25 unarmed Whites and only 14 unarmed Blacks were fatally shot by police in 2019. Do the data suggest that police deserve an apology from those who vi

  • Thread starter Thread starter 1cthlctrth
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
1

1cthlctrth

Guest

As of the June 22 update, the Washington Post’s database of fatal police shootings showed 14 unarmed Black victims and 25 unarmed white victims in 2019.

There are about 7,300 Black homicide victims a year. (*Eighty-nine percent of black victims are killed by black offenders, according to the FBI. Do those lives matter?) The 14 unarmed victims in fatal police shootings would comprise only 0.2% of that total. Does that sound like an epidemic of police murders?

Ideally, officers would never take anyone’s life in the course of their duties. But they make around 10 million arrests each year, and numerous deadly-weapons attacks are made on officers (an average of 27 per day in just two-thirds of the nation’s police departments, according to a 2014 analysis).

The percentage of Black respondents in a 2015 Gallup poll who wanted more police in their community was more than twice as high as the percentage of white respondents who said the same. Activists who seek to disband police departments will have to explain to these law-abiding residents that they will in essence just have to fend for themselves.

Reducing police resources will ultimately result in poorer service to the law-abiding residents of high-crime areas. Officers without back-up will be more stressed and at higher risk of poor judgment. Response times will increase. Cash-starved agencies will train less, not more, while lower pay scales will result in less qualified recruits. Would this be fair to all the good police? Would this be fair to the citizens who benefit from police presence?

A reduced police presence in minority neighborhoods will claim more Black lives. When officers back off of proactive policing under accusations of racism, violence shoots up. That was the case in cities recently examined by Harvard economists. After investigations opened up into a media-grabbing instance of police use of deadly force in Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Ferguson, Missouri, and Riverside, California, there were almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies, their study found.

The myth of racist police shootings has many unintended costs. Hundreds of police officers have been injured or killed, and many more have expressed their desire to quit.
This negative environment will likely lower the number of applicants to police academies and degrade the quality of applicants, which could result in higher levels of police criminality. Police may become less proactive. (source: lawenforcementtoday.com)

Perhaps police deserve our thanks and appreciation.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
“does the data suggest that police deserve an apology?”

No. It shows that while Blacks are 13% of the US population, they are 35% of the victims of police shootings of unarmed people. What it shows is that Blacks are disproportionately more likely to be victims.
 
Whites outnumber Blacks by eight or ten to one.
For this item to prove anything, the number of dead Whites would have to be eight or ten times the number of dead Blacks, or at least in that ball park.
 
Last edited:
What it shows is that Blacks are disproportionately more likely to be victims.

Blacks comprised 54.9% of all homicide offenders, compared to 42.4% for whites. Blacks are 13.4% of the US population, yet they accounted for more than half of all homicides. According to the FBI UCR, of 7,710,00 arrests reported in 2018, blacks comprised 27.4%. Approximately 28.6% of people arrested for rape were black, 54.2% of robbery arrests, 33.7% of aggravated assault arrests, 29.4% of burglary arrests, and 30% of arrests for larceny-theft.

Black arrest rates for violent crimes are also correlated with victim descriptions of offender race. Higher crime rates within the black population increases contact with police and therefore the chance of police shootings within that community.

Another variable to consider when assessing racial disparities is single-parent homes. In 2017, 65% of black households had a single parent, compared to 24% of white households. The more interaction a child has with a father, the less likely they are to commit a crime, according to the Minnesota Psychological Association. Children from single-parent homes are four times more likely to be in poverty and three times more likely to end up in jail by age 30.

According to a Bureau of Justice Statistics 2018 study, 15.3% of crimes against whites were committed by blacks for a total of 547,948 crimes. In contrast, whites committed 10.6% of crimes against blacks for a total of 59,777 crimes. Despite being 13.4% of the population, blacks committed nine times more interracial crimes against whites than whites committed against blacks. If racism is the cause of interracial violence, white cops are not the problem.

The myth of racist police shootings has many unintended outcomes. Hundreds of police officers have been injured or and killed, and many more have expressed their desire to quit.
This negative environment will likely lower the number of applicants to police academies and degrade the quality of applicants, which could result in higher levels of police criminality. Police may become less proactive.

The widely believed lies about racist police have also fueled an effort to defund or abolish police departments, despite only 16% of Americans agreeing with cutting financial support for police.

