Law, Mathematics, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

“Black Lives Matter”

25 Comments

Heather McDonald writes about the myths of the movement:

For starters, fatal police shootings make up a much larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths than black homicide deaths. According to the Post database, in 2015 officers killed 662 whites and Hispanics, and 258 blacks. (The overwhelming majority of all those police-shooting victims were attacking the officer, often with a gun.) Using the 2014 homicide numbers as an approximation of 2015’s, those 662 white and Hispanic victims of police shootings would make up 12% of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths. That is three times the proportion of black deaths that result from police shootings.

The lower proportion of black deaths due to police shootings can be attributed to the lamentable black-on-black homicide rate. There were 6,095 black homicide deaths in 2014—the most recent year for which such data are available—compared with 5,397 homicide deaths for whites and Hispanics combined. Almost all of those black homicide victims had black killers.

Police officers—of all races—are also disproportionately endangered by black assailants. Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.

Some may find evidence of police bias in the fact that blacks make up 26% of the police-shooting victims, compared with their 13% representation in the national population. But as residents of poor black neighborhoods know too well, violent crimes are disproportionately committed by blacks. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there.

Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force.

The Ferguson Effect is going to make life much worse in the black communities.

[Update a while later]

“Black Lives Matter is acting like a racist hate group. You can only imagine how the press would treat Tea Partiers or Trump supporters who acted this way.”

Yes. Oh, and hey remember those New Black Panthers that Eric Holder let off the hook after the case had been essentially won?

[Update a few minutes later]

The Justice Department laughed off the armed New Black Panther Party threat.

The administration also called ISIS the “Jayvee team.”

25 thoughts on ““Black Lives Matter””

  1. McDonald quotes a couple of statistics that I have always wondered about: what about black _police officers_? Anyone who believes that racism is involved should surely expect that white police officers should kill more blacks (on average) than black police officers. Isn’t that the obvious test?

    1. I think that doesn’t follow logically. Black officers are quite capable of being just as racist toward black civilians as white officers, and even if racism is not a factor, they might kill just as many black civilians for unrelated reasons. I don’t have any answers, but you said “anyone” and “surely”, so I’m commenting to let you know that I don’t think it is entirely obvious.

      1. A black police officer being “racist” against black suspects doesn’t make any sense. A black officer may act/react to a black suspect in a given manner just because the suspect is black but not out of racist hate for black people (that would be illogical in the extreme for someone who was themselves black) but instead out of experience gained from dealing with black criminal suspects for a period of time. And if the latter is the case could that not also be the primary reason that white officers may also react in a given way when dealing with back suspects, IE based on experience rather than personal, unfounded hate of anyone who has black skin?

        1. I agree, we all have a deep instinct to stereotype, stereotyping is just the mind putting like things into the same box, it’s a truly ancient instinct, gazelles that don’t assume all lions eat gazelles don’t pass on their genes.
          I think it’s important to resist the instinct when it comes to race, but it cannot be denied it’s there, we all have it, even black people, and instinctive reflexes are faster than cognitive thought.
          I should add that the stereo types are based on past evidence, and someone whose only experience with and observations of people of a given race is positive will assume they’ll mostly have positive experiences in their next encounter with someone of that race. etc.

          1. Some of us were raised to identify as being American rather than as a skin color. Sadly, our friends to the left inculcate racial chauvinism among different ethnic groups. This is why minorities who come out as supporters of Republicans or libertarians are called race traitors.

            What does skin color have to do with an opinion on the proper level of taxation or the role of government in micromanaging people’s lives? People aren’t born with an ideology. Politics isn’t determined at birth by your race. Some people work to see that it is though.

            It is one thing to say we all have stereotypes but it is totally different when an entire political party intentionally creates and inculcates stereotypes as a means of keeping people from viewing themselves as Americans in a cynical ploy to gain power and wealth by dividing us all on race.

            The left goes on and on about systematic racism but they have controlled the system for much of the past and they are the ones that are using those same systematic race based strategies today. And there is a huge effort to take the past sins of the Democrat party and scapegoat Christians, the NRA, and Republicans for them.

            When Democrats say they want social justice, who do they want to punish?

          2. Some of us were raised to identify as being American rather than as a skin color.

            That is in fact a key element of American exceptionalism. Or used to be.

        2. ” (that would be illogical in the extreme for someone who was themselves black)

          Yes, racism might be “illogical in the extreme”, but so what? People can be pretty darn illogical.

