Our nation’s police officers aren’t killing young black males for sport. That’s the first and most important point.
And how can we be certain of this?
Because that’s what the facts tell us, at least for anyone actually interested in looking at them (which apparently doesn’t include many pundits or politicians, let alone the odious members of Black Lives Matter).
The Washington Post analyzed all fatal police shootings nationwide in 2015 and found that less than 10 percent of the 965 (as of Dec. 24) involved unarmed victims. Unarmed black males killed by white police officers accounted for only 4 percent of the total.
To say that unarmed black males are proportionately more likely to be shot by police than unarmed white males also impresses only until you consider that, according to FBI data for the years 1980-2008, blacks committed 52 percent of the nation’s homicides while comprising just 12 percent of its population.
As John Hinderaker noted on PowerLine, “given that the black homicide rate is around eight times the white rate, it is surprising that the portion of blacks fatally shot by policemen is not higher.” Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer, upon finding no racial bias in his impressively thorough study of police shootings, called it “the most surprising result of my career.”
To say that there are at least some (hopefully very few) racist police officers is to say something no more profound than that there are racist firemen or soldiers or nurses or plumbers. We can also note that many of the police in larger urban areas are themselves black or Hispanic, and that racism, as Micah Johnson sadly demonstrated, cuts in all directions.
What happened in St. Paul and Baton Rouge notwithstanding, the hunch is that the number of unarmed black males shot by white police officers has been on a downward trajectory for decades and is now probably near or at an historic low. As with so many other alleged manifestations of racism, it makes headlines these days not because it happens so often but so rarely.
The more progress we make as a society in combating various ills, including racism, the more glaring (and stubborn) are those which remain.
So let’s, for starters, tone down the reckless accusations and false claims that put targets on the backs of police officers and lead to tragedies like that in Dallas.
It would also be helpful if we resisted knee-jerk reactions and the frenzied invective of the social media/Twitter mobs—as a police officer friend of mine reminded, the police having to use force against someone resisting arrest or threatening others with violence never makes for a pretty cell-phone video, but those video snippets, often torn out of context and without the capacity to convey the full circumstances that might explain events, are all that many people see, or are interested in seeing.
Emotions are provoked and opinions congeal long before the facts arrive. And when the facts do emerge, they are then often ignored because they contradict cherished assumptions and ruin politically advantageous narratives. (How many people, for instance, still think Michael Brown actually said “hands up, don’t shoot” in Ferguson, Mo.?) By that point, too many people have made too great an investment in the lies.
Police are, after all, only human, and like other humans in highly stressful situations they make mistakes. Given the concentrated nature of the violent crime in some of the urban areas they patrol, it is surprising that those mistakes don’t happen more often.
In the meantime, as we wait for the investigations to be carried out and the facts to be revealed in a nation thankfully still under the rule of law rather than the mob, we might stand back a few paces and consider the possibility that the biggest factor in poor relations between the police and the black community, and probably between blacks and whites in the nation as a whole, is the staggeringly high violent-crime rate for young black males.
Why, in any conceivable assessment of cause and effect, would we expect police officers patrolling crime-ridden inner-city neighborhoods to view the overwhelming cause of that crimeyoung black males—without suspicion? Wouldn’t any other result defy all logic and common sense?
No one with credibility any longer denies that the “Baltimore effect” is real and growing; that violent crime is spiraling out of control because we have made policing more difficult and now dangerous.
And in that most bitter of ironies, those paying the price are black people, precisely those most in need of protection by the same police they are being encouraged to view as enemies. Apparently, black lives matter only when they can be used as fodder by demagogues to demonize cops.
Finally, who ultimately benefits from what we are witnessing now? Apart from the genuine racists out there, both black and white, who want to provoke a race war that would tear the country apart and hurt black people most of all?
America doesn’t have a police problem, or at least not the police problem that liberal politicians and pundits claim. It has a black crime problem, and that is what we should all be talking about.
So why aren’t we?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.