A garrison state in "democratic" society.

Takagi, Paul

I.

THIS ARTICLE REPORTS ON A STUDY OF POLICE OFFICERS KILLED IN THE LINE OF duty and civilians killed by the police. The study was originated in 1971 in reaction to news reporting on the several mass media outlets at the local and national levels, which focused on FBI statistics indicating that police officers were being "assassinated" at an alarming rate. A police reporter for an educational television station alarmed viewers with a report that 125 law enforcement officers had been killed in 1971, an increase of almost two and one-half times over 1963, when only 55 police officers were killed in all of that year. Police killings of citizens, however, were reported as isolated events. Although the death of civilians at the hands of police occurred from time to time, no news analyst attempted to show this as a national phenomenon.

Sorel (1950) said people use words in selective ways to create alarm. When a police officer kills a citizen, the official language is "deadly force," suggesting to the audience that the use of force was legitimate. But when a police officer is killed, it is characterized as "violence," and therefore, illegitimate. In this way, news reporting on the killing of police officers in 1971 conjured the idea that the apparent increase in the killing of police officers was unprecedented. It was seen as an attack caused in part by the rising political militancy among revolutionary groups, and by the increasing race consciousness among people of color venting their frustrations by attacking a visible symbol of authority. This interpretation was entertained by officials at the highest levels. President Nixon, in April of 1971, called upon police officials, and as subsequent events revealed, other representatives from paramilitary organizations also met to deal with the "problem."

The approach by officials was to consider the problem one of defense, and to search for the best technical means and policies to protect their view of a "democratic" society. It was viewed as a military problem, and the fortification of the police under increased Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) funding and direction became a national policy (Goulden 1970).

One hundred and twenty-five police officers died while on duty during 1971; the actual rate of death, however, did not increase because of the greater number of police officers who were on duty during the same year. Even if the number of police personnel has increased two and one-half times since 1963, the rate of death among police officers should not change. This is not said in an attempt to minimize the statistics that concern the officials. One could argue that the rate of police deaths should decrease. The point is to look at all the statistics, including previous studies that actually show the killing of police officers occurs at a relatively stable rate (Bristow 1963; Robin 1963; and Cardarelli 1968).

The source of data is the FBI's own reports, which show an increase in the number of police officers killed, from 55 in 1963 to 125 in 1971, along with an increase of over 50% in the numbers of full-time authorized police personnel. The data presented in Chart I show that the rate of such homicides, while fluctuating from year to year, does not result in a trend either up or down over the period. The rate did peak nationally in 1967 with 29.9 deaths per 100,000 law enforcement officers. This includes all ranks from patrolmen to higher officials and federal agents. Since patrolmen bear the greatest risk of being killed in the line of duty, they may feel that FBI reports should be more detailed to accurately reflect the hazards they face.

Reports to the FBI on the numbers of police officers on duty and the numbers killed may not give a complete picture, since the agency has been only gradually achieving uniform reporting. Indeed, the number of reporting agencies has increased since 1963. California, however, has had fairly complete and uniform reporting throughout the period, and the death rates among California police are available for the whole decade since 1960. They, too, show a peak in 1967, a year in which 12 officers were killed. That did not set a trend, however, as the rate decreased in the next two years.

[GRAPHIC 1 OMITTED]

For the 86 officers who were killed in California from 1960 through 1970, the police apprehended 117 suspects, of whom 55% were white, 25% Black, and 19% Mexican-American. (This is the same percentage distribution of ethnic/racial groups in California's prison population.) At the time of this writing, 65 of the 117 suspects were convicted of either murder or manslaughter, and seven cases were still pending in court. W.H. Hutchins, Assistant Chief of the California Bureau of Criminal Statistics, noted in a paper delivered to the California Homicide Investigators' Conference on March 5, 1971, that the great majority of homicidal deaths among police officers occurred in situations where robberies were in progress or where robbers were fleeing arrest. But, noted Hutchins (1971), "the ambushing of officers, which has been relatively rare in the past, accounted for 25% of peace officers killed in 1970."

Mr. Hutchins is not entirely correct when he reports that the majority of police officers killed were in situations involving armed robberies. An earlier report by his Bureau of Criminal Statistics indicates that "63 percent of these officers died while conducting routine investigations, responding to disturbance calls, and taking people into custody ..." (Beattie 1968, 5). A special study on the deaths of 39 California police officers (1960 through 1966) shows 35 of the 39 died of gunshot wounds, in some instances by their own guns (Ibid., 11-14).

