At Townhall.com: Police Officers Are Not Disproportionately Killing Black Men—Here Are the Facts

Aug 28, 2018 | Featured

Dr. John Lott has a new piece at Townhall.com on some of the claims in the Texas Senate race.

Democrats have a new hero in Beto O’Rourke, who is campaigning against Texas Sen. Ted Cruz. Hatred for Cruz is enough to get Democrats excited by the prospect of unseating him, but O’Rourke has also won them over on Wednesday by campaigning against police brutality toward blacks.

O’Rourke asserts that law enforcement members are killing unarmed, black children at a “frightening level” and aren’t being held accountable. He expresses approval for “peaceful, non-violent protests, including taking a knee at a football game.”

When Colin Kaepernick started kneeling during the National Anthem a couple of years ago, he wanted to protest police “getting away with murder” of black people.   Over the weekend, whole NFL football teams protested police racism against blacks. Protests during the National Anthem have spread to the NBA and major league baseball. In St. Louis last week, after a white officer was acquitted for shooting a black man, protestors chanted “hey ho, hey ho, these racist cops have got to go.” President Trump has called out these protestors, but the perception of many is that racism explains why white officers shoot blacks.

The media has helped create a biased perception. In a recent study, the Crime Prevention Research Center finds that when a white officer kills a suspect, the media usually mentions the race of the officer. This is rarely true when the officer is black.

Polls of blacks paint a bleak picture of relations between blacks and the police, but there is other evidence based on behavior that, overall, blacks trust police at least as much as whites do.

A recent Quinnipiac survey of New York City found that blacks were 11 percentage points more likely to approve of the police in their neighborhood than of the NYPD as a whole.  The police that blacks know best, they like.

If blacks really believe that police are racist, one may think that black victims would be less likely to report crimes committed against them. After all, they may doubt the commitment of the officers to solving the crimes. They may think that officers will engage in profiling and arrest an innocent black suspect.

In fact, blacks don’t shy away from reporting crimes to the police. Our report, comparing Department of Justice survey data to crimes reported to the police, shows that from 2008 to 2012 blacks were actually more likely than whites to report violent crimes committed against them to the police — 9 percentage points more likely than whites (54 percent to 45 percent). . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

johnrlott

2 Comments

  1. Lars

    This disclosure of officer race is true. Recently, the black cop (who tased an 11 y/o black girl who was running from him after shoplifting) was not mentioned to also be black. It is distressing to see the black “leaders” and the Left increasing the divide between races in an effort to gain money. It’s simple greed which might bring us into another deadly clash like the Civil War. The largest bits of racism I see are in the Left, and that encompasses the black community. Sad, sad, sad.

    • Lars

      Oops, s/b “This lack of disclosure of officer race statement is true. “

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