Letter: No one likes trash, but the Plum Creek incident could have been tragic

Letter to the editor··1 min read
Tire tracks remained at the Plum Creek Park in Kent after a Memorial Day party attended by 2,000 people. Photo via Kent Police Department

I have been watching the conversations around the Memorial Day party at Plum Creek Park on the Kent and Stow community Facebook pages.

People seem to be very concerned for the state of the park property, which is warranted, I guess. But what I am more concerned about was that police officer Michael Carnahan drew a gun in the presence of 2,000 mostly Black folks.

(The race of the attendees was a detail both the Record-Courier and Portager stories left out, but I actually had driven through the park that day around 8 p.m., so I saw who was there. I ended up leaving after being unable to find parking.)

Would you be worried about picking up trash after seeing an officer draw a gun, especially if you felt you were in danger? Sorry, but I wouldn’t be.

It makes me wonder: Why are readers so concerned with grass and picnic tables? Why am I not hearing more relief that humans were not harmed?

Let’s remember that a previous time Carnahan drew a gun, someone ended up dead. He, along with three other officers, was put on administrative leave in 2015 for firing 18 times at a 25-year-old white man holding a machete.

The man, Douglas Yon, had been living with bipolar disorder and needed help, his family said. Instead, he died in the middle of the street. To be fair, Carnahan’s AR-15 duty rifle had jammed, so he wasn’t able to contribute to the 18 shots.

Do I love our parks? Absolutely. Do I want to see them treated with care? As much as the next person.

But in the aftermath of the Uvalde shooting, I’m reminded how a bullet can wreck a community. I’m grateful that this time, it didn’t.

Lyndsey Brennan, Kent

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7 Comments

  1. After hours party was illegal, they were all trespassing. Alcohol and drugs present, illegal. And least of all, one of the two people confronted by police was in possession of a hand gun, a truth left out by the writer. Race is not relevant, criminals are criminals, unless one finds a need to mention it to enhance a report.

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  2. I have to agree. Why was Black Folks even a topic unless some one just wants to stir up the on going race fire. My only concern is why some kind of security from parks and rec. or police does not patrol all of our parks before dusk and make sure every one is on the way out?

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    1. Race is relevant, in the context of the observations in the letter, because of the fact that police often kill Black people in America, and the people attending the party would be reasonable to feel more concerned for their safety than for the trash.

      Is this John Kuhar the council member, by the way? I think it’s important to let people know you’re not just a random guy commenting.

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  3. You gotta wonder though, what were those 2000 people doing that made the officer feel he needed his gun? It’s quite possible he felt that his life was in danger and he reacted to that fear.

    Keep in mind they arrested 2 people there on gun charges as well.

    This is the second time this park has been trashed like this. Maybe Kent PD and Parks & Rec need to be more proactive about shutting down these parks after dark. A gate and a patrol through every evening making sure no one is still parked inside the parks may be in order.

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  4. The Portager editor, Ben Wolford, suggests above that the police are racist. Please read this post in its entirety. I’m sorry it’s long, but it takes time to make the case. If the Portager is truly an unbiased news outlet, this will not be censored. Without further ado, here is my case against the claim that the police are systemically racist. I link to all the data and articles, so anyone can check my facts.

    In 2015 (the most recent year stats are available), 6,146,400 Black U.S. residents (age 16 or older) had contact with the police (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15.pdf; see Table 1). About 3.5 million of those were police initiated. The vast majority of these contacts were uneventful. We know the names of the individuals where contacts involved injustice and ended very badly, which underscores the fact that bad stops by cops are quite the exception rather than the rule, especially given the millions of opportunities for bad things to happen (assuming that’s a relatively stable statistic across years, which is a safe assumption).

    If policing is as racist as the media would have us believe, I would expect to see multiple thousands of deaths of unarmed Black citizens each year. The Washington Post maintains a database that shows us that this is demonstrably not the case (https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/). In 2020, for example, there were 10 incidents where an unarmed Black individual who was not attacking was killed by the police. In 2021 there were three such incidents. Does this suggest systemic racism? What is meant by that?

    It’s important to note that the Post database uses a very broad definition of “unarmed.” So, we’d have to look carefully at the circumstances in each case to draw any firm conclusions. But even if we could agree that all 10 cases in 2020, and all 3 in 2021, were totally unjustified, to lead people to believe on the basis of those numbers, tragic as they are, that systemic racism is the current state of affairs in policing is to perpetuate irrational, delusional fears on the basis of fiction. Culturally, this will only make social conditions worse than they already are; in fact this has already started to happen, and many of us now fear the worst.

    Police will be reluctant to do their job in the communities where they are needed the most (the infamous Ferguson effect), and both cops and Black individuals will bring unfounded fears and a heightened state of negative emotion into routine stops, which sets the stage for a tragic self-fulfilling prophecy. Furthermore, elected officials will continue to be extremist caricatures, or otherwise absurd representatives, of our two dominant parties, and social unrest and its attendant problems, therefore, will continue to get worse and worse. Is this really what we want?

    It is also worth noting that the (also rare) bad police stops involving white citizens receive no media attention whatsoever, which further contributes to the false perception that Black individuals are uniquely being targeted with lethal force by racist cops. Why isn’t “Tony Timpa” a household name? Why didn’t the media widely cover this tragedy around the clock for weeks on end when it happened? Watch this horrific video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c-E_i8Q5G0, and ask yourself: why didn’t this awful case receive more media attention? What about Daniel Shaver? Why doesn’t anyone know his name? There are many others. The bottom line is that there are bad cops out there for sure, and cops themselves know this. The bad ones are equal opportunity in their brutality. And our lunatic solution is to vilify the entire institution of policing and call for them to be defunded without due consideration for the communities that are going to be hurt by this. The rational answer is more and better police vetting and more and better police training (including non-lethal self-defense training, such as Brazilian jiu jitsu), which requires more, not less, funding.

