On Monday, 3/20/23 the Police shot and killed a 35 year old man. Both the Rochester Police Department and Monroe County’s Sheriff’s Office were involved in the shooting which is reported to have involved multiple police officers. As the D&C has reported in 3/22 there was one police killing by an RPD officer. In addition “There were five killings involving RPD officers in 2021.”

This leaves the question why are there so many fatal police shootings in Monroe County. There was recently a study released looking at bias at the community level and fatal police shootings. The study was labeled “Disproportionate Use of Lethal Force in Policing Is Associated With Regional Racial Biases of Residents” The study looked at data gathered from the Harvard Implicit association test (IAT). Which is the most widely used method of measuring an individual’s implicit biases and then when gathered by zip code, an areas implicit biases. As noted by the authors of the study “Project Implicit (implicit.harvard.edu) has been collecting various IATs and measures of explicit bias over the Internet since 2002. By geolocating respondents, we used this data set (Xu, Nosek, & Greenwald, 2014) to compute point estimates of implicit and explicit biases by region.”

The study found a strong correlation between the implicit biases in a region and the number of fatal police shootings of individuals of color. Specifically, the study found that “We find that the implicit racial biases of White residents predict disproportionate regional use of lethal force with Blacks by police. This association is robust, reliably emerging across two conceptually distinct measures of racial bias, multiple imputations, three different transformations of the outcome measure, traditional and bootstrapped distributions, and above and beyond 14 sociodemographic covariates. Though the implicit prejudice of Whites is sufficient to significantly predict disproportionate lethal force (Analysis 1), the strongest predictor of lethal force was the regional implicit stereotypical association between Blacks and weapons (Analysis 2).” This means the more a community associates people of color with weapons the more people of color are killed by police.

The reason to write about this is that Monroe County is one of those racially biased communities with a strong correlation between that bias and the fatal killings of people of color in our community. In other words, our community’s racism is strongly correlated with the death of people of color by police. This is a striking and a very disturbing finding. That can not be said enough or loudly enough. Our communities racist attitudes are directly correlated with fatal shootings in Monroe County. The question then becomes what are we going to do about it? How long are we going to let it persist?

© words by Daniel DeMarle 3/25/23

Although we are all inundated with information, at times certain words or images make you stop, take deep breaths, and grasp again the true picture of the insanity of America. That happened to me tonight.

Today, in between seeing patients I took a break to watch my beautiful brown skinned 3 year old grandson, while his mother helped chaperone his sister’s school field trip. We played games and then he went out to play by himself in the backyard while I watched from the window.

This evening I started watching this wonderful piece on Netflix. Then I had to stop. I had to stop when they showed pictures of the manacles used to hold 3-year-old slaves so they could sell them at auction. I then pictured that joyful boy who had played just a few hours before in my backyard in a slave market with those manacles on.

Formal slavery in America only ended because the South lost the civil war. Once again, slavery in America only ended because the South lost the civil war. If there had not been a civil war, we would most likely still have slavery. Again, if there had not been a civil war, there would most probably still be slavery in the United States. Until that time, the Supreme Court had consistently upheld slavery and many members of Congress and a number of past presidents owned slaves.

Racism and hate are real. Americans were happy to take brown and black babies from their mothers and sell them to other people. There has never been a national reckoning with that fact. We live with its continual repercussions every day.

If you want to do something about it, try watching this show on Netflix. I will finish it at a later day and time.

© by Daniel DeMarle 3/7/23