"I have already made the case that systemic racism in law enforcement is a myth.
...It is by now well publicized — at least in some corners — that, despite all of the panicking and rioting over race-based police brutality, only a very small number of unarmed black men are killed by police each year.
But an even closer look at the data, and a study of each “unarmed” killing, reveals that the real number of unjustified police shootings of actual unarmed people — black, white, or any other race — is much smaller still.
First, to put the statistics into perspective, it’s helpful to begin with the overall number of arrests.
- According to the DOJ, police make about 10 million arrests each year.
- As a rough average, 7 million of the arrested suspects are white and 3 million are black.
- Out of that number, last year, 25 unarmed white people were killed by police, compared to 14 unarmed black people, according to the Washington Post database of police shootings. That means about .0004 percent of all blacks arrested were killed while unarmed.
- The percentage for whites is comparable.
- In total, 1,000 people were shot and killed by police in 2019, the vast majority of whom were armed. Still, that’s a mere .01 percent of all arrests.
...No reasonable person could describe any of the 8 cases just listed as cold-blooded murder, much less racist hate crimes.
- These were violent criminals shot while in the act of physically attacking and threatening officers.
- Some were using cars.
- One used a dog.
- Another used a taser.
- Others used their hands and nearly succeeded in arming themselves with the officer’s weapon.
This is what the media and BLM activists mean when they scream about the epidemic of “unarmed” black men killed by police.
They mean that a very tiny fraction of black people arrested by police are killed in the process, and that an even tinier fraction are unarmed at the time, and that an even tinier fraction of that fraction of the fraction, actually had no weapon of any kind, and were making no attempt to hurt or kill a police officer.
When phrased like that, it doesn’t seem like there’s much of an epidemic here at all.
Read all.
No comments:
Post a Comment