The Facts Matter

For decades, the public has been admonished a dozen times a day by the media, liberal politicians and our betters in academia that government policy decisions they prefer are based upon evidence and data.  But what evidence and data are they talking about? Real science carefully reviews all the data.  Junk science supports a narrative.  Americans of all colors have been intentionally misinformed with regard to race relations, particularly when it comes to the police.  The the clarion call of liberal/progressives, race hustlers like Al Sharpton and a complicit major media is that racial bias was baked into the U.S. Constitution by the founding fathers and that 244 years later, every American institution remains systemically infused with bigotry.  In order to sustain this narrative, its adherents simply ignore the data.  In her remarks before the House Judiciary Committee today, Manhattan Institute scholar Heather MacDonald addressed that claim, highlighted by the tragic death of George Floyd, that systemic racism infects the police departments across America.

“The evidence does not support that charge,” notes MacDonald.  “Policing today is driven by crime data and community demands for help. Victim reports send police disproportionately to minority communities because that is where people are most being hurt by violent street crime. Blacks between the ages of ten and 43 die of homicide at thirteen times the rate of whites, according to the CDC. In New York City, blacks make up 73% of all shooting victims, though they are 23% of the city’s population. In Chicago in 2016, there were 4300 shooting victims, almost all black.”

“Are the police nevertheless engaging in an epidemic of racist violence, as we hear daily? They are not. For the last five years, the police have killed about 1000 civilians a year, the vast majority of those victims armed or otherwise dangerous. In 2019, the police killed 235 blacks, most of them also armed or dangerous, out of 1004 police shooting victims overall. That roughly 25% ratio has also remained stable. It is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of the rate at which officers encounter armed and violent suspects, a fact confirmed most recently by a 2019 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In the 75 largest U.S. counties, which is where most of the population resides, blacks constituted around 60 percent of all robbery and murder defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks comprise only 15 percent of the population in those counties.

What about unarmed victims of fatal police shootings? As of June 1, the Washington Post’s data base of fatal police shootings showed nine unarmed black victims and 19 unarmed white victims of fatal police shootings in 2019. That number of black unarmed victims is down 76% from 2015, when the Post began keeping its data base. The Post defines “unarmed” loosely to include suspects who have grabbed an officer’s gun or who are fleeing from a car stop with a loaded semi-automatic pistol in their vehicle. Those nine allegedly unarmed black victims represent .1% of all black homicide victims, which number about 7500 a year, more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined.”

MacDonald goes on to note that last week the Post reclassified some additional black shooting victims as unarmed in order to up the numbers, presumably in the wake of the George Floyd killing.  The new data of 15 unarmed blacks shot by police last year, better supports the narrative, but not by much. The discussion about police arrest procedures and public engagement policies is useful and should be ongoing.  But it wastes everyone’s time when one side of the discussion refuses to acknowledge the irrefutable data showing what is actually happening.