The media and protesters claim the violent actions of a few rioters do not represent most of the peaceful group, yet they argue the actions of one bad officer represents the whole. This faulty reasoning needs to stop. People need to forgo emotional arguments for rational analysis.
 
Last edited:

Tucker Carlson analyzed all 2019 cases listed by the Washington Post as of 6/2/20 “in which unarmed African Americans were fatally shot by police.
  • “The first was a man called Channara Pheap. He was killed by a Knoxville police called officer Dylan Williams. According to Williams, Pheap attacked him, choked him and then used a Taser on him … before the officer shot him. Five eyewitnesses corroborated the officer’s claim, and the officer was not charged.”
  • “The second case concerns a man called Marcus McVae. He was by any description a career criminal from San Angelo, Texas. He’d been ‘convicted of aggravated assault, assault on a public servant, and organized criminal activity.’ At the time he was killed he was wanted on drug dealing charges. A Texas state trooper pulled him over. McVae fled in his car, then he fled on foot into the woods. There, he fought with a trooper, and was shot and killed. The officer was not charged in that case.”
  • “Marzues Scott assaulted a shop employee. When a female police officer arrived and ordered the suspect toward her car, he instead charged her and knocked her to the ground. At that point, she shot and killed him. The entire incident was caught on body camera. The officer was not charged.”
  • “Ryan Twyman was being approached by two LA County deputies when he backed into one of them with his vehicle. The deputy was caught in the car door. He and his partner opened fire. The deputies were not charged in that case.”
  • “Melvin Watkins of East Baton Rouge, Louisiana was shot by a deputy, after he allegedly drove his car to toward the deputy at high speed. The deputy was not charged.”
  • “Isaiah Lewis, meanwhile, wasn’t just unarmed, he was completely naked. Williams broke into a house, and then attacked a police officer. The police tased Williams, but he kept coming at them and attacking. The officers shot him. They were not charged.”
  • “Atatiana Jefferson [sic] was shot by a Fort Worth deputy called Aaron Dean. A neighbor had called a non-emergency number after seeing Jefferson’s door open thinking something might be wrong. When police arrived, Jefferson saw them approach from a window and was holding a gun at the time. According to body camera footage, the office shot Jefferson within seconds. That officer has been charged with homicide.”
  • “Christopher Whitfield was shot and killed in Ethel, Louisiana. He had robbed a gas station. Deputy Glen Sims, said his gun discharged accidentally while grappling with Whitfield. Sims, who is black himself, was not charged in that killing.”
  • “Kevin Mason was shot by police during a multi-hour standoff. While Mason turned out not to have a gun, Mason claimed to have a gun, claimed to be armed and vowed to kill police with it. They believed him. Mason had been in a shootout with police years before.”
 
Additional research by Tucker Carlson:
  • “And, finally, Gregory Griffin, who was shot during a car chase. An officer called Jovanny Crespo claimed he saw someone pointing a gun at him. Later, a gun was in fact found inside the vehicle and yet Officer Crespo was charged anyway with aggravated manslaughter.”
    After the list, Carlson contended that an “officer was attacked” before the shooting in five of them and one was an accident, which “leaves a total of four deaths during a pursuit or in a standoff.”
“So out of four, in two of those cases, in fully half, the officer was criminally charged,” Carlson said. “Is it possible that more of these officers should have been charged? Of course it’s possible. Justice is not always served, that’s for sure. But either way, this is a very small number in a country of 325 million people. This is not genocide. It’s not even close to genocide. It is laughable to suggest it is.”

“Last year was the safest year for unarmed suspects since The Washington Post began tracking police shootings,” he said. “It was the safest year for both white and black suspects.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. “remains a dangerous place for police officers,” with forty-eight “murdered in 2019,” more than all “unarmed suspects killed, of all races.”

Carlson ended the monologue by citing the “7,407 black Americans” who were murdered in the U.S. in 2018. If those numbers continue “on a similar trajectory,” it would mean that “for every unarmed black person shot to death by police, more than 700 were murdered by someone else — usually someone they know.”