    But when it really comes down to it, is there any sort of racial disparity in police use of deadly force? Roland Fryer points out that carefully conducted research on racial disparities in police use of lethal force (not just comparisons of gross descriptive statistics) is “surprisingly thin” (https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/reconciling-results-racial-differences-police-shootings). On that basis alone, the Portager’s position is on thin ice. Fryer has conducted one of the better published studies to date, and he finds no racial disparity in police use of *deadly* force “using the simple statistical framework that economists have used for more than a half century to analyze racial differences on myriad dimensions” (p. 5). While it shouldn’t be relevant, I feel compelled to point out that Fryer himself is Black.

    Beyond the media, what do people really think about their direct *experiences* with the police? That’s also worth talking about. According to Table 14 in a special report by the DOJ (https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cpp15.pdf), the percentages of Black individuals and White individuals who feel that police behaved properly during traffic stops are comparable, regardless of the outcome (no enforcement action, warning, or search/arrest). The exception is ticketing, where Black individuals are roughly 5% less likely to perceive that the police behaved properly (85.1% vs 90.8%). Okay, let’s have a dialogue about that. If we approach this constructively, we could find solutions. But instead let’s burn the country down and kill each other.

    Moving on, Table 21 shows that residents who request help from the police report comparable (and high) levels of satisfaction with police responses and comparably feel good about the result–that the police responded promptly, improved the situation, and behaved properly.

    According to Table 18, though, Black individuals are, in fact, about twice as likely as White individuals to experience force during police-initiated contacts (3.3% vs 1.3%), and they are more likely to perceive the force to have been “excessive” with respect to their most recent police-initiated contact (59.9% vs 42.7%). This disparity alone doesn’t automatically mean bias/racism, but it is disconcerting and important to address in light of the Fryer study (https://scholar.harvard.edu/fryer/publications/empirical-analysis-racial-differences-police-use-force), which shows that *all else being equal,* police do tend to use more force with Black individuals.

    Is racism, per se, the explanation for this disparity? Consider, if you will, the ubiquitous messaging that the police are racist and dangerous. You should be able to see how this creates a problem. If the dominant cultural message is that all cops are racists and that Black lives are in grave danger anytime a cop initiates a stop, the anxiety and other negative emotions that both police and Black individuals will bring into the stop set the stage for things to run amok. Tragic irony. The wealthy, misguided intellectuals in their safe, crime-free neighborhoods who demand that we accept a false narrative regarding systemic police racism are actually, in all likelihood, making things far worse for the people they say they want to help. Indeed, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

    The responsible thing to do at this point is to point out that if you are Black in America, the chances that you will be the victim of homicide by police are exceptionally low. Thankfully so. Take last year. Assuming around 6 million stops and given 3 possible homicides, the odds of a Black person being the victim of homicide-by-cop are one in two million. While low, who wouldn’t want to lower that? What action should we take? Answer: the responsible thing to do is to come together, like we should be right now in the wake of George Floyd, and “throw the book” at anyone who perpetrates such a horrific act of violence. But to pretend that America is awash in violent racism and that Black individuals are being killed at a high rate by racist cops is empirically false and arguably the worst thing we can do for race relations in this country. If we want to see society fall apart at the seams and politics become more of a circus than it already is, we should keep this up. One thing we don’t need is more hyperbole, overgeneralization, confirmation bias, selective perception, and emotional “reasoning” right now, and we surely don’t need more lunatic politicians. We need science, careful attention to the facts, and civil discussion, and debate. That is the true path to peace and justice.

    Obviously, many well-intending people have yet to figure that out, and they will live to regret the terrible damage and loss of life that will result, in fact IS resulting, from reckless, empirically unsupported sloganism, virtue signaling, ignorance, and willful disregard for the facts. This is all tragic in its consequences, and it is unfair, intellectually dishonest, counter-productive, and if I may say, downright wrong to blame the police as a whole for what is happening in this country today.

    The truth is in the middle. The cops are not bad to the core, nor are they perfect. All the ones I know want to work WITH us to find ways to better protect and serve our communities, especially our most vulnerable communities. That’s the way forward. But by making baseless, inflammatory statements, we close that door, and that is just shameful. Perhaps such intellectual negligence could be excused among untrained lay people (and it often is by police departments), but it is tantamount to malpractice when it happens among social scientists, public intellectuals, and politicians, and it needs to be challenged in the interests of the public good.

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    1. I did not say the police are racist. I said they “often kill Black people,” which is true. Out of over 1,000 instances in which a police officer killed someone in 2021, something like 25-30% were Black. That’s like one a day. It doesn’t mean they’re racist or even that they didn’t have to shoot. You’re welcome to comment here, but don’t put words in my mouth.

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  5. For some reason the following reply did not go through, so I try again.

    It is reckless to say they “often kill Black people.” You imply that they target Black individuals. Let’s look at lethal shootings in 2021 using the WAPO database. In that database, for incidents where race data are available, fifteen percent (169), not 25-30%, of the 1088 lethal police shootings involved Black individuals, while 309 (28%) involved white individuals. My point is, you and other media outlets only pay attention to the former figure. You never mention the latter. You join the media club in directing attention away from the latter figure, which is very misleading and intellectually dishonest. Now, you (as others have) might respond that Black individuals are over-represented and white individuals are under-represented in these numbers, but when you statistically control for relevant factors, as Fryer has done, there is no racial disparity in police use of lethal force. You can’t just look at descriptive statistics and draw any conclusions. Sophisticated statistical analyses are required, such as those used by Fryer. Don’t perpetuate a myth that doesn’t help, but rather hurts, our most vulnerable communities.

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