EDITORIAL: Police shootings down, but much more to be done

You wouldn’t know it from the passionate rhetoric dominating the George Floyd tragedy, but police shootings have been declining significantly in America’s largest cities. That’s of little solace to Mr. Floyd’s family, of course, and it doesn’t minimize the behavior of the officers involved in his death. But it provides some antidote to the toxic notion that the situation is hopeless and can be addressed only through mayhem and destruction.

According the FiveThirtyEight website, an analysis of the nation’s 30 largest cities reveals a 37 percent drop in police shootings between 2013 and 2019. Las Vegas and the Metropolitan Police Department have experienced a similar trend. Interestingly, the site found that law enforcement shootings in rural and suburban areas have actually increased over the same time. We’ll leave that discussion for another day, but it’s simply not true to say that reforms implemented in recent years to address unnecessary police violence against minority Americans have produced nothing.

The data suggest that “protests and public pressure may have played an important role in producing policy changes that reduced police shootings, at least in some cities,” Samuel Sinyangwe of FiveThirtyEight wrote this week.

The ongoing protests over the tragic killing of Mr. Floyd have been marred by looting, arson and the destruction of property. Let’s hope sanity prevails and the peaceful marchers overcome those who are using the demonstrations to promote lawlessness.

In the meantime, local and state policymakers should consider additional reforms, primarily to increase police accountability while weeding out serial misconduct. The vast majority of men and women who don the badge honorably serve the communities they risk their lives to protect. But a small number of bad actors take advantage of an internal code that discourages officers from reporting misconduct. One step toward dismantling that wall would be a comprehensive database — available to the public — that catalogues use-of-force incidents.

“Cities need the authority to identify problematic officers and intervene before a tragedy occurs,” write law professors Kyle Rozema and Max Schanzenbach in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal. The writers note that civilian complaints, when considered in light of “experience and assignment history,” offer an accurate indicator of future behavior, and that departments must be given greater “latitude” to use such metrics in managing their officers. That wll also entail limiting the power of police unions, which often stand in the way of rooting out problem officers.

The gospel of hopelessness offers no road map to meaningful change. Nor is acknowledging positive progress a message of complacency and a denial that much more must be done. In that sense, peaceful Floyd protests represent an encouraging harbinger of future progress.