WSJ--The Myth of Systemic Police Racism

[Tenshot13]

I guess I'm having a hard time understanding about police racism when the statistics don't back it up.  If we're going to talk about police training being more stringent so incidents like Greg Lloyd's never happens again, I'm all about that.  If you're saying that police have a widespread racial bias, I just don't see it as statistically significant.  Unfortunately, due to human error and just overall bad people, these sort of things will continue to happen, as there are bad cops and neglectful cops.  With more stringent training and accountability from peers, this sort of thing can be mostly prevented, hopefully by weeding those sorts of people out.  

Bad cops should be prosecuted and as Dave pointed out in another thread, it shouldn't be 3 days before one is arrested for something as blatant as the Greg Lloyd incident.  The media would have you believe that cops are committing genocide on African Americans, and that's not true.  This is why I blame them almost completely for the racial tensions and riots in the US, from fake news CNN to fear mongering FoxNews.

http://archive.is/XLNh4#selection-2077.5-2077.42


The Myth of Systemic Police Racism
Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But there’s no evidence of widespread racial bias.
By Heather Mac Donald
June 2, 2020 1:44 pm ET

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.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”
Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.

This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.

The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.

A 2015 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. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.

The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.

Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “The War on Cops,” (Encounter Books, 2016).

[MyGodWearsAHoodie]

The perfect example of the line, “Statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics.”.

[Fau Teixeira]

pack it up boys .. there's no bias .. people are angry and frustrated without a reason .. it's all Soros .. he's obviously the one in charge .. please won't trump save us from all the bad people on the left .. and antifa .. and acorn..

breaking .. here's a picture of soros now!!!

[Sunstroke]

Heck, Soros called me this morning to ask me to continue taking pot shots at CF. He said he could deliver some bricks as well, should I decide that I need to throw something at him...   

[Tenshot13]

Try to stay on topic please.  CF mentioned Soros in the other thread, not me.  You're projecting.

[Tenshot13]

The perfect example of the line, “Statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics.”.

Who is the liar, the article writer?  What specifically is untrue in the article?  Where is the proof to back that claim up?

[Dolphster]

Haven't you heard?  Facts are racist. 

[Sunstroke]

Haven't you heard?  Facts are racist. 

Nope...facts are facts, racists are racist.

Once folks learn how to recognize both, it becomes real easy to decide where to stand.

[Dolphster]

Nope...facts are facts, racists are racist.

Once folks learn how to recognize both, it becomes real easy to decide where to stand.

I know.  I was being glib for effect.  I consider myself a logic based centrist on most matters and I think that the majority of the posts/comments I have made on TDMMC bear that out.  I have called out both conservatives and liberals here with what is probably close to a 50/50 split.  Don't get me wrong, I know that there are racist cops.  And I applaud when they suffer the consequences of their stupidity and hatred.  Two Florida Highway Patrol troopers were just fired yesterday for making ignorant and racist comments on social media.  And that is exactly what should have happened to them.  The moron cop in Minneapolis has been charged with murder and manslaughter and that is exactly what should happen to him as well.   So yes, there are clearly racists in the law enforcement community.  And it makes me very happy when they lose their jobs and have criminal charges pressed against them when their actions are criminal.  However, that doesn't change the validity of the WSJ article that Tenshot posted.  To paint with a broad brush and say "the police are racist" is no more valid than saying "blacks are racist" because some African American criminals target white people specifically.  I know I'm kind of getting off in the weeds here, sorry.  The point I'm trying to make is that this isn't an "everything or nothing" topic.   If the author of the WSJ article had said "This proves that no cops are racist" then I would have a huge problem with the article.  The article was simply pointing out evidence that the law enforcement community is not systemically racist.  It is really disheartening to me that almost 60 years after the Civil Rights Act, any kind of discrimination still exists.  It is a sad commentary on humanity. 

[Fau Teixeira]

Ok then i'll stay on topic.

The underlying theme of the article you linked, in case you didn't catch it, Is that he's saying that black people are by nature more violent and prone to criminality than white people. It isn't the system that's racist, the fact that there are a much higher proportionality of minorities imprisoned is that minorities are more prone to crime. And has nothing to do with how those communities are policed or how different attitudes from police lead to different outcomes.

Crime and suspect behavior

What is crime and suspect behavior for one person may not be suspect behavior for another based purely on skin color or more insidiously neighborhood segregation brought about by redlining policies or housing costs from such things as gentrification.

The failure to take any of that into account is incompetent at best and what i suspect to be intentional by the author.

[Dolphster]

The perfect example of the line, “Statistics don’t lie, but liars use statistics.”.