   Klass, Richard J., 25-year-old patrolman, Daly City Police
   Department, killed May 6,1966. Shot with his own gun by an escapee
   with whom he was struggling.

   LeFebvre, Richard R., 23-year-old patrolman, Long Beach Police
   Department, killed August 15, 1965, at 8:00 p.m. Died at the scene
   of a riot when a shotgun in the hands of a brother officer
   discharged during a struggle.

   Ludlow, Donald E., a 26-year-old deputy sheriff, Los Angeles
   County, killed August 13,1965, at 9:00 p.m. Shot to death when
   brother officer's gun went off during struggle at riot scene.

   Ross, Charles M., 31-year-old patrolman, Richmond Police
   Department, killed February 9, 1964, at 1:00 a.m. Shot with his own
   gun while struggling with two drunks.

The four cases above were classified as homicides. To distinguish accidental death from homicide appears to require considerable judgment among those compiling crime statistics, and it is important to understand that these judgment classifications are included in the annual FBI reports on homicides of police officers.

It was noted earlier that the killing of police officers peaked in 1967, with 29.9 deaths per 100,000 law enforcement officers. Does this mean that law enforcement work is one of extreme peril? Robin (1963) argues otherwise:

There is reason to maintain that the popular conception of the dangerous nature of police work has been exaggerated. Each occupation has its own hazards. The main difference between police work and other occupations is that in the former there is a calculated risk ... while other occupational hazards are accidental and injuries usually self-inflicting (Ibid., 230).

Robin adjusts the death rate among police officers to include the accidental deaths (mostly from vehicular accidents), and compares the death rate among the major occupational groups:

Table 1:
Occupational Fatalities per 100,000
Employees 1955

Occupation              Fatality Rate
                         per 100,000

Mining                      93.58
Construction Industry       75.81
Agriculture                 54.97
Transportation              44.08
Law Enforcement             32.76
Public Utilities            14.98
Finance, Gov. Service       14.18
Manufacturing               12.08
Trade                       10.25

Table adapted from Robin (Ibid.,
Table 6).

It is apparent that the occupational risks in law enforcement are less dangerous than those in several major industries. Mining, with 93.6 deaths per 100,000 employees, is almost three times riskier than law enforcement, while construction work is two and one-half times more dangerous; agriculture and transportation show considerably higher rates of death than does law enforcement. Robin correctly concludes that the data do not support the general belief that law enforcement work is a highly dangerous enterprise.

II.

The other side of the coin is police homicides of citizens. This aspect of police-citizen interaction has received little attention aside from the work of Robin (Ibid.) and Knoohuizen et al. (1972). For example, the prestigious President's Task Force Report on the police (1967) devotes not one line to this issue.

What is generally not known by the public, and either unknown or certainly not publicized by the police and other officials, is the alarming increase in the rate of deaths of male citizens caused by, in the official terminology, "legal intervention of police." These are the cases recorded on the death certificates as "justifiable homicide" by police intervention. After disappearing onto computer tapes, these reappear as statistics in the annually published official volumes of "Vital Statistics in the United States." Here they can be found under "Cause of Death, Code Number 1984," where they have attracted very little attention.

The deaths of male civilians ages 10 years and over caused by police intervention gradually increased in rate, especially from 1962 to 1968, the latest year in which nationwide statistics were available at the time of this writing (see Chart 2). More dramatic is the trend in civilian deaths caused by California police, where the rate increased two and one-half times between 1962 and 1969. This increase cannot be attributed simply to an increase in the proportion of young adults in the population, among whom a larger share of these deaths occur, because each annual rate is age-adjusted to the age-profile of the population in 1960. There is an increase in the rate of homicides by police, regardless of the changes in that age profile.

[GRAPHIC 2 OMITTED]

Why should such a trend go unnoticed? The crime rate has, of course, increased at the same time, and this, it might be argued, indicates that more males put themselves in situations where they risk a police bullet. This is the argument that the victim alone is responsible. But that is too simple an explanation: an increase in such dangerous situations has not led to an increased jeopardy of police lives, for, as we have seen, their homicide rate did not increase over the same period.

The charts show police to be victims of homicides at an annual rate of about 25 per 100,000 police, while citizens are victims of killings at the hands of police at a rate of 0.5 per 100,000 males ages 10 and over, on the national level, and a rate of about 0.8 in California. This huge difference of 30-to 50-fold cannot be taken literally, because the civilian rate is based upon all males over age nine, even though most of them do not have the slightest chance of confronting a policeman in a desperate situation of anyone's making. There simply is no other population base to use in computing that rate. The point, however, is inescapable: the rate of death did not change for law enforcement officers during a period when it changed critically for male citizens.