“Again, those are the facts,” he concluded. “They are not in dispute. Are African Americans being ‘hunted,’ as Joy Reid recklessly claimed on MSNBC recently? Or is something else happening? Is our nation being ripped apart by a total and complete lie, a provable lie. A lie used by cynical media manipulators and unscrupulous politicians who understand that racial strife, race hatred, is their path to power, even if it destroys the country? You have the facts now and you can decide what’s really going on.”
 
Last edited:
Sadly, this is so true.
Not for all protesters or all media. Most hat I have heard from only want to stop the bad cops; the fringe who talk about defunding or abolishing police departments are just that - the fringe.

And why concentrate on shooting deaths? What is the ratio of persons shot to death by police vs those killed by other means (like choke holds and such)? I think that most people understand that someone who is shot either during the commission of a crime or while in the process of being arrested, even if it turns out that they are unarmed, is a very different thing that someone who is killed while in custody.
 
Each time that I witness protests of the police, whether it be kneeling or generally bad-mouthing police as a whole, I’m disturbed that the leftist media, apparently, does not provide them with the facts I’ve listed above.

Athletes like Lebron James just don’t know any better because they’re basing their conclusions on the faulty information that is being provided to them.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for doing all this legwork, saved me the effort this time around. It’s insane how blown out of proportion this whole thing is.

If BLM really cared about black lives, they’d have no choice but to sit down and examine what it is about black culture in the US that is causing so many young men and women to be killed so meaninglessly. We already know the answer, it’s fatherlessness, but they don’t seem to have realized it yet.

I recently got into a debate about this with a family member on Facebook, and I wound up digging into the federal statistics about offenders and offenses. Black individuals account for roughly 26% of all crime, but make up only 13% of the population. As depressing as that is, it’s actually way worse when you really dig into the numbers. For one, criminals are predominately male, so that 13% can be reasonably cut down to 7.5%, maybe 8% on the high end to account for female criminals.

So now, it’s that roughly 8% of the population commits ~26% of the crimes.

But wait, it gets even worse, because not all black people are criminals. Far from it. For the sake of this example we can reasonably conclude that maybe a quarter are criminals. (I want to stress, that number is likely wayyyyyyyy too high, but it makes for easy math while still demonstrating the point I’m trying to make.)

25% of 8% is 2%, meaning that now we’re looking at roughly 2% of the population being responsible for 26% of crimes committed.

But even that doesn’t demonstrate how truly depressing this situation is, because the majority of offenders are between 15 and 40. I couldn’t find any good statistics for this exact demographic, but based on the Census Bureaus findings for 2018, 28.3% of Americans are under 18 (adding the under 18 and under 5 categories), and 16.5% are over 65, leaving 55.2% of the population being between 19 and 64. While these numbers do vary by race, and while they are not evenly distributed, we can at least get a rough estimate of the percentages.

Ages 15-18 are 1/6th the total range of 0-18, so that’s 4.72% of the population.
Ages 19-40 are just shy of 1/2 of the range of 19-65, so that’s around 27.6% of the population.
Adding those together, we’re looking at 32.32% of the population falling in that age range.

So, 32.32% of 2% is ~.65%
 
Last edited:
So, when all is said and done, approximately 0.65% of the responsible for 26% of all the crimes committed in the US. (And remember, this number is probably high, because I probably grossly overestimated the percentage of people that are actually criminals.)

When you look at it in perspective, it’s not surprising that there’s a higher representation in police confrontations. Another issue is that crime is more rampant in cities regardless of racial makeup, and black communities are predominately located in the cities. Cities also have a much less personal police force, meaning that rates of aggression towards them tend to be higher, and they are more likely to respond with equivalent aggression. This is opposed to rural communities where the police are generally known to and answerable to community in a way they are not in urban areas. That lack of personal relationship tends to make a person more likely to be aggressive towards the other.

At the end of the day though, the reason there are more police involved shootings seems to be a general distrust and lack of respect for the police. Young men aren’t raised to respect the police, and so they don’t listen are are actively aggressive towards them, which wind up with them getting hurt are even killed. This, in turn, perpetuates the cultural impression that the police should not be be trusted, further increasing the likelihood of noncompliance, which in turn increases the likelihood of incident. It’s a vicious cycle which needs to end.
 
I thought that the right to bear arms was sacrosanct in the US. Given that there are around 400mn registered firearms in circulation with a population of 330mn, a sizable number of people are going to be armed. Given that US police are currently trapped with a siege mentality, believing their own propaganda about how dangerous police work is I’m surprised it’s that low.