I totally agree with your quote.  I've always liked the Mark Twain quote of "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."   However, I'm confused by how the "Statistic don't lie, but liars use statistics" as your response to the WSJ article.  What is the author of the article being a liar about?

We can also revise the "statistics" quote to address videos.  "Videos don't lie, but liars use videos."   Kind of like posting a video of cops taking bricks out of a pickup and placing them on the ground and calling it "evidence" that cops are putting bricks out on the street in order to bait protesters into vandalism.  Only for the truth to come out that it was the Boston police and they were unloading bricks in a secured police department parking lot after they had removed them from the street in order to prevent their use for vandalism.  And no, I'm not specifically calling you a liar.  I'm sure that you believed that the video depicted cops "planting" bricks on the street to incite a riot.  I think that you were trying to hold people accountable for doing something wrong.  Nothing wrong with trying to hold people accountable.  But it is obviously paramount that we use facts to support our stances, not just "part" of a video or drawing erroneous conclusions from a video.  So back to my question, what is the author of the WSJ article being a liar about?

[Tenshot13]

Ok then i'll stay on topic.

The underlying theme of the article you linked, in case you didn't catch it, Is that he's saying that black people are by nature more violent and prone to criminality than white people. It isn't the system that's racist, the fact that there are a much higher proportionality of minorities imprisoned is that minorities are more prone to crime. And has nothing to do with how those communities are policed or how different attitudes from police lead to different outcomes.

What is crime and suspect behavior for one person may not be suspect behavior for another based purely on skin color or more insidiously neighborhood segregation brought about by redlining policies or housing costs from such things as gentrification.

The failure to take any of that into account is incompetent at best and what i suspect to be intentional by the author.

Heather Mac Donald is a she, not a he.  I have a hard time seeing any hidden suggestion or theme, I'm just looking at the numbers she posted and the intentional theme of Systemic Police Racism being a myth.  If she is suggesting African Americans are more prone to crime, maybe it's because of the reasons you suggested, that's valid.  Personally, I think it has more to do with the high rate of single parent households in African Americans.

In 2014-18, the share of families headed by single parents was 66% among African American families, 41% among Hispanic families, 33% among white families and 20% among Asian families.

https://www.actrochester.org/children-youth/single-parent-families-by-race-ethnicity

The number of children who grow up without a father in the home in the United States has reached concerning levels. There exists a considerable research base that suggests that children raised in households lacking a father experience psychosocial problems with greater frequency than children with a father in the home (Allen & Daly, 2007). These problems have been found to extend into adolescence and adulthood and include an increased risk of substance use, depression, suicide, poor school performance, and contact with the criminal justice system (Allen

& Daly, 2007).

https://www.mnpsych.org/index.php%3Foption%3Dcom_dailyplanetblog%26view%3Dentry%26category%3Dindustry%2520news%26id%3D54

Single parent households are also a common theme in mass shooters.

[CF DolFan]

Nope...facts are facts, racists are racist.

Once folks learn how to recognize both, it becomes real easy to decide where to stand.

I agree with you. The problem is anyone who disagrees with any form of liberalism is called a racist by the left so it's become impossible to tell what is real and what is made up by people who have no argument and are still in a hussy over Hillary not winning.

[Dave Gray]

It's not just a bad cop.

It's a system, not necessarily of racists (I don't believe that most cops are racists)....but it's a system that protects racists.  It's a system that devalues certain communities or stereotypes and treats certain people of different looks, with different levels or respect or force.

Do you think that a white woman would've been kneeled on the neck for 8 minutes until dead in front of a bunch of other cops?

But it's also that there isn't action against these acts until it becomes public.  If this wasn't on video, nothing would have happened to this cop.  And even with it on video, this took days.

This might surprise you, but I don't even necessarily think that the man who killed Floyd was a racist.  But he worked for an organization, with a deeply embedded culture that is built on a foundation of racism.  The protection that cops have for each other comes at the expense of those they're supposed to protect, and it's especially true for communities of color.

And was even worse is that the black community has been saying forever how this has been happening and only with the advancement of technology are we finally able to see that it's true.  For one George Floyd, there are countless dead men that were lied about, mistreated, and covered up.

[CF DolFan]

I think we could fix teachers and police the same way. Not eliminate all bad but certainly make it better if we paid higher salaries to attract more competition from good employees and make it so that it's not so hard to get rid of the bad ones. The unions protect both and makes it extremely difficult to get rid of them.  The officer had 18 complaints against him. I realize that he's in a vulnerable job as far as complaints go but maybe around 10 someone should have sat down with him and let him know that maybe police work wasn't his forte and he should seek something else.