          I can reflect on my own personal experience: I’m Jewish, and I’ve known a few people who hated Jewish people. Some of these people were themselves Jewish. At least outwardly, they weren’t “self-hating Jews” – they appeared to have a pretty high opinion of themselves – but they exhibited all kinds of anti-semitism, some of which would make your mouth drop open in disbelief, particularly if you’ve momentarily forgotten that people can act “illogical in the extreme.”

          1. I agree. Anyone can be racist against anyone, even those of their own ethnic group. But just because this is possible, you still have to prove that black cops kill black people because of racism. You can’t just assume racism in general or for any type of event.

            Maybe black cops are more likely to kill black people because of community policing demands made by activists where the color of the cops skin has to match the color of the skin they are policing?

            99% of these deaths are because of crime. Either the person is engaged in crime or they live in a high crime area. Could we deal with the crime rather than deflecting to racism and the NRA? And would Democrats listen to anyway to solve these problems that don’t rely on government pogroms designed to create dependency and funnel money to Democrat activist groups or hokey pokey woo woo sit in a circle and learn to cry BS?

    3. In the full article:
      The Black Lives Matter movement claims that white officers are especially prone to shooting innocent blacks due to racial bias, but this too is a myth. A March 2015 Justice Department report on the Philadelphia Police Department found that black and Hispanic officers were much more likely than white officers to shoot blacks based on “threat misperception”—that is, the mistaken belief that a civilian is armed.

    1. Put the URL into Google–the first link should be the story. Follow it and it’s almost always unblocked.

  4. Rand,

    I’ve been wondering about this statement since seeing that article the other day: “Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.”

    From several sources, the total number of police who were killed by gunfire, vehicular homocide, and all other malicious causes in 2015 was ~40-50. If 40% of those 40-50 police killings were done by blacks, that would imply 16-20 police killings last year from blacks. Compared to 258 blacks killed by police in the same period. How are they defining the “rate” in that quote? Because 16-20 is nowhere near 2.5x 258, unless I’m missing something.

    I’m not saying that most of those 258 are innocent–they probably weren’t, but the quoted section seems fishy to me.

    ~Jon

  5. Jon, that “at a rate 2.5 times higher” threw me for a loop too, as I first thought that the rate was in killings per year, but I think that she must be looking at killings per year per 100,000. In other words, she is saying that a police officer is is 2.5 times more likely to be killed by a black person than any random black person is to be killed by a police officer.

    I’m not yet sure, one way or the other, about the relevance of that comparison. An alternate comparison (whose relevance I’m also unsure of) would be to compare the likelihood of a police officer killing a black person in the course of their duties to that of a police officer being killed by a black person.

    1. Combing your (Jon’s) number of 258 blacks killed by police in 2015 with a US population of about 40 million blacks, gives a black-killed-by-police rate of 0.65 per 100,000. If the rate of police-killed-by-black was 2.5 times that, or 1.6 per 100,000, that, combined with your 16-20 police killings by blacks, would give a law enforcement census of between 1 and 1.25 million, which is about right according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_in_the_United_States#Number_of_police

      1. Should women and children be included in the blacks killing police side of the equation?

        1. Depends. Do teenagers engage in violent crime? Do women?

          There are teenagers and women, but it is mostly young males of any race, that engage in violent crime. Do we factor out the white/black/hispanic population that is not a young male when creating these statistics?

          Would it make a difference only looking at the male population between the ages of 13-30?

          1. Sorry, I was being a tad sarcastic, McDonald ‘s version of “Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.” just seems a bizarre statistic, the maths mean that if the police kill 2.5 times the number of black people they do now the score will be even, Does that mean there would need to be extra time to get a result?
            Using McDonalds system the NZ police are in serious trouble, because the number of police killed each decade is about equal to the number of people the police kill, so the kiwi public is ahead by a ratio of about 400 to 1, thrashing em!

  7. No surprise, Obama unable to determine motive of Dallas police shooter, just like the motive of the Orlando shooter seems elusive. But he seemed to hold little reservation in scolding the police in Minnesota and New Orleans, while also telling protestors they’re rights would be protected.

    1. And Dylan Roof was claimed to represent all white people, Republicans, all of the South, and a stupid flag.

      Then we are told acts of violence carried out by Democrats and encouraged by Democrat activist groups are just senseless acts from random people and don’t reflect on Democrat’s nonprofit racist activist groups engaging in politics and violence.

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