Is Joe Biden Telling the Truth About “Systemic Racism” in Policing?

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He might think he is, but the data tell a different story.  As this story in today’s WSJ shows, “A detailed new report shows no racial disparities in crimes committed versus arrests made.”

Here’s how it begins:

‘Absolutely,” President Biden said last year when a reporter asked him if he believes there’s “systemic racism in law enforcement.” That’s hard to square with a presidential memorandum Mr. Biden recently issued, stating: “It is the policy of my Administration to make evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data.” The claim of “systemic racism in law enforcement” defies the best available science and data.

In a report released days before Mr. Biden’s inauguration, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics examined whether people of different races were arrested to a degree that was disproportionate to their involvement in crime. The report concluded that there was no statistically significant difference by race between how likely people were to commit serious violent crimes and how likely they were to be arrested. In other words, the data suggested that police officers and sheriff’s deputies focus on criminals’ actions, not their race.

And here’s the heart of it, in specifics:

The new BJS report took victims’ responses on the 2018 NCVS and compared them with arrest rates by police, supplied by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. It found that for nonfatal violent crimes that victims said were reported to police, whites accounted for 48% of offenders and 46% of arrestees. Blacks accounted for 35% of offenders and 33% of arrestees. Asians accounted for 2% of offenders and 1% of arrestees. None of these differences between the percentage of offenders and the percentage of arrestees of a given race were statistically significant….

When removing simple assault, which generally isn’t prosecuted as a felony, and focusing solely on the more serious nonfatal crimes reported to police (rape or sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault), whites made up 41% of offenders and 39% of arrestees. Blacks made up 43% of offenders and 36% of arrestees. Asians made up 2.5% of offenders and 1.5% of arrestees. Again, none of these differences between offenders and arrestees by race were statistically significant. Hispanics accounted for 12% of offenders and 21% of arrestees, which was statistically significant. But again, “victims not knowing the ethnicity of their assailants, even if they knew their race,” to quote the BJS report, “may have resulted in some underestimates of Hispanic offenders’ involvement in violent crime.”

These statistics don’t indicate that police officers are never racist. Individual officers, like people in any profession, run the gamut from laudable to deplorable. But what they do show is that Mr. Biden’s claim of “systemic racism” in American police forces is contrary to the best data we have on the subject.

This is a fact to bear in mind the next time some pro-criminal group starts barking at you that criminal justice policy must he based on “science” and “data.”  Indeed it should  —  which means, for starters, that these same groups should try to un-paste themselves from what has become the vodoo-talismanic belief in Amerika, the Racist Cesspool.