable – not my actions. So, ok, yes, cops have human brains (which I can’t say I found surprising) and those brains are capable of experiencing uncontrollable rages, but how does it follow from that that they would then commit murder? On one hand, I didn’t have a gun (I’ve never so much as held a gun in my life) but I also don’t have any kind of police training, and I didn’t try to beat the guys senseless with my bare hands, so why would a supposedly well trained police officer, even one with a gun, succumb to their rage and shoot? I don’t understand that at all.
Is Shermer arguing for the presence of a soul? That would actually explain his “reasoning”. Because it isn’t the soul but rather the materialistic brain which is being racist. Therefore, the soul, which is the real cop, and therefore the cop, are not being racist.
That’s the only way I can find any logic running through this article.
Yeah, I tend to skip the Shermer articles when I get my Scientific American. Why he’s popular in atheist circles always puzzled me. He’s arguments seem so bad, even when I agree with the conclusion. Don’t get me started on his libertarianism….
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard him use sciencey words instead of an actual explanation. One gets the sense that if you ask him why your browser crashed he’ll start talking about transistors, logic gates, electron flow, etc. Stuff that are all true, but provide no illumination to the question at hand.
Shermer gets published because he makes pseudoscience appealing to people who believe themselves to be skeptical science interested folk.
“Shermer gets published because he makes pseudoscience appealing to people who believe themselves to be skeptical science interested folk.”
I should add, that, folks, is the “Mind of the Market”; deciding what to publish based on short-term profits naturally selects in favor of delusions.
Does “To whatever extent prejudice still percolates in the minds of a few cops in a handful of pockets of American society….” sound to anyone like he’s trying to imply the only racist cops are redneck southerners?
Prejudice percolates in everyone’s minds even if you try not to be racist. It takes constant monitoring to be aware of bias. But you can’t really use brain imaging and theories about the brain to explain complex behaviors. No competent neuroscientist is going to make such a simplistic connection between brain and behavior
So, uh, I guess it was racism after all? I mean, this paragraph appears to be saying that cops kill because they’re paranoid racists with poor self-control and a tendency to explode into violent rage. Because of their brains and their training and stuff. (For some reason, Shermer considers this a “charitable explanation;” I’m not sure most police officers would agree.)
But that’s okay! You see, “citizens should remember that cops are working to protect us from threats to our security.” They’re well-meaning paranoid violent racist rageballs, and so…well, the column ends there, so I’m not really sure what the moral is. We should forgive police brutality? Or we shouldn’t bother trying to prevent it, except by teaching cops de-escalation techniques they can use if they feel like it? Or something else? It is a mystery.
Anton Mates @ 23:
:Snort: Ah, that’s not the way to do tea, at all. Well said, well said.
@12
On that, check out the California Open Justice project (http://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/index.html). The state is publishing information on deaths at the hands of law enforcement. I was really surprised to see the state publish this information, and every state should do the exact same thing.
I was just thinking: didn’t Shermer write a book about morality that is pretty much directly contradicted by the mechanistic behavioral model he’s describing here?
Probably some sophistimacated philosophamacizing.
You know, this sounds a lot like the kinds of explanations people give to explain why an animal attacks a human. Like getting between a mother bear and her cubs to trigger the maternal protection instinct, or running from a big cat to trigger the predatory chase instinct, or splashing in the water to trigger a shark’s investigative bite instinct.
So does that mean that cops are animals, lacking in human self-control? Would you give a weapon and the authority to use lethal force to a tiger or a shark?
Not to deny PZ’s points, but I don’t think that’s the full story.
Non-racist systems and non-racist actors can also have racist outcomes. In his book Chasing the Scream, author Johann Hari points this out. Police departments which are largely funded by asset seizures would, I’d expect, target rich white areas for their drug busts, as they have the most assets. However it doesn’t work this way. The white people are friends with the DA, the chief of police or governor, and if their neighbourhoods start being targeted the pressure brought to bear will get the department shut down and police salaries would drop. So the police target poor neighbourhoods full of people that can’t defend themselves legally.