As for the higher murder rate, maybe, just maybe, if you addressed systemic socioeconomic factors like housing, education and opportunities that might have an impact.
 
believing their own propaganda about how dangerous police work is I’m surprised it’s that low.
Believing their own propaganda? Seriously?

Do you honestly think policing isn’t dangerous in the areas where a lot of this violence is taking place? Have you been paying no attention at all to what’s going on? Have you not seen the police precincts that have been targeted? The instance where some of these rioters tried to use quickrete to cement a station’s doors shut while they tried to burn it down? Have you not seen the images of the police who’ve had their skulls cracked with bricks? Are you really that unaware of what’s going on?
As for the higher murder rate, maybe, just maybe, if you addressed systemic socioeconomic factors like housing, education and opportunities that might have an impact.
Socioeconomic influences don’t make people violent, and they don’t make people criminals. I grew up around plenty of poor people who didn’t engage in violence or illegal activities because they’re poor, and there are plenty of rich people who do engage in such violence. The problem isn’t money, the problem is a fundamental breakdown in the structure of their society due to a lack of fathers.
 
Last edited:
How are you defining a victim here? Is it any African American that is shot by police or is it innocent, law abiding citizens? I do agree with you that the numbers indicate a disproportionate percentage of African Americans being shot, but are they all victims? The critical question here (it seems to me) is why? Is the cause of this disproportion level of shootings simply racism among the police? Is the cause general police corruption? Incompetence? Is it a combination of all these things and others? Perhaps these are all contributing factors in some cases or another, but to what degree is very unclear.

Besides all of these possible factors, it seems obvious to me that we have a profound social problem among African Americans in which they are suffering disproportionately. Growing up in that situation, and living in that environment, would seem to explain why, for example, that there is a disproportionate murder of African Americans by African Americans. I suppose that one could look into other races and perhaps find that this is true of each one—that a race tends to kill members of its own race, but why such a seemly high percentage among blacks? Environment is likely to play a major role in it. This environment, of course, was created by slavery, segregation, civil and human rights violations and so on. The difficult and complicated question, it seems to me, that very many seem to avoid is how to resolve this? Many people have tried and failed, and many government efforts have made things worse. I don’t know the answer to this problem, as if there is a single, quick fix. Defunding the police or hating the police just on principle, does not make sense to me.
 
Last edited:
Blacks comprised 54.9% of all homicide offenders ,
54% of the convicted does not mean 54% of the guilty.

And I am reminded of Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)'s comment. Deception comes in three levels: lies, damned lies and statistics.
 
Could it be that each side–the left and the right–reports only half the story? That is, right commentators such as Tucker Carlson, report only cases in which the police were justified in shooting and killing Blacks who violated the law, whereas liberal media, such as MSNBC, report only cases in which police officers were not justified in shooting and killing Black people. If both sides were to combine their reports, they might find that two things are happening: some police officers are being unjustly accused of disproportionately killing Blacks, while other police officers are being justly accused of disproportionately killing Blacks. What the public needs is comprehensive reporting that tells it like it really is rather than partial half-truths based on selective reporting of crimes.
 
Last edited:
The media and protesters claim the violent actions of a few rioters do not represent most of the peaceful group, yet they argue the actions of one bad officer represents the whole . This faulty reasoning needs to stop. People need to forgo emotional arguments for rational analysis .
The actions of a few rioters are still illegal and can be prosecuted. Their fellow protestors can and have turned on them both on camera and off.

The blue line is solid and is protected by prosecution immunity.

How’s that comparable?
 
No. It shows that while Blacks are 13% of the US population, they are 35% of the victims of police shootings of unarmed people. What it shows is that Blacks are disproportionately more likely to be victims.
Ok - now do the same statistical analysis for their percentage of the US population vs percentage of violent crimes committed.
 
“does the data suggest that police deserve an apology?”

No. It shows that while Blacks are 13% of the US population, they are 35% of the victims of police shootings of unarmed people. What it shows is that Blacks are disproportionately more likely to be victims.
This is a deceptive answer because black males in particular commit violent crimes at a far higher rate than other ethnic groups, which accounts for the disproportionate outcome you just mentioned. Several studies have demonstrated this. Perhaps you need to look up what a multivariate study is.
 
Last edited:
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top