It bears no resemblance to reality — not in police forces, and not in America.
About twice as many white people as black people are killed by police. In fact, in about 75 percent of police shootings, the decedent is not black. Of course, that is not what you would grasp from consuming media.
Take the website statista.com, specifically its breathless focus on “Hate crime in the United States” — counterfactually insinuating that any shooting involving a black victim must be a “hate crime.” Here’s their big headline from Tuesday: “Black Americans 2.5X More Likely Than Whites to Be Killed By Police.”
It is fiction. It is sheer demagoguery, peddled as American cities are besieged by rioters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. The falsity of the claim is demonstrated even by statista.com itself. Just three days ago, the site posted another series of bar graphs, showing that, in fact, whites are nearly twice as likely as blacks to be shot to death by police. Here are the numbers:
Year White Black
2017 457 223
2018 399 209
2019 370 235
2020 (so far) 42 31
The rest of the bar graphs break out the numbers of Hispanic decedents (slightly lower than black, significantly lower than white), as well as those whose heritage is described as “other” and unknown.
Right underneath its chart, statista.com writes, “Sadly, the trend of fatal police shootings in the United States seems only to be increasing.” In point of fact, it is steady — and if I wanted to play games like statista.com does, by, say, weighting the numbers to account for population growth while ignoring all other relevant factors, I could even pretend that the number was decreasing. The Washington Post acknowledges that fatal shootings by police have run steadily at around 1,000 per year since 2015 — 995 (2015), 963 (2016), 987 (2017), 998 (2018), and 1,004 (2019).
As Heather Mac Donald relates in an insightful Wall Street Journal op-ed, blacks make up only a quarter of the total number of people killed in police shootings annually, a ratio that has held steady since 2015. The reigning canard, however, is that this 25 percent figure proves racism since African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population.
Ridiculous as this syllogism is (as we’ll see, it conveniently elides more consequential factors), it still puts the lie to the slanderous narrative that police are hunting down black men. Even if we ignore the fact that an increasing number of police officers — obviously including those involved in encounters with black suspects — are themselves African Americans, the percentage of black deaths from police shootings would be much higher if blacks were being targeted.
Police do not go looking for people to shoot. In shooting situations, police are confronting crime suspects, the majority of whom are armed. But given that George Floyd was unarmed, let’s consider unarmed people killed in such encounters. Such unarmed decedents, too, were twice as likely to be white as black in 2019 — i.e., 19 unarmed whites, nine unarmed blacks. As Ms. Mac Donald observes, this ratio is not stable (and there is some looseness in what the media define as “unarmed”): In 2015, it was 38 unarmed blacks to 32 unarmed whites.
The Floyd killing has been injected into the bien pensant narrative of innocent, unarmed black men murdered by cops. But the number of unarmed black men killed by police is vanishingly small. As Mac Donald notes, there were 7,407 black homicide victims in the United States in 2018, the last year for which final numbers are available. Assuming a comparable number in 2019, the nine unarmed men killed in police shootings would represent just 0.1 percent of black homicides.
In stark contrast, she asserts, “a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”
The media, the bipartisan political class, the academy, and the commentariat concoct their “systemic,” “institutional,” “unconscious” racism fiction by statistical tunnel vision: We must conclude that African Americans — in particular, young black men — are being targeted by police because the percentage of killings of blacks significantly overrepresents the black population. It makes no sense, however, to look only at the percentage of blacks involved in police shootings, as if it were the only attribute that mattered — as if it were the only attribute by which blacks are overrepresented compared to their percentage of the overall population.
While African Americans are involved in two times more police shootings than their percentage of the population would seem to warrant, they commit 53 percent of murders and 60 percent of robberies — well over four times their percentage of the population.
Blacks commit most of the crimes; that’s a fact. It’s how they get killed at a greater rate (but not number) that whites. But it has to do with economics, not anything indicating blacks are inherently bad or criminal people.
They have been relegated to poverty ever since they were shipped over here to be slaves. Their freedom didn’t help much, because they had no education and the only skills they had were slave skills. Once they got access to education (and were not racially barred from participating in society) they began to move upwards out of poverty. After World War II, when the US was the only functioning economy in the world, blacks excelled along with anyone else. Only when the Civil Rights Movement and the “War on Poverty” began did that advance halt and more began to fall back into poverty. Because, the government was “taking care” of them. They became dependent.
Add to that the liberal belief that blacks are incapable of fending for themselves. Certain protections needed to be in place, to be sure, but Democrats assumed they were too stupid and child-like to exploit opportunities and provide for themselves, even though there were thousands and thousands of examples to the contrary.
Later, in schools, it was forbidden to treat them the same as everyone else. Disciplinary problems, made worse by the broken homes financed by the Welfare State, were mandated to be ignored. Blacks left school without an education or social skills to function and advance in society.
So, in society, how are they to get by? Many have to resort to crime; it is their only option. This leads to more encounters with cops and more of them killed by cops.
Trump’s economy has benefited blacks more than ever before. Their unemployment rate became lowest in history. But, that is only the beginning of the recovery; this allows families to stay together, children to be properly raised, their education completed and the advancement to better jobs… same as with anyone else.
Capitalism has generated more wealth and opportunity than any other political system in history. Democrats oppose capitalism… vehemently. And there you have it: the problem.