Alysia Santo and R.G. Dunlop report for the Marshall Project and the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, under the headline, "Where Police Killings Often Meet with Silence: Rural America." The journalists "spent a year examining ... little publicized" police shootings in rural America. Here's an excerpt from their story:
Officers in rural areas fatally shot about 1,200 people from 2015 through 2020, while in cities there were at least 2,100 such deaths, according to the news organizations’ analysis of data compiled by The Washington Post; no comprehensive government database exists.
The data analysis found that, although the rate of rural police shootings was about 30 percent lower than the urban rate when adjusted for population, the rural incidents mirrored many of the dynamics of police shootings that have come under scrutiny in cities.
And even as deadly police shootings decreased overall during this time, according to the data, the decline in rural communities was more modest than in cities: about 9 percent versus 19 percent.
My own thinking about this is that there are just fewer checks and balances in rural communities, fewer watch dogs and a less robust tradition of protest.
High-profile urban police shootings such as the killing of Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., have set off protests, prompted widespread calls for change and led to new policies in some law enforcement agencies. But rural deaths seldom attract attention from the public or the national press. Police shootings in isolated areas are rarely captured on video, and many rural officers don’t wear body cameras.
Police and sheriff’s departments that each had a single deadly shooting account for hundreds of the rural fatalities. But in a handful of states, including Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Texas, state troopers are responsible for many of the deaths.
Rural shootings by the Kentucky State Police, the agency with the largest number of such deaths in the six-year period, illustrate both what distinguishes these encounters from other police killings and how they fit within broader patterns nationwide.
Kentucky state troopers shot and killed at least 41 people during that period, including 33 in rural areas. To examine these deaths, reporters interviewed more than 100 people and reviewed dozens of court cases and thousands of pages of police investigative reports, in addition to conducting the data analysis.
One big difference was that most of the people killed in the rural shootings, in Kentucky and elsewhere, were white. White people make up the rural majority in nearly every state, and two-thirds of the people fatally shot by law enforcement in rural areas across the country were white, the data analysis shows; about 10 percent were Black. (In cities, 37 percent were Black and 31 percent white.)
Nevertheless, in some states, a disproportionately high number of Black people were shot and killed by the police relative to their share of the rural population, according to the data. These include Alabama, Virginia and — the starkest example — Louisiana, where Black people accounted for about 20 percent of rural residents but almost 37 percent of rural police shootings.
Other characteristics of the rural Kentucky incidents were closely aligned with both rural and urban police shootings across the country. Most of the people shot in rural Kentucky were men, and two-thirds were armed with guns, according to police records.
The story also includes several compelling vignettes about people who've been killed by rural law enforcement. The opening vignette, for example, out of Pippa Passes, Kentucky, population 533, features rural lack of anonymity--in this case between a man killed by a police officer and the officer who killed him: they'd gone to school together, and the officers had previously saved the man's life with Narcan.
My earlier posts taking up the issue of police shooting civilians in rural areas--including the shootings of unarmed whites--often low-status, low-income whites-are here and here. As my prior posts have noted, it's interesting that media reports like this New York Times story do not lead with the problem of cops shooting unarmed, low-status white folks. Instead, it uses "rural" as a proxy for that demographic, though this story co-reported by the Marshall Project does eventually get to an express discussion of racial difference among those killed.
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