III.

Black men have been killed by police at a rate some nine to 10 times higher than that for white men. From that same obscure, but published source in our nation's capital, come the disheartening statistics. Between 1960 and 1968, police killed 1,188 Black males and 1,253 white males in a population in which about 10% are Black. The rates of homicides due to police intervention increased over the years for both whites and Blacks, but remained consistently at least nine times higher for Blacks for the past 18 years (see Chart 3).

[GRAPHIC 3 OMITTED]

That proportionately more Blacks are killed by police will come as no surprise to most people, certainly to no police officials. The remarkably big difference should be surprising, however. After all, the Black crime rate, even if we rely upon measurement by the arrest rate, is higher for Blacks than for whites. But that does not explain the killing of Black men. In 1964, arrests of Black males were 28% of total arrests, as reported by 3,940 agencies to the FBI, while Black deaths were 51% of the total number killed by police. In 1968, the statistics were essentially the same.

It might be argued that Blacks have a higher arrest rate for the seven major crimes: homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft, and auto theft; and that arrests for these crimes will correlate better with deaths by legal intervention of police. In 1968, Black males accounted for 36% of arrests for the major crimes; four years earlier, in 1964, Black arrests were less than 30% during a year when they suffered 51% of the deaths from police guns. Besides, it is not certain that the major crimes are a more accurate index of how frequently Blacks and whites commit crimes. Further, the threshold of suspicion is lower when a policeman encounters a Black man, and thus the arrest rate is biased against Blacks. No matter how it is viewed, the death rate of Blacks is far out of proportion to the situations that might justify it.

Black people do not need these statistics to tell them what has been happening. The news gets around the neighborhood when someone is killed by the police. It is part of a history. But white people, especially policymakers, do not live in those neighborhoods, and it is important that they explore the statistics further.

Take the age groups where "desperate" criminals are much less likely to be found, the very young and the very old. Male homicides by police during 1964 to 1968 were:

Table 2

                Number of       Rate Per
                 Deaths      Million/Yearly

             White   Black   White   Black

Ages 10-14      5      11    0.12    1.75
Ages 65+        5      14    0.14    4.76

In proportion to the population, Black youngsters and old men have been killed by police at a rate 15 to 30 times greater than that for whites of the same age. It is the actual experiences behind statistics like these that suggest that police have one trigger finger for whites and another for Blacks. The latest statistics, those for 1968, give no reason for altering that belief.

Whereas our analysis covered national data on police killings of private citizens, Robin (1963, 229), utilizing the same data for the years 1950 through 1960, examined the rates of Black and white victims by selected cities.

In absolute numbers, Chicago police accounted for 54.6% of the 350 police slayings of citizens in the eight cities; the mean annual rate, however, was highest for Miami, with Chicago second. The two cities with the lowest police "justifiable homicide" rate, Boston and Milwaukee, killed Blacks in proportion to whites at a ratio of 25 to 29 times higher.

A more detailed analysis of police killing of private citizens was conducted by Robin for the city of Philadelphia. He reports:

Thirty of the 32 cases (28 were Black victims) were disposed of by the medical examiner, who at the inquest exonerated the officers involved in the killings on the grounds that death was due to justifiable homicide. In the two remaining cases the officers were held for the grand jury, indicted, tried by a jury, and found not guilty (Ibid., 226).

Black citizens have long argued that the police are committing genocide on Black people, and there is increasing evidence that these killings are indeed murder, and that real justice is rarely if ever carried out in this process. Knoohuizen et al. (1972) conducted a study of Chicago police killing of citizens, and provided further credence to the claim that police are murdering Black citizens. In their report, Knoohuizen and associates examined the incidents as reported by the police, the reports of the coroner's office, and testimonies or statements by credible eyewitnesses. In Table 15, they summarized their findings, from which we have extracted three cases.

Case 1. The victim was Linda Anderson. Police action resulting in her death was ruled justifiable homicide because, according to police reports, she was killed accidentally during an attempt to gain entrance to her apartment by shooting the lock off the door. The partner of the officer, and independent witnesses, corroborated the police officer's version. An independent investigation revealed that the officer used a shotgun standing four feet from the door, did not warn the occupant of impending shot, and missed the lock completely.

