By Jeremy Logan
Poor white people who think that the police killing unarmed black men doesn’t affect them personally are in a for a rude awakening.
When you look at the disenfranchisement of today’s poor whites and poor blacks, the two groups have much more in common with each other than they do with their so called peers of similar skin tone. Especially when it comes to the criminal justice system.
When looking specifically at race it would appear that mass incarceration and police justified homicides are black problems, and understandably, some blacks feel this way as well. This is what they see in their community.
“The reason blacks are more likely to have a violent encounter with police is because they are convicted of felonies at a higher rate than whites,”
– John Jay, College of Criminal Justice, City University
Candace McCoy — a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the city university of New York — told Punditfact.org, “The reason blacks are more likely to have a violent encounter with police is because they are convicted of felonies at a higher rate than whites, however; this has more to do with class than it does race. Felony rates for poor whites are similar to those of poor blacks.”
According to a Bureau of Justice survey of state prison inmates, more than half of all prisoners made less than 10 thousand dollars in 1991. Currently 72 percent of prisoners lack a high school diploma, and 55 percent of prisoners were without full time employment at the time of their arrest.
The FBI website hosts “Crime in the U.S.” which the site states, “is the most comprehensive analysis of violent crime and property crime in the nation,” but if you are trying to find out how many citizens are killed by police in the US, you will find no such data.
It would appear, to me, that the lack of information in the FBI database on police homicides is hiding something.
For example, they only keep data on police homicides that were found to be justifiable. So apparently the feds think it is unimportant for US citizens to know how many people the police kill without provocation. This has to be troubling to anyone with any kind of compassion for their fellow man.
Living in Spokane, where poor white men appear to be fodder in the war on drugs, gives me a unique perspective, I believe, on this subject. During the long hours I have spent researching this topic, I became curious as to the percentage of poor whites killed by police. I found no specific data but the numbers I came up with were surprising, even to me.
There are 19 million poor whites in the US and 7.8 million poor blacks. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention keeps data on fatal injuries from 1999 to 2011 and one category is homicides by legal intervention. The CDCP data shows that over the span of more than a decade, police, compared to 1,130 blacks, killed 2,151 whites in justifiable homicides.
If incarceration rates are any kind of reflection on who is killed by police, than we could assume that the majority of them are poor.
Now if I were correct in this, which I am sure I am, then the difference between poor blacks, and poor whites who are killed by police in justifiable homicide would only indicate a 22 percent disparity, as opposed to the 300 percent indicated when comparing all blacks, and all whites.
This would mean that poor whites are not only incarcerated at nearly the same rate as poor blacks, but they are also nearly as likely to be killed by police.
Native Americans lead the pack, however, making up only .08 percent of the population while accounting for 1.7 percent of police killings.
The Black Panthers acknowledged the similarities between poor whites and poor blacks, and the importance of addressing poverty as a whole when they argued that no fundamental change could occur without the help of poor whites.
Huey P Newton pointed to poor whites as another group, a larger group, that were also oppressed by the white wealth in this country.
King also saw it when he started the Poor Peoples Campaign shortly before his death.
There are 45.3 million poor in the US which means 15 percent of the country makes less than 11 thousand dollars a year, and another 25 percent live paycheck to paycheck, on nothing more than 20 thousand.
If all of these people were united as one we could send a deafening roar throughout congress, and force the changes we believe need to be made.