OPINION

DANA D. KELLEY: Facts for context

Our emotions are wonderful things. They give us incredible capacity for great good in the world. They power our hope against all odds, our faith beyond what we can see, and our love without conditions.

But when feelings are substituted for facts, they can also confuse, deceive and misguide us.

The distinction between what seems scary and what is scary is all the difference in the world. Watching a fright flick can make us feel afraid while in complete security. Fear that is felt but not real can lead to rash decisions and panicked overreactions. That's how family members sometimes get shot to death in their own homes as misperceived intruders. The fact is there was never any threat to fear. But the tragic, unnecessary consequence is very real and permanent.

Emotions regarding race and the police are alarmingly high right now. Watching the murder of George Floyd (thankfully all officers have been charged) on video is mentally traumatizing; it offends with grotesque totality our notions of justice, compassion and human decency.

The same is true of watching any video of any homicide. Every murder is a savage atrocity that strips victims of every civil and human right, and there will be 15,000 of them this year in America. On average, one every 40 minutes or so.

But watching one homicide video over and over isn't the same as watching a lot of different homicide videos--all of which are difficult, sickening and disgusting to see. In fact, if you only repeatedly view one video, your emotional construct can work against the factual framework. What we don't see can blind us.

That's exactly how stereotyping and mob mentality works. What seems is not always what is, because feelings are not facts.

It's easy to know how we feel about race, crime and police. It takes hard work to learn and know facts based on data, balance of scale and rational relativity.

There are 800,000 sworn law enforcement officers in the U.S., and most of them carry guns. They are on duty day and night each year, in every state, county and city in America. That 24/7/365 presence in the population produces about 375 million annual interactions with civilians.

Against that vast universe of encounters, The Washington Post has investigated and logged fatal shootings of citizens by police officers in a comprehensive database since 2015.

If a camera had captured every time police killed an unarmed black person last year, there would be 10 tragic videos to watch.

In contrast, if every murder committed by a black perpetrator against a black victim from 2019 had been caught on camera, there would be 7,000 videos to watch. Each of which would turn our stomachs and gouge our sensibilities.

A disproportionate and unacceptable number of innocent black Americans live in daily threat of dangerous crime in their neighborhoods. The malignancy of crime isn't racial in nature, however; there are more white criminals than black criminals in America. The better breakdown is lawful and unlawful.

We're seeing that dynamic in the protests, where lawful citizens are trying to assemble in support of improving race relations, and unlawful criminals are looting, burning, assaulting and killing.

The fact is that, overwhelmingly, Americans lead lawful, productive lives. One reason the riots seem senseless is because lawful Americans simply cannot comprehend the utterly foreign lifestyle of habitually unlawful, destructive criminals. More than 98 percent of U.S. citizens will never burgle, thieve, assault, rob, rape or murder.

The unlawful, criminal minority is few in number, but their lives are immersed in routine illegality. Recidivism among violent offenders is rampant, and petty criminals frequently have a revolving-door relationship with local jails and parole offices.

"I'm sick and tired of seeing black men and women being killed and nothing being done about it," a masked protester said on TV in Washington, D.C. Did she mean Chicago, where 81 percent of known-race murder victims in the past 365 days have been black?

And where the clearance rate for murders involving black victims is only 20 percent, meaning in four out of five homicide cases the killer gets away with it? Those grieving black families get no justice or closure for their world-shattering loss.

That protester was also not referring to David Dorn, a 77-year-old retired St. Louis police captain who bled out in a horrible-to-watch video after being shot (and then repeatedly sidestepped) by looters in front of a pawn shop he was guarding.

We should unequivocally oppose racism, period. But we must also oppose criminals and their cruel toll on our poorest and most vulnerable citizens. Unlike skin color, which no one can change, unlawful living is a choice--and always a bad one.

Racial unity is strengthened most in mutual respect for each other under the rule of law, which is the defining tenet of our democratic republic. Try to imagine the change in black lives--economic, educational, etc.--if we took the destructive, debilitating crime out of their communities. That's a worthy focus for marches, campaigns and commitment.

Government can't unite hearts behind it. Will we?

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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.

Editorial on 06/05/2020

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