Case 2: The victim was Raymond Jones. Police action was ruled excusable because police officers did not strike the deceased and were only using the amount offeree necessary to bring the suspect under arrest. Seven of nine officers involved in the incident testified and confirmed each other's story. The report of the coroner's pathologist, however, revealed that Mr. Jones was age 31 and in good health. He was also unarmed. The use of excessive force was implied when nine police officers could not subdue a suspect without causing his death.

Case 3. The victim was Charles Cox. The police report did not offer a justification or an excuse, claiming the victim died from drug overdose rather than use of police force. Further reports from the police indicate that blood analysis revealed some drugs in the victim's body. One of the arresting officers and one of the officers in charge of the lock-up testified that the victim appeared all right when in their charge. A pathologist testified on the basis of his examination of the body that Cox died of blows to the head.

Knoohuizen and associates conclude from their analysis that in 28 of the 76 cases in which civilians were killed at the hands of the Chicago police, there was substantial evidence of police misconduct; and in 10 of the 76 cases, there was substantial evidence of criminal liability for manslaughter or murder (Ibid., 61).

Despite grand jury findings in those instances where police officers are held criminally liable, the courts have been reluctant to proceed with prosecution. All too often, such matters are thrown out of court or juries return the verdict of not guilty. For example, Superior Court Judge Ross G. Tharp of San Diego County dismissed involuntary manslaughter charges against a California Highway patrolman indicted in the fatal shootings of an unarmed 16-year-old boy. According to police reports, Roland R. Thomas was shot by Officer Nelander following a high-speed chase in an allegedly stolen car. The car ran off the road and Thomas appeared to reach toward his pocket, at which point the officer fired his gun. In dismissing the case, Judge Tharp observed: "I think the officer deserves a commendation for doing his duty rather than standing trial."

The only recent cases in which police officers were held accountable for killing civilians were shown on a TV program (Owen Marshall, ABC, Saturday, March 2, 1974), in addition to the highly publicized case in Texas where a 12-year-old Mexican-American youngster was shot while under custody in a police car. The circumstances in the latter case were so gross that a dismissal was out of the question. The court, however, sentenced the officer to a prison term of five years in a state where sentences of 1,000 years for lesser crimes are not uncommon.

IV.

Authorities have been trying to combat what they view to be a rash of attacks on police, to the neglect of all the data that bear on the problem--a problem in which other lives are involved. The problem has existed all along, at least since 1950, and there is reason to believe that for decades before that, Black people have been killed by the police at a tragically disproportionate rate, beyond the bounds of anything that would justify it.

Open warfare between the police and the citizenry might be one of the outcomes. Two recent attacks upon police stationhouses, one by a bomb and the other by shotgun-wielding assailants resulting in the death of two police officers, are indicative. In the latter killing, the gunman thrust a shotgun through the speaking hole of a bulletproof glass shield separating the desk sergeant from the public. Cyclone fencing protected portions of the police stationhouse. The wall of isolation surrounding the police is not only social and psychological, but also physical, and the breaking down of these walls was considered by the National Crime Commission to be the single most important priority. Yet the federal government, in appropriating billions of dollars for the LEAA program, earmarked the funds primarily for the fortification of the police, thereby contributing to their isolation.

Currently, the concept of citizen participation is being stressed by the LEAA. The support the police get from some citizens' groups actually increases the isolation of police from minority communities. In Oakland, California, such a group, called Citizens for Law and Order, has a program of needling judges for their "soft" handling of criminal cases, firing broadsides at the press, television, and radio, and appearing before local governmental bodies to promote support for the police and more "discipline" in schools. Programs such as these are based on the belief that increasing the penalty for crime, increasing the powers of the police, and invoking police coercion of the citizenry will result in law and order.

Other citizens' groups have encouraged the introduction of reforms. People have worked on a variety of schemes such as Civilian Review Boards, psychological testing and screening of police candidates, human relations training, police community relations, racially integrated patrol units, and efforts to increase the hiring of Black and other minority officers. To the extent that they work to improve only the "image" of police, they fail because the problems go much deeper. And to a major extent, they fail because policemen, most of them willingly and others unknowingly, are used as the front line to maintain the social injustices inherent in other institutions and branches of government.

Perhaps the only immediate solution at this time is to disarm the police. Observers have noted that provinces in Australia where the police are unarmed have a much lower rate of attacks upon the police compared to neighboring provinces where the police are armed, and, as a corollary observation, a lower rate of police misconduct.