I think it was said about Baltimore, or maybe Jackson, that the city used black people like an ATM with its many regulations and fines for non-compliance, and fines on fines ad infinitum.
The rage circuit argument sounds like arrant nonsense. But I believe police are trained to expect their orders obeyed, and to escalate when it doesn’t happen. So people (and it may be disproportionately black people) get stuck in a cycle of escalation as quite reasonable complaints about an officer’s behaviour or resisting being manhandled are seen as cause for the cop to escalate into violence and arrest.
And that, elronxenu, is what we call systemic racism.
This is all just baldly asserted without any attempt to provide evidence. He’d never accept that kind of argument from a Bigfoot hunter or a UFO abductee. Dude publishes a magazine called “Skeptic” but doesn’t even try to fact check himself. It’s just embarrassing.
snark on> You have to forgive Michael Shermer, but his inability to think critically is due to the physiology of the nervous system. The tripartite structure of his reasoning shortcircuits and redirects rational thought leading to anaerobic venting being redirected from the primitive cloaca through a deformed notochord (similar to that of early pre-vertebrates) into the complex ganglia controlling the feeding mechanism. The overpressure (believed to be of the order of Gigapascals) has to be released through the oral cavity or via spasmodic uncontrolled movements of dactyl extremities. This last can result in complex and seemingly meaningful squiggles
/snark off>
@27 Amphiox
Well they are animals, and human self control is overrated. We have this thin coat of civilization to fool ourselves into thinking we are somehow better or different from the rest of the animals. Given enough stress, it’s still fight, flight of surrender.
As for Tigers and Sharks, they already have the weapons and authority they need.
Amphiox@27 —
I’m very nervous about giving weapons and authority to use lethal force to human beings, purely on the evidence of human-on-human attacks, never mind the fact that human beings are, according to all the evidence, animals.
Texas [goons] pledge ‘In God We Trust’ but car decals draw ire from watchdog:
Not being a mafia of goons gunning down people from tanks would be a good start. Not showing your blatant bigotry and contempt for the rule of law, and not using torture and manufacturing “evidence”, would also help. Not perjuring yourself in court, actually knowing what the law is, and obeying it yourself might, just might, also help.
@31 Intaglio:
I lost it at, “[]…redirects rational thought leading to anaerobic venting being redirected from the primitive cloaca through a deformed notochord…[]”
That was beautiful.
Ah. Sounds like a credible experiment and an accurate report of its substance and outcome. I’m sure it was exactly like this:
Cryp Dyke:
I just watched The Princess Bride several hours ago, for the first time in 20 years, and I think I would have missed the reference otherwise.
So essentially,
Fuck off, Shermer.
Amphiox #27
Not from any reasonable or moral position – but yes, yes I would. Being fully aware of the danger and absurdity of such a thing, I couldn’t resist the pure awesome of an authority invested, weapon wielding shark or tiger existing.
elronxenu #28
Sure, it may be. But probably only in a handful of instances in a couple small pockets in a few tiny towns, sometimes. Maybe.
I wonder how much Shermer’s libertarianism plays into this. If it actually is racism causing this problem, then it means the government will have to do something to correct it, which will be antithetical to him. Therefore, mental gymnastics will be done to not only define the problem as not-racism, but also imply that nothing significant can or should be done about it.
erik333
Unless someone has evidence otherwise, all the other armed cops in the advanced industrial democratic world are similar animals with a similar “thin coat of civilisation”. So why don’t Canadian or Australian or German or French or Italian armed cops kill as many white / black / other people? It couldn’t possibly be some combination of selection, training and standard operating procedures. Or could it?
Canada has recorded 19 such deaths in 2015. Given their population of 36 million, the equivalent for the USA would be 163 people killed so far this year whereas it’s 815 according to the Counted project on The Guardian. In Germany. that number is one. The USA equivalent number would be 4 or fewer.