XPost: alt.tv.pol-incorrect, alt.politics.usa, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
XPost: alt.non.racism, soc.culture.african.american
From: echolot@pinger.com

On 06/01/2016 05:13 AM, Ubiquitous wrote:
> Heather Mac Donald
>
> For almost two years, a protest movement known as “Black Lives
> Matter” has convulsed the nation. Triggered by the police shooting
> of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the Black
> Lives Matter movement holds that racist police officers are the
> greatest threat facing young black men today. This belief has
> triggered riots, “die-ins,” the murder and attempted murder of
> police officers, a campaign to eliminate traditional grand jury
> proceedings when police use lethal force, and a presidential task
> force on policing.
>
> Even though the U.S. Justice Department has resoundingly disproven
> the lie that a pacific Michael Brown was shot in cold blood while
> trying to surrender, Brown is still venerated as a martyr. And now
> police officers are backing off of proactive policing in the face of
> the relentless venom directed at them on the street and in the
> media. As a result, violent crime is on the rise.
>
> The need is urgent, therefore, to examine the Black Lives Matter
> movement’s central thesis—that police pose the greatest threat to
> young black men. I propose two counter hypotheses: first, that there
> is no government agency more dedicated to the idea that black lives
> matter than the police; and second, that we have been talking
> obsessively about alleged police racism over the last 20 years in
> order to avoid talking about a far larger problem—black-on-black
> crime.
>
> Let’s be clear at the outset: police have an indefeasible obligation
> to treat everyone with courtesy and respect, and to act within the
> confines of the law. Too often, officers develop a hardened,
> obnoxious attitude. It is also true that being stopped when you are
> innocent of any wrongdoing is infuriating, humiliating, and
> sometimes terrifying. And needless to say, every unjustified police
> shooting of an unarmed civilian is a stomach-churning tragedy.
>
> Given the history of racism in this country and the complicity of
> the police in that history, police shootings of black men are
> particularly and understandably fraught. That history informs how
> many people view the police. But however intolerable and inexcusable
> every act of police brutality is, and while we need to make sure
> that the police are properly trained in the Constitution and in
> courtesy, there is a larger reality behind the issue of policing,
> crime, and race that remains a taboo topic. The problem of black-
> on-black crime is an uncomfortable truth, but unless we acknowledge
> it, we won’t get very far in understanding patterns of policing.
>
> Every year, approximately 6,000 blacks are murdered. This is a
> number greater than white and Hispanic homicide victims combined,
> even though blacks are only 13 percent of the national population.
> Blacks are killed at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics
> combined. In Los Angeles, blacks between the ages of 20 and 24 die
> at a rate 20 to 30 times the national mean. Who is killing them? Not
> the police, and not white civilians, but other blacks. The
> astronomical black death-by-homicide rate is a function of the black
> crime rate. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit
> homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens
> combined. Blacks of all ages commit homicide at eight times the rate
> of whites and Hispanics combined, and at eleven times the rate of
> whites alone.
>
> The police could end all lethal uses of force tomorrow and it would
> have at most a trivial effect on the black death-by-homicide rate.
> The nation’s police killed 987 civilians in 2015, according to a
> database compiled by The Washington Post. Whites were 50 percent—or
> 493—of those victims, and blacks were 26 percent—or 258. Most of
> those victims of police shootings, white and black, were armed or
> otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force.
>
> The black violent crime rate would actually predict that more than
> 26 percent of police victims would be black. Officer use of force
> will occur where the police interact most often with violent
> criminals, armed suspects, and those resisting arrest, and that is
> in black neighborhoods. In America’s 75 largest counties in 2009,
> for example, blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery
> defendants, 57 percent of all murder defendants, 45 percent of all
> assault defendants—but only 15 percent of the population.
>
> Moreover, 40 percent of all cop killers have been black over the
> last decade. And a larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide
> deaths are a result of police killings than black homicide deaths—
> but don’t expect to hear that from the media or from the political
> enablers of the Black Lives Matter movement. Twelve percent of all
> white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by police officers,
> compared to four percent of all black homicide victims. If we’re
> going to have a “Lives Matter” anti-police movement, it would be
> more appropriately named “White and Hispanic Lives Matter.”
>
> Standard anti-cop ideology, whether emanating from the ACLU or the
> academy, holds that law enforcement actions are racist if they don’t
> mirror population data. New York City illustrates why that
> expectation is so misguided. Blacks make up 23 percent of New York
> City’s population, but they commit 75 percent of all shootings, 70
> percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all violent crime,
> according to victims and witnesses. Add Hispanic shootings and you
> account for 98 percent of all illegal gunfire in the city. Whites
> are 33 percent of the city’s population, but they commit fewer than
> two percent of all shootings, four percent of all robberies, and
> five percent of all violent crime. These disparities mean that
> virtually every time the police in New York are called out on a gun
> run—meaning that someone has just been shot—they are being summoned
> to minority neighborhoods looking for minority suspects.
>
> Officers hope against hope that they will receive descriptions of
> white shooting suspects, but it almost never happens. This incidence
> of crime means that innocent black men have a much higher chance
> than innocent white men of being stopped by the police because they
> match the description of a suspect. This is not something the police
> choose. It is a reality forced on them by the facts of crime.
>
> The geographic disparities are also huge. In Brownsville, Brooklyn,

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