Truth Claim:
“…recent reform efforts to prevent police violence in the USA, including body cameras, implicit bias training, de-escalation, and diversifying police forces, have all failed to further meaningfully reduce police violence rates”.
Transition from Truth Claim to Agenda:
“Evidence-based research and advocacy are needed to find solutions that work.”
Agenda:
“[We need] new strategies, including divestment from police and corresponding investment in evidence-based community resources for violence prevention.…Although it might seem drastic to many in the USA to defund, disarm, or abolish militarised police, there are many places where living without militarised police is already a reality.
The above quotes are from Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression, which was published this month in the Lancet. The authors support their truth claims with three citations:
AS Vitale The end of policing. Verso, New York, NY (2017). This is a book that does not pretend to offer a balanced approach to the problem of police violence. Excerpt: “Modern policing is largely a war on the poor that does little to make people safer or communities stronger, and even when it does, this is accomplished through the most coercive forms of state power that destroy the lives of millions” Publisher blurb: “The problem is not overpolicing, it is policing itself. Why we need to defund the police and how we get there…the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination.”
E Zuckermann Why filming police violence has done nothing to stop it. MIT Technology Review (June 3, 2020). This is an opinion piece that cites two studies* to document that body cameras have done nothing to stem police violence. Excerpt: “If police officers know they’re being watched both by their body cameras and by civilians with cell phones, they will discipline themselves and refrain from engaging in unnecessary violence. It’s a good theory, but in practice, it hasn’t worked.”
SM Underhill Decades of failed reforms allow continued police brutality and racism. The Conversation. July 6, 2020. This is an opinion piece that does not address recent police reforms, except to advocate for the demilitarization of the police. Excerpt: “Violence and corruption have long been the mainstay of American police…there is no promise that reform efforts now will lead to any more changes than they have in the past.”
The Lancet is a medical journal, whose motto is “the best science for better lives”. I assume the Lancet’s high standard for science holds as well for science writing and that an important part of science writing is deciding which sources to cite. Luckily, guidance on that subject is available. Per The Principles of Biomedical Scientific Writing: Citation:
“Among available sources, the most relevant, valid, methodologically sound, and those with a landmark contribution to the topic should be selected.”
One-sided books and opinion pieces do not meet this standard. Yet the Lancet’s editors are looking the other way. Why? Probably because the journal’s mission is not just to publish some of the best science in the world but also to “transform society” and be “a platform to advance the global impact” of the research it publishes. Unfortunately, pursuing the truth and advancing a cause require kind different mindsets. As Dhruv Khullar put it in The New Yorker:
“…it is only through careful study design, methodical data analysis, and the skeptical interpretation of results that we can separate unfounded speculation from scientific fact. [Some] want urgent action; science demands caution…An ideology compresses the space for nuance until you’re left with only supporters and opponents, believers and nonbelievers. Dogma obscures data; the cause trumps the truth.”
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* I’ll address these studies in the next post.
References:
Fatal police violence by race and state in the USA, 1980–2019: a network meta-regression, authored by the GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators. The Lancet, Volume 398, Issue 10307, 2–8 October 2021, Pages 1239-1255.
The Struggle to Define Long COVID by Dhruv Khullar/The New Yorker September 20, 2021