Far too many of those in both politics, as well as the state-controlled media, seem to take a perverse pleasure, and spend a great deal of their time, exaggerating the supposed fear that we’re told blacks have of the police. Exaggerations that have now so poisoned the environment that the likelihood of having any truly productive discussions about relations between blacks and the police has been significantly reduced. You know, like that oft quoted ‘fact’ than a black male is killed by the police every 28 hours, or roughly 312 every single year. I’m not sure about anyone else, but what I believe we have here is nothing more than the throwing around of numbers that, while they may provide a ‘good’ sound bite, have very little basis in fact.
We have boobs in the state-controlled media like the perpetual Barry apologist, Chuck Todd, telling his gaggle of viewers of his “Meet the Press” that, “Black men between the ages of 15 and 19 are 21 times as likely as whites to be killed by a police officer.” And then we have Harvard Law Professor Charles Ogletree who echoed Todd saying, “The data is clear, that black boys are being killed by white police officers around the country.” The claim was repeated frequently on other shows. But those numbers aren’t entirely accurate, and they are far from the whole truth. There’s no denying that accidental deaths at the hands of police do occur, like the killing of 12-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a toy gun in a public park, and are horrible tragedies.
Nor is there any denying that blacks feel discriminated against. According to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, 70% of blacks believed that the police treated whites better than blacks. By contrast, only 37% of whites agreed. And Barry “Almighty” has taken it upon himself to emphasize how blacks’ distrust of police is “rooted in realities” and how the anger to the verdict was “an understandable reaction.” I would argue that this sense of discrimination that black are said to feel has essentially been created, as well as perpetuated, by blacks themselves. Because the fact is that both of these men who are said to be at the center of these protests would be alive today if they had only done one thing. All they had to do was what the police told them to do. And they ‘chose’ not to!
Those who busy themselves trying to justify the actions of these black rioters, try to do so by either cherry picking the data, or simply making things up. In the case of Todd and Ogletree, they relied on an analysis of FBI data by ProPublica and Slate. Slate’s headline read, “Black Teens Vastly More Likely to Be Killed by Police Than Whites Even After Adjusting for Crime Rates.” If their claim is right, if police do unjustly shoot blacks at vastly higher rates, it is a serious indictment of the police. But, fortunately, these allegations are false. One allegation is that 15-to-19-year-old black males die at the hands of the police 21 times as often as do white males of the same age. Another claim is that blacks commit violent crimes no more than two to three times as often as whites do.
But the original 21-fold claim is based on worse than unreliable data. ProPublica acknowledges that the data on justifiable police killings are “terribly incomplete. . . . Vast numbers of the country’s 17,000 police departments don’t file fatal police shooting reports at all.” But they don't make it clear that literally only a couple hundred police departments report these numbers. Even worse, the very few police departments that do report are predominately urban areas, which tend to have much higher concentrations of blacks. So this would have the rather natural effect of skewing the numbers to over-represent black deaths. So despite the fact that the data is obviously flawed hasn’t stopped from being quoted as supposed fact.
If you’re going to accurately compare, which very few on the other side seem interested in doing, the rates at which police kill black and white male teenagers, you have to compare teenage crime rates. You can’t simply compare crime rates among the entire black and white populations. The rate that these teenagers commit murder, not including rape and other less serious crimes, also provides a somewhat better measure of the perceived threat that they might pose to police. Among blacks, teenage crime is much more prevalent. Based on the most recent available FBI crime numbers, black male teenagers were 9 times more likely to commit murder than were their white counterparts. That’s right, 9 times, and the gap in these urban areas is undoubtedly even larger.
The fact is that after adjusting for murder rates, black male teenagers are still killed by the police 2.3 times as often as whites. This is a considerable difference than the numbers being thrown around by the likes of Todd, but again, over-representation of urban areas in the data set could be a big part of the explanation. Screaming “racism!” may attract a wider TV audience. But uncritically spreading bad information is nothing more than downright dangerous. As I have pointed out before, it’s the thug mentality that many blacks possess, together with their willingness in allowing themselves to be so easily manipulated by the likes of Al Sharpton, that forms the foundation of their current relationship with the police. And only they can alter that relationship.
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