Disarming the police in the United States will undoubtedly lower the rate of police killings of civilians; it does not, however, get at the causes of police misconduct, particularly toward Black people. The findings that Blacks are killed by the police at a disproportionate ratio in cities such as Milwaukee and Boston, and the attitudes of officials like San Diego County's Superior Court Judge Tharp, require a more fundamental understanding of the meaning of policing in contemporary America.

V.

In distinguishing social justice from distributive justice, the former would not have been obtained, if, for example, Officer Nelander had been tried and convicted for the killing of a 16-year-old alleged auto thief; that would have been distributive justice, because it would have symbolized the fact that the police would not have received special treatment from the courts .Instead, the question that must be asked is why the police officer resorted to deadly force involving an alleged theft. To put it differently, why was the value of an automobile placed above the value of a human life? Judge Tharp's comments in dismissing the case provide a partial answer: "For doing his duty," the duty being to enforce the laws having to do with the property rights of an automobile owner. The critical issue here is that the auto theft laws and, for that matter, most of the laws in American society essentially legitimize a productive system in which human labor is systematically expropriated. Examine for a moment the social significance of an automobile: it involves an array of corporate systems that expropriate the labor of people that go into manufacturing its parts, the labor for its assembly, the labor involved in extricating and processing the fuel that propels it, the labor of constructing the roads on which it runs, etc. The fiction of ownership exacts further capital by banking institutions that mortgage the commodity, and automobile insurance required by laws that extorts additional capital. The built-in obsolescence, or more precisely, the depreciation of the commodity, occurs when the muscle, sweat, and human potential have been completely capitalized. These are the elements embodied in an automobile. It is no longer merely a commodity value, but represents a social value. (1)

The automobile is a commodity created by varied types of wage labor. And as noted by men with ideas as far apart as those of Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the wealth of nations originates in the efforts of labor. But Marx added that wealth based on production of these commodities is accrued through the expropriation of labor power; and thus, the concept of private property based on this form of wealth is in essence the theft of the value-creating power of labor. The criminal laws, the system of coercion and punishment, exist to promote and to protect the consequences of a system based on this form of property.

The rights of liberty, equality, and security are not elements to be exchanged for the right of property acquired by the exploitation of wage labor; nor should they be expressed in relative terms, that is, as greater or less than property rights. One person's life and liberty is the same as the next person's. But in a society that equates private property with human rights, they become inevitably reduced to standards and consequences that value some lives less than others. The system of coercion and punishment is intimately connected with the inequitable distribution of wealth, and provides the legitimation under the perverted notion that "ours is a government of laws"--even to kill in order to maintain social priorities based on private property. This is the meaning of policing in American society.

Why are Black people killed by the police at a rate nine to 10 times higher than the rate for whites? We can describe the manifestations of racism, but cannot adequately explain it. At one level, we agree with the observation that the existence of racism is highly profitable. The Black urban ghettos, created by America's industries, provided the cheap labor power for the accumulation of some of America's greatest industrial wealth at the turn of the 20th century, and again during World War II. These urban ghettos still provide a highly exploited source of labor. In addition, the ghettos themselves have become a place for exploitation by slum landlords, merchants selling inferior quality goods at higher prices, a justification for higher premium rates on insurance, and the victimizing of people under the credit purchase system. To maintain this situation, regulatory agencies, including the police, have ignored the codes governing housing, food, health, and usury conditions.

In cities across the country, the infamous ghettos are now deemed to be prime real estate, and the state under the powers of eminent domain claims these areas for finance capitalism for high-rise buildings, condominiums, trade complexes, and entertainment centers ostensibly for the "people." Under what has been called urban redevelopment, the police are present to quiet individual and especially organized protest and dissent, and the full powers of the state are employed to evict, dispossess, and humiliate.

At another level, the concentration of capital has produced, on the one hand, a demand for a disciplined labor force and, in order to rationalize its control, a need to rely increasingly upon administrative laws; on the other hand, it has created a surplus labor force that is increasingly controlled by our criminal laws. The use of punishment to control surplus labor is not new, having its roots in early 16th-century Europe (Rusche and Kirchheimer 1968).

