Seeking Truth About Systemic Racism in Cops!

Defiantly reposted by Jack Lee because the truth needs to said….

Two years of corrosive rhetoric about racist cops, based on falsehoods — with disastrous effects.

For two years American police departments have endured relentless attacks from the Obama administration, its media allies and the Black Lives Matter movement alleging that U.S. law enforcement is a racist, deadly threat to African-Americans. A handful of disturbing videos depicting police shootings helped galvanize widespread hostility to law-enforcement officers, and cops began backing away from the proactive policing that stops crime but has been repeatedly denounced as racial oppression.

It bears repeating: Unjustified shootings by police officers are an aberration, not the norm, and there is no evidence that racism drives police actions. 

Make no mistake: Assertions about systemic, deadly police racism are false. That has been true throughout the period following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014; recall that the cop involved was ultimately exonerated by the Justice Department. But no number of studies debunking this fiction has penetrated the conventional story line.

A “deadly force” lab study at Washington State University by researcher Lois James found that participants were biased in favor of black suspects, over white or Hispanic ones, in simulated threat scenarios. The research, published in 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, confirmed what Ms. James had found previously in studying active police officers, military personnel and the general public.

In 2015 a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. And this month “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” by Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr., analyzing more than 1,000 officer-involved shootings across the country, reports that there is zero evidence of racial bias in police shootings.

All of which brings us to President Obama’s extraordinary statement last week alleging systemic racism in American law enforcement. He was speaking in the aftermath of two highly publicized fatal police shootings. Viral video captured the shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., as officers attempted to disarm him, and the aftermath of the shooting of Philando Castile during a car stop outside St. Paul, Minn.

Those shootings look horribly unjustified based on the videos alone; but information may emerge to explain the officers’ belief that the victims were reaching for a gun.

A few hours after President Obama made his remarks, the Dallas gunman assassinated five police officers, in a rampage that police officials later reported was driven by hatred of white officers and white people generally.

Mr. Obama’s statement undoubtedly had no causal relationship to the Dallas slaughter. But it certainly added to the record of distortion and falsehood that has stoked widespread animus toward the police.

It bears repeating: Unjustified shootings by police officers are an aberration, not the norm, and there is no evidence that racism drives police actions.

Every year, officers confront tens of thousands of armed felons without using lethal force. According to the Washington Post, police officers fatally shot 987 people in the U.S. last year; the overwhelming majority were armed or threatening deadly force.

Blacks made up a lower percentage of those police-shooting victims—26%—than would be predicted by the higher black involvement in violent crime. Whites made up 50% of police shooting victims, but you would never know it from media coverage. Note also that police officers face an 18.5 times greater chance of being killed by a black male than an unarmed black male has of being killed by a police officer.

Indifferent to these facts, President Obama on Thursday, referring to the police killings in Baton Rouge and St. Paul, said: “[T]hese are not isolated incidents. They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system.” He made another sweeping allegation of law-enforcement racism, saying that there “are problems across our criminal justice system, there are biases—some conscious and unconscious—that have to be rooted out.” And he claimed that higher rates of arrests and stops among blacks reflect police discrimination; naturally, Mr. Obama remained silent about blacks’ far higher rates of crime.

Such corrosive rhetoric about the nation’s police officers and criminal-justice system is unsettling coming from the president of the United States, but it reflects how thoroughly the misinformation propagated by Black Lives Matter and the media has taken hold. Last month Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in a case about police searches, wrote that blacks are “routinely targeted” by law enforcement, adding that “Until their voices matter, too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.”

Hillary Clinton has also taken up this warped cause. On CNN Friday, she decried “systemic” and “implicit bias” in police departments. She also called on “white people” to better understand blacks “who fear every time their children go somewhere.”

Mrs. Clinton ought to take a look at Chicago. Through July 9,  2,090 people have been shot this year, including a 3-year-old boy shot on Father’s Day who will be paralyzed for life, an 11-year-old boy wounded on the Fourth of July, and a 4-year-old boy wounded last week. How many of the 2,090 victims in Chicago were shot by cops? Nine.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump emphasized “law and order” in a video released Friday, saying: “We must stand in solidarity with law enforcement, which we must remember is the force between civilization and total chaos.”

Given the nightmarish events of the past several days, Mr. Trump could do worse than making this presidential campaign one about that line between civilization and anarchy.

