Systemic Racism?

“George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal,’ ”  writes Heather MacDonald in today’s Wall Street Journal.  In his piece in California Political Review, James V. Lacy notes “Liberal officials and the media focus on what they call “systemic racism” as causing the death of Floyd and other people of color at the hands of scoflaw police officers.”  Liberal/progressive politicians and their mouthpieces in the mainstream media have become boringly predicable.  News anchors, politicians and endless array of pundits have been for years engaged in nonstop hectoring that virtually everything happening in the United States, including sports and weather events, is the result of racism.  Maintaining this narrative requires ignoring the inconvenient truth.

Ms. MacDonald dismantles the narrative with widely available data showing that while African-Americans make up 13% of the U.S. population they were responsible for 53% of the murders and about 60% of the robberies in 2018.  With this substantially disproportionate offense ratio we would expect at least half of people fatally shot by a racist police force to be black, and we would be wrong.  Roughly 1/4 of the offenders shot by police last year were black.  According to the Washington Post, in 2019 nine unarmed blacks were shot by police compared to 19 unarmed whites.  National crime data for 2019 is not yet available, but using 2018 data showing that 7,407 blacks were murdered that year, if the numbers for 2019 are comparable, the nine blacks shot by police last year will be 0.1% of all African Americans killed.  A police officer is 18 1/2 times as likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black man is to be killed by a cop.  She goes on to cite recent studies from the National Academy of Science, Harvard and the Philadelphia Police Department disproving the systemic racism narrative.   Don’t tell anybody at CNN about this.

Mr. Lacy takes a different, but equally convincing tack.  Noting that if we are to believe that America is infected with systemic racism, pretty much everybody living here who is not a person of color is a racist and “the racist majority in control are making racist decisions routinely in managing police departments and everything else..”   Beyond the fact that a racist white majority, which makes up 72% of the U.S. population, recently elected a black president to two terms,  how does the systemic racism narrative explain the fact that of the nation’s 20 largest cities, people of color hold most of the positions of power.  The heads of police departments in Chicago, Phoenix, Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Charlotte, San Francisco, Indianapolis and Seattle are African Americans.  In three of those cities the police chiefs are also woman.  The political leadership in most of the largest cities, including New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Minneapolis, Chicago, Sacramento and Philadelphia are liberal democrats.   Not surprisingly these are the cities which have seen the most damage from the George Floyd riots as their leaders handcuff the police in order to protect the First Amendment right of rioters to loot and burn buildings and attack those trying to defend their property.   The only thing that is systemic in these cities and among the major media is stupidity.