Historically, people of color came to the United States not as freepersons, but as slaves, indentured servants, and as contract laborers. They were initially welcomed under these conditions. As these particular systems of exploitation gradually disappeared and the people entered the competitive labor market, various devices were employed to continue oppressing them, including imprisonment. In the present period--described by some as the post-industrial era--increasing numbers of people, and especially Black people, find themselves in the ranks of the unemployed, which establishment economists, fixing upon the five percent unemployment figure, dismiss as a regular feature of our political economy. Sweezy et al. (1971) disagree, arguing that the "post-industrial" unemployment figures are the same as those during the Great Depression when one includes defense and defense-related employment data. When arrest and prison commitment data on Black people are viewed from this perspective, especially the sudden increase in prison commitments from a stable rate of 10% up to and during the early period of World War II, to almost double that after the war, there is some basis to suspect that the police killing of Black citizens is punishment to control a surplus labor population.

The labor surplus analysis, however, does not explain the sudden increase in police killing of civilians beginning around 1962. Did the Civil Rights Movement in housing, education, and employment, and more specifically, the militancy of Malcolm X and the liberation movements in Third World nations around the world, redefine the role of the police? Did finance imperialism in the form of multinational corporations beginning about this time create an unnoticed social dislocation? Why do the police kill civilians at a much higher rate in some cities compared to others, and why do they kill Blacks at a disproportionately higher ratio in cities such as Boston and Milwaukee? Why do California police, presumed to be highly professional, kill civilians at a rate 60% higher than the nation as a whole? We are not able to answer these questions.

We must, however, pause for a moment, and consider what is happening to us. We know that authorized police personnel in states such as California have been increasing at the rate of five to six percent, compared to an annual population increase of less than two and one-half percent. In 1960, there were 22,783 police officers; in 1972, there were 51,909. If the rate of increase continues, California will have at the turn of the 21st century an estimated 180,000 police officers, an equivalent of 10 military divisions. Is it not true that the growth in the instruments of coercion and punishment is the inevitable consequence of the wealth of a nation that is based upon theft?

America is moving more and more rapidly toward a garrison state, and soon we will not find solace by repeating to ourselves: "Ours is a democratic society."

REFERENCES

Beattie, Ronald H. 1968 "California Peace Officers Killed 1960-66." Bureau of Criminal Statistics, Department of Justice, State of California (September).

Bristow, Allen P. 1963 "Police Officer Shootings: A Tactical Evaluation." The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 54.

Cardarelli, Albert P. 1968 "An Analysis of Police Killed by Criminal Action: 1961-1963." The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 59.

Goulden, Joseph 1970 "The Cops Hit the Jackpot." The Nation (November).

Hutchins, W.H. 1971 "Criminal Homicides of California Peace Officers, 1960-1970." A report delivered before the California Homicide Investigators' Conference, Los Angeles (March 5).

Knoohuizen, Ralph, Richard P. Fahey, and Deborah J. Palmer 1972 The Police and Their Use of Fatal Force in Chicago. Chicago Law Enforcement Study Group.

President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice 1967 Task Force Report: The Police. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Robin, Gerald D. 1963 "Justifiable Homicide by Police Officers." The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 54.

Rusche. Georg and Otto Kirchheimer 1968 Punishment and Social Structure. New York: Russell and Russell.

Sorel, G. 1950 Reflections on Violence. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

Sweezy, Paul M., Harry Magdoff, and Leo Huberman 1971 "Economic Stagnation and Stagnation of Economics." Monthly Review 22 (April).

NOTES

(1.) The ideas in this section are not original. They come from Fourier, Godwin, Proudhon, Marx, Kropotkin, and others.

PAUL TAKAGI was at the time of publication an Associate Professor at the School of Criminology, University of California, Berkeley. The study was originally conducted by Philip Buell and Paul Takagi in the summer of 1971 .entitled "Code 984: Death by Police Intervention." The present version was considerably revised for this publication. The author wishes to express his appreciation to Herman Schwendinger, Virginia Engquist Grabiner, June Kress, and Tony Platt for their comments and criticisms. Original citation: Crime and Social Justice 1 (Spring-Summer 1974): 27-33.

Table 3:
Rates of Black and White Decedents, by City

                   Black   White   Black: White
City               per 1,000,000      Ratio

Akron              16.1     2.7       5.8 to 1
Chicago            16.1     2.1       7.4 to 1
Kansas City, Mo.   17.0     2.2       7.5 to 1
Miami              24.4     2.7       8.8 to 1
Buffalo             7.1      .5      12.2 to 1
Philadelphia        5.4      .2      21.9 to 1
Boston              3.2      .1      25.2 to 1
Milwaukee          13.5      .4      29.5 to 1