Drop in Killings by Police Noted : Black Political Pressure, Increased Training Cited

The nation’s big-city police killed 50% fewer citizens in 1984 than they did 14 years earlier, and much of the decline resulted from fewer police killings of blacks, a study by the Washington-based Crime Control Institute reported Sunday.

Over the same span of years, the number of police killed in the 50 cities surveyed dropped by two-thirds, according to the study, even though overall violence in the cities was somewhat higher.

“This report shows that if you can train police to be less violent, less violence will be directed at the police,” said Minneapolis Police Chief Anthony V. Bouza, chairman of the nonprofit research institute. “Violence engenders violence.”

Killings by police in Los Angeles did not drop as sharply as those in the four other largest cities in the study--New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Detroit. The Los Angeles totals were 96 citizens killed by police in 1980-84, compared to 107 in 1970-74.

But Lawrence W. Sherman, a University of Maryland criminology professor who as institute president directed the study, said the Los Angeles rate was influenced by the city’s sharp population increase and the even faster growth in the area’s overall homicide rate.

At least 353 citizens were killed by police in the 50 cities in 1971, contrasted with 172 killed in 1984, the study found. Police officers killed by citizens went from 19 in 1971 to a peak of 38 in 1975 and then dropped to 13 in 1984.

The sharp decrease in the number of blacks killed by police occurred despite little change in the black arrest rate, the study said. The institute’s data on black deaths was drawn from a National Urban League study of blacks killed by police from 1970 to 1979 in 54 cities over 250,000 population.

Black and White Deaths

The ratio between black and white deaths at police hands dropped from 7 to 1 in 1971 to 2.5 to 1 in 1978 and 2.8 to 1 in 1979, according to the Urban League study.

Sherman said it is “statistically impossible” to attribute the drop in big-city police killings to any one cause or set of causes.

“It seems most likely to have been caused by changing police policies and practices, which were in turn influenced by black political pressure, civil litigation and training,” the study said.

In listing police policy shifts as a factor, the study noted that substantial declines in police shootings, woundings and killings took place in New York, Atlanta and Kansas City after restrictions were tightened on police use of firearms there.

‘Disciplinary Process’

“Perhaps more important than the formal policy on fleeing felons, however, was the informal ‘message’ police executives communicated about the disciplinary process,” the study said. These informal messages applied to defense-of-life shooting as well as to fleeing-felon situations.

The study cited as an example the 1979 shooting of Eulia Love by two Los Angeles police officers after she threw a knife at them at close range, which drew what the report called “extensive press criticism.”

“Precinct commanders told officers at roll calls that if they got into a shooting that ‘looks bad,’ they may find little support from the department,” the study said. “Total persons shot by LAPD officers, already declining when the Eulia Love incident occurred, continued to decline thereafter for three years.”

The study cited intensive training in use of deadly force and tightened disciplinary review of shootings that began in the late 1970s as factors in the decline of citizens killed by police. The rising threat of lawsuits over police shootings and the psychological costs for police that result may well be another “powerful reason,” the study said.

Black Political Power

The influence of black political power was an important factor in the decline of police shootings of blacks, the study concluded. “The rising percentage of black voters in big cities meant that few mayors could ignore the issue, no matter what their own race.”

The combined pressures of black protest, tightened restrictions, training, discipline and civil suits produced “a new perspective on shootings within the police culture that the report said is ‘nothing short of extraordinary.’ ”

The report cited as an example a Savannah, Ga., police sergeant who recently recalled how his colleagues would routinely point their guns at unarmed people in the early 1970s. By the early 1980s, he said, such practices were almost unheard of in his department.

“We did things differently then,” he said. “Things that we’ve now outgrown.”

The study found that police kill citizens at widely varying rates, with the variations only partly related to levels of violence in the cities surveyed. “These variations demonstrate that police shooting decisions are still highly discretionary, and greatly dependent on local police practices and customs,” Sherman said.