At the same time, race is a factor — but a complicated one. Black men are about 2.5 times more likely than white men to die at the hands of a police officer. How much of a racial disparity there is for women is unclear, since very few women of any racial background are victims of such killings. (A white man is about 20 times more likely to be killed by the police than a Black woman.)
Partly, these disparities are unquestionably due to higher crime rates in the Black community (which certainly reflect a history of racial oppression but are still a fact, and which mean that criminal suspects are disproportionately Black). They also undoubtedly reflect racial profiling that extends to people like Nichols who are not criminal suspects, sometimes based on unconscious assumptions and sometimes on conscious racial prejudice.
But there are also nonracial factors that shape police violence. As New Yorker staff writer David Kirkpatrick notes in a comment on the Nichols killing, police training in the United States has often promoted a “warrior” mindset based on a flawed study from the 1990s which encourages officers to see any civilian as a potential cop killer and stresses aggressive dominance as the correct attitude. While such methods have been going out of fashion, they still influence police work (with the presence of legal and illegal guns an additional factor).
Other commentators point to a lack of professionalism as a key part of the problem. American police officers often receive relatively little training — much less than in other countries (minimum hours of training are twice as high in Canada and four times as high in England), and much less than cosmetologists and plumbers. Of course, more police training means more police funding, not less.
Police brutality is an outrage every civilized society must condemn. The greater attention to it in recent years is a good thing. But if we want practical change, not passions in the social media, we need less rhetoric and more facts about what drives police violence and how to reduce it.