America's Toxic Masculinity

America suffers from more violence than other developed nations, especially gun violence due to America's ridiculous gun laws that serve to maximize gun manufacturer profits under the guise of 2nd Amendment liberties.   But, as a piece in the Los Angeles Times argues, the main underlying source of violence in America is men - or at lease those who cling to the most toxic aspects of what is deemed to be acceptable masculinity.   If we want to reduce violence, many, any men could stand to undergo some feminization.  Until America recognizes that the so-called "macho male" is a toxic danger and steps are taken to change the cultural dynamic, things likely will not improve for the batter.  Here are column excerpts:

In the wake of the Orlando, Fla., shooting, some conservative politicians called for the use of the term “radical Islam” to label the violent movement with which Omar Mateen identified himself. In the wake of the police shootings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, many called for a review of violence by law enforcement against black Americans.And after Dallas, some piled on the Black Lives Matter movement, suggesting that the gunman was spurred to murder because he’d made reference to the group. Others use the term “black-on-black violence” to refer to the killings of poor black Americans in their communities, playing into what author Ta-Nehisi Coates has labeled “the enduring myth of black criminality.”

What we don’t talk about is how the greatest predictor of violence isn’t religion, occupation or race. It’s gender.

In the United States, 98% of those who commit mass shootings are male; 98% of the officers who have shot and killed civilians are male; 90% of those who commit homicide by any means are male; and 80% of those arrested for all violent crimes — murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault — are male.

If women are less likely to kill strangers, could increasing the number of women on the police force reduce officer-involved killings? A 2002 study by the National Center for Women and Policing shows that, although women comprise 12.7% of sworn police personnel in urban centers, only 5% of citizen complaints for excessive force involve female police officers. The average male officer is two to three times more likely to be named in an excessive force complaint.

It’s a significantly under-studied area — which is why it’s so crucial to talk about the role men play in America’s epidemic of violence. We need serious, current research in order to understand why male police officers are more violent in their interactions with citizens and how the culture of policing can be changed.

There are myriad theories as to why men are nearly 50 times more likely to commit murder than women. Some neuroscientists say testosterone is directly connected to aggression and competition, attitudes that are correlated with violence. . . . . Some psychotherapists have argued that men are raised to suppress vulnerable emotions, which leads them to become overwhelmed and express pain physically rather than verbally. 

[I]f physicality alone, rather than brain chemistry or socialization, were the reason that men kill at a much higher rate than women, then we would expect guns to be a leveling technology. The statistics, however, do not bear this out. From 1980 to 2014, the gender gap in gun ownership closed by 17%. Yet the rates at which men and women kill have remained relatively stable.

The Great Police Violence Cover-Up

Politico isn't always the most liberal of news outlets.  It's not Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, but it isn't Salon or the Huffington Post either.  Thus, it is informative that its magazine arm has an article bearing the same title as this blog post.  America has a serious problem with lawless police officers.  That statement is not intended as a denigration of all police officers.  But like it or not, there are far too many officers who have no business wearing a badge or carrying a gun.  Especially when it comes to their views of minorities, particularly blacks.  White, conservative Christians too often revere the police yet have no idea what its like to have the police view you as a menace or unworthy of decent treatment simply because of your skin color or your sexual orientation.  It's bad enough to be gay around some police officers much less to be black or brown skinned.  Here are article highlights:

I have a 20-year-old son, and I have a 12-year-old son, and I’m so afraid for them. … This is about a war machine. It is us against the [expletive] machine!” 

—Rapper Killer Mike

Perhaps the saddest thing is: We don’t really know what the truth is. We don’t really know if Killer Mike—his voice breaking on stage this week after the Ferguson grand jury decision—is correct in his perception that America’s police departments are less protectors of the peace than monstrous “war machines” leveled against the nation’s poor and minorities.

[N]o one knows for sure how serious the problem is—now, or then—because there simply are no reliable national data on police violence in the United States. The data are lacking because police departments keep almost all those numbers to themselves, in defiance of a 20-year-old federal law—the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act—requiring the Justice Department to compile an annual report on “the use of excessive force” by police.

The story of the various failed national efforts to compile and release such data—or to obtain any reliable numbers on violence by police officers at all—is just another dimension of an issue that Monday’s grand-jury decision threw into relief: a sense that police departments across the country are simply not held accountable enough.

And because a substantial portion of these alleged police abuses of law and justice appear to be directed against blacks and other minorities in certain communities—not the white-dominated power structure in their own communities—it rarely becomes a notable issue, at least until a Michael Brown-type killing provokes enough violence and outrage in the streets for the TV cameras to pay attention.

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program collects data from the roughly 18,000 law enforcement agencies in the country to compile statistics about crime and law enforcement, and yet here too police departments are not required to submit data on what they consider to be justifiable homicides by officers.

But given the average number of dubious shootings in any given year—most recently the killing of a 12-year-old boy wielding a BB gun in Cleveland—many criminologists say it’s clear that there is a serious problem, especially in minority neighborhoods, that has not been quantified. “If there’s smoke, there must be fire there,” says Sam Walker, an expert on police accountability at the University of Nebraska.

Despite the consistently high percentage of African-Americans in prisons, the issue is not necessarily racial. “It’s not a black or white issue. It’s a blue issue,” Frank Serpico, the former New York City detective whose efforts to expose corruption were made famous in a 1973 movie starring Al Pacino, said in a telephone interview. “The fact is that police have never been accountable,” said Serpico, who in the decades since his retirement from the NYPD has become an advocate for police whistleblowers and greater restraint on the use of force. . . . . what erupted in Ferguson is not just about Ferguson. This thing has been a long time coming.”

According to another widely cited criminologist, Lorie Fridell of the University of South Florida, “It’s not just about when force is used. There is a lot of variation in this country about how police treat low-income, high-minority neighborhoods. There are places where police treat them very, very differently than they do white communities.” She adds that “police have gotten better over the years, but also expectations might have gotten higher.”

[A]ccording to John Firman, director of development of the IAPC, after a year “the Justice Department shut it down, and for good reason: The number of [police departments] reporting back to us was under 600” out of about 18,000 in the country. The law had no means of forcing cooperation, Firman added, and as for whether the government is simply ignoring the mandate of the law, “that was between the Congress and the DOJ.”

Other criminologists have found that even when they participate, law enforcement agencies often misrepresent data in survey responses. “On nonsensitive subjects we usually get a high response in our surveys,” says Edward McGuire, a criminologist at American University. “But then on questions about the use of violence we get a very low response rate. That’s because they had been advised by their attorneys not to answer those questions.”

[T]he real answer to restoring accountability may lie in technology, especially sensors and body-worn cameras for police officers. Despite some current resistance, most officers like that solution too, she says, because most of them probably have nothing to hide. “The police profession is unlike any other in that officers usually operate outside the direct review or purview of supervisors in most cases. So this is a way to document not only what the police are doing—but what the subjects are doing as well.”

. . . “body-worn cameras increase transparency and citizen views of police legitimacy,” and it quoted William A. Farrar, chief of police in Rialto, California, as saying: “When you put a camera on a police officer, they tend to behave a little better, follow the rules a little better. And if a citizen knows the officer is wearing a camera, chances are the citizen will behave a little better.”

 We need to do a far better job of policing the police.