This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal by Heather MacDonald

Post Scripts can’t guarantee every single statistical fact posted here is 100% accurate, because there is often a slight disagreement even within government reporting agencies.  However, the statistics noted are generally consistent with the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports and they appear accurate within a plus or minus a 2% error rate.  

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17 Responses to Seeking Truth About Systemic Racism in Cops!

  1. Shari GAINES says:

    Good article, Jack.

  2. Chris says:

    In hours of secretly recorded telephone conversations, police officers in Mount Vernon, New York, reveal widespread corruption, brutality and other misconduct in the troubled Westchester County city just north of the Bronx.

    Caught on tape by a whistleblower cop, the officers said they witnessed or took part in alarming acts of police misconduct, from framing and beating residents to collaborating with drug dealers, all as part of a culture of impunity within the department’s narcotics unit.

    The Mount Vernon police tapes, obtained exclusively by Gothamist/WNYC, were recorded from 2017 to this year by Murashea Bovell, a 12-year veteran of the department who has been blowing the whistle on misconduct for years.

    In 2014 and 2015, Bovell reported his colleagues’ alleged corruption and brutality in confidential complaints to the city and a lawsuit against the city, which was dismissed on procedural grounds. But he saw little change, so he began quietly recording his colleagues to substantiate his own claims.

    https://gothamist.com/news/mount-vernon-police-tapes-innocent-people-were-framed

    • Tina says:

      The whistleblower addresses systemic corruption, mostly regarding drugs. Racism wasn’t mentioned, unless I missed something.

      Sounds more like a city with corruption from the leadership on down.

      In my experience most of the cities where problems like these occur are run by democrats with corruption trickling down.

      Also it should be remembered that the president who brought up systemic racism in the blue community showed his own systemic prejudice when he public ally accused an White officer, without knowing the facts, of racism. His auto response was quite telling.

  3. Chris says:

    Even George W. Bush acknowledged “systemic racism” by name the other day.

    https://www.bushcenter.org/about-the-center/newsroom/press-releases/2020/06/statement-by-president-george-w-bush.html

    No one else has any excuse not to anymore.

  4. Post Scripts says:

    If this is true and I find it hard to believe it is, then Bush is as big a fool as you have always said he was. Who pronounces a verdict ahead of the trial and who assumes facts not in evidence? What kind of person would do that? A fool.

    • Chris says:

      If this is true and I find it hard to believe it is,

      Wait, you find it hard to believe that a statement from the George W. Bush Presidential Center that explicitly says it’s from George W. Bush, and has been reported on extensively, is really from George W. Bush?

      Why? Have Trump’s constant false charges of “fake news” destroyed your ability to tell a reliable source from an unreliable one?

      Who pronounces a verdict ahead of the trial and who assumes facts not in evidence?

      Jack, you’re not making any sense. There was no “verdict” expressed in that statement; did you even read it?

      And don’t pretend like you’ve never made a judgment about a case before a trial. Unless you’re a juror in said trial, there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing that as long as you are properly informed. People here, including you, haven’t been shy about condemning individual rioters before their trials, so why are you pretending that no one should ever make up their minds about criminals until a trial has happened? You’re only saying that because in this case, the criminal was a cop. Total double standard.

    • Lonestar says:

      Mr. Jack, That thar’s a ton o’evidence y’all got it right.

      It’s rightly sorry when, the one thing missin’ in yer main objectors reply is a mind open e’nuff to reason it out.

      Round these parts, we sometime will say, ya’all can lead a horse to water, but ya can’t stop him from pissin’ in it, so best point his head up stream, or else he feedin’ on his own waste.

      Same holds true fer someone who spins a yarn twisting it all around, jes feedin’ on their own Bull S^!t

  5. cherokee jack says:

    If this ever calms down, I wonder if anyone will ever conduct a study to see how many people were persuaded to stop being racist, and whether anyone became racist after the “protests.”

  6. J Soden says:

    The claim of “systemic racism” is another term designed to enable those like Sharptongue who feed on the fears of others and is repeated by the Leftie Media propaganda machine.
    That’s like calling looters and rioters “protesters.”

    • cherokee jack says:

      You’re right on, J.
      Racism today is individual, and no “protest,” or law, or wishful thinking will change it. Racism is a game the brain plays to make one lowlife believe there’s someone lower than themselves.
      It’s ridiculous to say there’s systemic racism when we elect Obama or all the governors, mayors, etc., and find generals, police chiefs, AGs, and others in positions of power all over the country.

  7. Tina says:

    Glad to be back, J, and thanks.

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