Dr. John Lott has a new piece at Townhall.com on the claims of systematic racism by police that starts this way:
Would you describe police as the “new Jim Crow”? That is what Democrat Senate nominee Beto O’Rourke recently told students at Prairie View A&M University. Accusing police of “shooting that person solely based on the color of their skin.”
A video then went viral of Beto O’Rourke whipping a large crowd of blacks into a frenzy at the Good Street Baptist Church in Dallas with the words: “How can we continue to lose the lives of unarmed black men in the United States of America at the hands of white police officers? That is not justice.” The media outlets such as the Washington Post, CBS, and Buzzfeed wondered why Senator Ted Cruz tweeted out the video because they argued that O’Rourke’s comments were completely reasonable.
A recent Cruz ad attacks O’Rourke for these comments. There is strong evidence that Cruz is correct.
The media has helped create a biased perception of systematic racial bias by police. In a 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 Quinnipiac survey last year in 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).
That higher rate of reporting applies to all income groups and to both urban and suburban areas. And it’s not just that blacks report more crime because they experience more of it. This higher rate of reporting even holds true in areas where whites face higher violent crime rates than blacks do.
This trust appears to be well-placed. White police officers aren’t killing defenseless blacks just because they can.
We found 2,699 police shootings from 2013-2015. We couldn’t rely on FBI data, which consists of cases voluntarily provided by police departments. The FBI lists only 1,366 suspect deaths over the same 3-year period. Our more comprehensive list comes from use of Lexis/Nexis, Freedom of Information Act requests, internet news searches, and several online databases.
The FBI database not only misses half of these cases, it also misses important information that is necessary to understanding why the officers resorted to deadly force, such as whether the suspect was armed or killed while in the act of committing a crime. The FBI disproportionately includes cases from heavily minority areas, giving a misleading picture of the frequency at which blacks are shot.
Our estimates also account for violent crime rates, demographics of the city and police department, characteristics of the suspect and officer, the rate at which police in the state are killed, the educational requirements of the department, and many other factors. . . .
The rest of the piece is available here.
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