Rodriguez: The Miscounted of 2016 and False Media Narrative of Police Abuse

On Dec. 12, 2016, as 73-year-old Francisco Serna stepped outside of his house and walked across the street toward seven armed Bakersfield, Calif., police officers, he was felled by 7 bullets, fired by one of them. While police thought that Serna had a gun in his pocket, they never saw a gun, nor did he have one.

Bakersfield, in Kern County, is the deadliest county in the United States. In fact, of the 14 deadliest counties in the country vis a vis police violence, 10 are in the heavily Mexican-Indigenous Southwest (California, Arizona and Texas). Surprisingly, Bernalillo County in New Mexico, with similar demographics, is not on this list, even though the  Albuquerque Police Department is the deadliest department in the country, at a rate 8 times higher than the NYPD.

And yet if one was relying on the mass media, one would never know that along with Blacks, Red-Brown peoples are getting killed at outrageous and unacceptable rates. Also, statistics do not tell the whole story. In fact, statistics often distort and obfuscate. But statistics are what people pay attention to, along with the narratives created as a result of them. So here is a story of that obfuscation, one with deadly consequences because reliance strictly on statistics, while useful, can also lead to complacency and the normalization of such killings.

As an avid follower of The Guardian newspaper’s The Counted, I can report that this project has now come to an end. It was a greatly respected resource that daily/annually chronicled those victims killed by U.S. law enforcement agencies throughout the country, while also breaking down each death/killing demographically. In part, it was the Guardian’s work that led the FBI to create its own Arrest–Related Deaths program, to better count those that are killed by law enforcement agencies throughout the country.

Through the years, most reporting on this topic has distorted and minimized the reality of what has been happening on this nation’s streets and prison system, by far and away, the largest in the world, which in effect, functions as warehouses for Red-Black-Brown peoples. Such reporting is reminiscent of how presidential elections are covered: the notorious horse race. Missing is historical and political context, especially when it comes to people of color, because many of these killings are not isolated or random, but the result of hundreds of years of dehumanization.

While the Guardian’s work was invaluable, there were several major flaws in its gathering of racial/ethnic data.

However, before explaining the flaws, it has to be acknowledged that prior to The Counted, the majority of the media relied on FBI statistics, sent in voluntarily by law enforcement agencies, to give the nation a picture of who and how many people were getting killed by police.