_Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored Peopl_e, Benjamin Crump; Harper Collins, 2019, 260 pages
“This contribution needs a pullquote”
Question: If members of one group are murdering members of another group at nine times the expected rate, can the members of the one group be said to be committing genocide against the members of the other group? Hold that thought.
Given the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, a moving picture, a fortiori, would have to be worth many thousands of words. Among other things in this book, Benjamin Crump addresses several instances of black fatalities at the hands of the police—the incidents captured on video—as evidence that black people are the victims of a genocide waged against them. This review begins by analyzing certain of those accounts that are readily available on YouTube. An indispensable viewing aid is the playback speed feature found by clicking on the gear-shaped settings icon in the lower right of the screen. Adjusting the playback speed setting to the slowest available—0.25—enables the viewer to catch details that might be missed at normal speed.
The first incident involves the shooting of Philando Castile. Here’s Crump’s version (6):
The police dashcam video footage captures Officer Yanez informing Castile that his brake light is out. He then asks Castile for his driver’s license and insurance. Castile can be seen handing over the cards and heard saying, “Sir, I do have to tell you I do have a firearm on me.”
“Okay. Don’t reach for it then,” Officer Yanez replies.
“I’m not pulling it out,” Castile responds.
Suddenly Yanez yells, “Don’t pull it out. Don’t pull it out!”
Yanez fires seven shots into the vehicle. Five hit Castile.
Crump has a few elements out of sequence. After Yanez first tells Castile not to “reach for it,” Castile responds, “I’m, I, I was reaching for . . .” Yanez then tells him not to “pull it out,” to which Castile responds that he’s not “pulling it out.” Yanez then tells him again not to “pull it out,” and then opens fire. The mortally wounded Castile responds that he “wasn’t reaching.” Yanez screams at him not to “pull it out.”
This all happens very fast, and this is where the 0.25 playback speed comes in. What we see is that just before Yanez opens fire, he inserts his left arm all the way into the vehicle through the open window, presumably in an attempt to dislodge Castile’s arm from whatever it was doing. This occurs between 21:05:58 and 21:06:00 of the dashcam time stamp. Unsuccessful in his effort dissuade Castile, Yanez then opens fire.
Crump also omits other relevant information. Castile was stopped because he fit the description of someone who had recently committed an armed robbery. When the car window rolled down, Yanez caught a strong whiff of marijuana. Bear in mind that police officers have been shot by stopped drivers who didn’t want to catch even a minor drug charge. This is what was going through Yanez’s mind when Castile advised him that he had a firearm on him.
After Yanez initially instructed Castile not to reach for his weapon, he twice admonished him not to pull it out. Now if a police officer, after having advised you once not to reach for a weapon, has to advise you a second and a third time of the same, it’s because he thinks you are going for the weapon. In such a case, you stop what you’re doing and show your hands; you don’t tell the officer that you’re not pulling a weapon and go on doing what you’re doing, because if you’re a bad guy, you might very well be pulling a weapon. I have no doubt the hapless Castile was simply fumbling about trying to get his wallet out of his pocket, the wallet lying in close proximity to his gun. Probably impaired by the THC in his system, his mind wasn’t tracking right and picking up the cues it should have. How can you be sitting in the driver seat and not notice a cop’s arm stuck all the way through the driver side window right under your nose? Wouldn’t anyone in his right mind stop what he was doing and go WTF? And then even after the poor devil was shot, he continued doing what he was doing, prompting Yanez to scream at him, “Don’t pull it out!” Although this certainly was a sad mishap, it wasn’t genocide.
Our second video analysis involves Terence Crutcher. According to Crump, “Crutcher was walking away slowly with his hands up and the officer shoots him twice and kills him saying that she feared for her life.” (34) Here’s what really happened: Terence Crutcher, a felon with gun and drug offenses on his record, and high on PCP at the time, abandoned his vehicle in the middle of the road. Betty Jo Shelby, first officer on the scene, observed Crutcher wandering about with his hands in his pockets and instructed him to take his hands out of his pockets. Completely unbidden, Crutcher raised his hands in the air and began walking toward his vehicle. Officer Shelby ordered him to stop, but he kept walking toward the vehicle. Now at this point, anyone in Shelby’s place would have been extremely wary, thinking the raised hands to be a ruse enabling the subject to get to his vehicle, at which time at least one hand would come down to produce from the vehicle an unpleasant surprise for the officer.
By this time, a couple of other officers had arrived and were coming up behind Shelby, who already had her gun drawn. When Crutcher came alongside the driver door of his vehicle, he made a right face toward the door. His right side now faced Shelby, his right hand still in the air. His left hand, however, had come down, and his left forearm was between his body and the window of the vehicle. Officer Shelby thought Crutcher was reaching into the vehicle and fired one shot, not two as stated by Crump.
There are both dashcam and helicopter video of the shooting, and both have time stamps, but the time stamps are not exactly in sync. On the dashcam video, the gunshot can be heard at 19:44:00 just before it rolls over to 19:44:01, but it takes a while for Crutcher to finally crumple to the pavement. Although the shot can’t be heard on the helicopter video, other elements enable the videos to be synchronized such that the helicopter video time stamp at 19:44:42 corresponds to the dashcam video timestamp of 19:44:00 when the shot was fired.
A freeze frame right at 19:44:42 as it rolls over from 19:44:41 of the helicopter video shows Crutcher standing at the front door of his vehicle, his right side toward the police, his right hand still up. But his left hand isn’t up. The left short sleeve of his shirt is up, as if his upper arm is raised, but we can’t see his forearm. Immediately visible to the left of that left shirt sleeve is a slanting structural feature of the vehicle, the A-pillar, which anchors the left side of the windshield and connects the roof of the vehicle to the body. If Crutcher’s left hand was still raised, his forearm would be visible in front of the A-pillar, which it is not. The only place his forearm could be is between his body and the driver window of the vehicle, giving the impression that he might have been trying to reach into the vehicle even if the window was up. Why did he keep his right hand up while fumbling around with his left hand the way he did? It sure gave the impression he thought he was up to something. When a felon ingests PCP and gets behind the wheel of a vehicle, bad things can happen. But this certainly wasn’t an instance of genocide.
The last video critique involves Eric Garner. Here’s Crump’s commentary on the “graphic and disturbing video footage of the incident” (106):
During the chokehold Garner gasped for air and repeated, “I can’t breathe,” _eleven_ times while lying on the sidewalk. Despite Garner’s pleas, Pantaleo did not let up on the chokehold, nor did any of the other three officers holding him down assist him, until Garner lost consciousness.
In reality, Garner began pleading he couldn’t breathe only after Pantaleo had let go of his neck. Go to 0:48 in the unedited version and play 0:48 through 0:52 at 0.25 playback speed. At 0:49, Pantaleo breaks the grip on his neck lock, his right hand coming down to control Garner’s right arm. Toward the end of 0:51, Pantaleo’s left arm comes away from Garner’s neck, immediately after which Garner begins to plead that he can’t breathe. This incident was the subject of a previous article in this journal which also pointed out that Garner actually died of an asthma attack. Having the misfortune to have a fatal asthma attack when being arrested isn’t genocide.
Now I’m going to share a link and discuss a video not mentioned in the book; this is provided as a remedial aid to its author. The second chapter of Crump’s book is titled, “Police Don’t Shoot White Men in the Back,” and of course, Crump simply hasn’t done his homework, which is to be expected. This video shows a white man being shot in the back while trying to run from the police, and, as an added treat, the police officer who shot him is black. It happened about three and a half miles as the crow flies from where I live on a stretch of highway I frequently drive. Roland Carnaby had been stopped for speeding, and while the officer was attempting to verify his identity, he suddenly sped away, leading the police on a high-speed chase until he finally ran out of gas and coasted to a stop. As a couple of officers broke out the passenger door window of his vehicle, Carnaby exited the driver side, fumbling with an object one of the officers thought might have been a gun. The officer still at the passenger side—the other officer had run around to the other side of the vehicle—took a shooting stance through the broken-out window and fired a shot into Carnaby’s back, killing him. The object in Carnaby’s hand turned out to be his BlackBerry phone.
The incident is quite instructive. If you attract the attention of the police by breaking the law in the first place, then get the police all amped up in a high-speed chase, and then attempt to flee on foot while fumbling with something that could be mistaken for a gun, you just might get shot. And if one group has a higher percentage of people who engage in this kind of high-risk behavior, well, that group will have a higher percentage of people shot for behaving that way. It’s not a racial thing; it’s a behavioral thing.
Not surprisingly, Crump also presents half-baked statistical analysis of the kind Julia Craven serves up at HuffPo. In a discussion of a non-fatal police shooting that occurred in Bellaire, Texas, Crump states, “The population of Bellaire is less than 1 percent Black, yet in 2005 Black drivers accounted for 22 percent of traffic tickets and 39 percent of motorists who were stopped and searched by police.” (95) Bellaire is a little enclave of 17,000 completely surrounded by Houston, a city of two million, about a quarter of whom are black. Houstonians regularly drive back and forth through Bellaire all the time. So what percentage of black motorists ticketed or searched by Bellaire police were actually from Houston rather than Bellaire? And if they were actually speeding, or not stopping at stop signs, or were searched because they fit the description of a suspect, well, what’s the problem?
Another piece of statistical chicanery brings us back to the question asked at the beginning of this review: If members of one group are murdering members of another group at nine times the expected rate, can the members of the one group be said to be committing genocide against the members of the other group? Crump cites a source from 2017 that dismissively states that “only” about 15 percent of all murders committed by black people involve white victims. (115) I recognized this statistic as being in the range of percentages that can be calculated from the single victim/single offender tables in the annual Crime in the United States (CIUS) figures published by the FBI. Percentages calculated from this subset of total murders are often used as a proxy for total murder percentages because certain information in the total numbers is lacking; for example, several thousand murder cases per year go unsolved, the identities of the murder offenders unknown. In the single victim/single offender tables, however, identified victims are paired up with their identified offenders. Percentages generated from these single victim/single offender tables are then taken as fairly representative of what the percentages would be for the larger total numbers.
Working backwards from 2017 until I came to a figure most closely approximating 15 percent on the dot, I came to the 2012 single victim/single offender table, whose calculated percentage was 14.88. There were a total of 2,896 black offenders and their corresponding victims, 431 of whom were white, and 431 ÷ 2,896 = 14.88 ≈ 15. There were 193 black victims killed by white offenders, so the ratio of white victims to black victims is 431:193 or about 2.2:1. So offenders from a little group managed to murder more than twice as many victims from a much larger group than offenders from the larger group murdered in the smaller group. But what should the ratio be, based on population percentages and the assumption of equal rates of murder?
According to Statista data for 2012, whites (including Hispanic whites) made up about 78 percent of the population, blacks made up about 13 percent, and all the other groups combined made up about 9 percent. Assuming the same murder rate for black, white, and other groups means that the percentage of murders committed by each group would be equal to the percentage they make up of the population. Another assumption would be that for every group, the out-of-group murder percentage would be the same, say 10 percent across the board to keep the math easy. And the final assumption would be that the out-of-group murders committed by each group would be proportionally distributed across the other groups; there would be, for example, more black victims than other victims of white out-of-group murders because blacks make up a greater percentage of the population than others.
Working within these parameters, I came up with a ratio of approximately 1:4.1. In other words, for every white victim murdered by a black offender, there should be 4.1 black victims murdered by white offenders. This ought to be fairly intuitive, a larger group committing more out-of-group murders than a smaller group instead of vice versa. Yet the actual observed ratio is 2.2:1. So by how much do we need to increase the 1 in the 1:4.1 ratio in order to get a 2.2:1 ratio? By substituting x for 1 in 1:4.1 and setting up the proportionality 2.2:1 = x:4.1, we solve for x by multiplying the extremes in the equation, x = 2.2 × 4.1 = 9.02. That’s right, folks—white people are being murdered at nine times the expected rate by black people. So who is committing genocide against whom?
Doing more work with the single victim/single offender table for 2012, I calculated that black offenders were responsible for 48 percent of the murders. Now 48 percent less 13 percent is 35 percent. So after black offenders got their legal bag limit of 13 percent of the murders, they went on a binge and committed 35 percent more murders on top of the 13 percent. I was also able to calculate the percentage of black in-group murders at 83 percent, and 83 percent of 35 percent is 29 percent. So an estimated 29 percent of the total murders in the country were black-on-black murders over and above the expected black-on-black murders in the 13 percent. The CIUS total victim count for 2012 was 12,765, and 29 percent of 12,765 is a little over 3,700. The number of truly unjustified black deaths per year at the hands of law enforcement pales in comparison with this internecine carnage. If anything remotely resembles a genocide against black people, this would be it.
One more datum from CIUS 2012 needs to be mentioned. This is Law Enforcement Officers Feloniously Killed, which gives a breakdown of the known offenders by race over a ten-year rolling average. For the decade ending in 2012, the offenders totaled up to 595, of which 259 were black, for a percentage of 43 percent. Crump whines about black people being killed by police but is apparently completely unaware that black people kill the police at about three times the expected rate.