According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there. When paired with these crime statistics, it’s no surprise blacks make up 26% of police shooting victims. Moreover, it is not always white police officers who are doing the shooting, a fact that casts doubt on claims from BLM activists and progressive journalists that there is an epidemic of white racism in America’s police force. From the same article:
The Black Lives Matter movement claims that white officers are especially prone to shooting innocent blacks due to racial bias, but this too is a myth. A March 2015 Justice Department report on the Philadelphia Police Department found that black and Hispanic officers were much more likely than white officers to shoot blacks based on “threat misperception”—that is, the mistaken belief that a civilian is armed.
A 2015 study by University of Pennsylvania criminologist Greg Ridgeway, formerly acting director of the National Institute of Justice, found that, at a crime scene where gunfire is involved, black officers in the New York City Police Department were 3.3 times more likely to discharge their weapons than other officers at the scene.
On the rare occasions when police officers do shoot a black suspect, they’re just as likely to do so if the officer is black. Or even if the officer is a Black Lives Matter activist! Whenever black critics of the police have dared submit themselves to “use of force” simulations, which put participants in police scenarios where the use of force against a suspect is an available option, they end up pulling the trigger just as often as white policemen.112
There are white people that Black Lives Matter should look up to, and they’re not Shaun King. They’re Heather Mac Donald, the tireless Manhattan Institute researcher who has outlined the damage done to black lives by the Black Lives Matter movement in meticulous detail (many of the citations in this chapter are from her work). They’re Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York, whose proactive policing caused gang violence in the city to plummet, saving countless black lives. Or Piper Kerman, author of Orange Is The New Black, who used her experience in the U.S. penal system to create a national conversation about prison reform. And they’re the hundreds of thousands of police officers, of every color, who patrol America’s streets at night, preventing young black men from murdering each other and their neighbors. Black lives don’t matter to Black Lives Matter. If they did, they wouldn’t focus on police-related deaths, which make up a tiny part of preventable black deaths. They would focus on the problems of their own community, rather than dwindling “white racism.” Above all, they wouldn’t force police off America’s streets.
The great truth obscured by the media and left-wing politicians is that police are not the enemies of black lives, but their greatest defenders.
THE FACTS
Not even a proud dissident conservative like me would deny that there are real, enduring issues in America that make it more difficult to be a black person. If I were a partisan hack, I’d shy away from making that admission.
Unlike the largely bogus complaints of feminists and gays, who at this point are largely privileged classes, some African-Americans, especially women, are still second-class citizens in America.
Education is a prime example. Schools in America are still largely segregated—black pupils overwhelmingly go to schools in lower-income neighborhoods, where class sizes are large, the standard of teaching is poor, and gangs prey upon adolescent boys, especially if they distinguish themselves academically. In 83 out of 97 large American cities, the majority of black students attended school where most of their classmates were low-income. In 54 of those 97 cities, that majority number was over 80%.113
Fixing America’s schools would go a long way to solving the deep-seated issues that cause black people to remain stuck in a cycle of crime and poverty. But unlike the angry, tribal politics of Black Lives Matter, the political dividends of such reforms could only be reaped in the very long term. Efforts to fix America’s weakest schools, as George W. Bush discovered when he attempted to do so, typically cause more political damage than support.
The problem of black schools is part of a wider maelstrom of disadvantage faced by black people in America. Black children are more likely to live in inadequate housing, are more likely to grow up in conditions of relative poverty, and more likely to have uneducated or poorly educated parents—one of the strongest indicators of future academic and professional success.
You’ll notice “parents” is plural in the previous sentence, but 70% of black children are born to single women.114 Black fatherlessness is widespread and socially and educationally devastating for black children. Furthermore, black children are more likely to grow up surrounded by crime, which makes them more likely to fall into the lifestyle themselves, and more likely to be affected by crime, which has a host of ramifications that affect educational attainment, including absenteeism and stress. Real stress, not the “triggering” that feminists experience when they encounter something they disagree with.
Then there’s the war on drugs, which needlessly puts hundreds of thousands of black people in jail. Entire generations of young black men have been lost to the prison system. It must end. If Black Lives Matter’s main purpose was instituting prison reform, I’d carry one of those dumb protest signs myself, but I assure you my sign would have much better production value than these activists can muster.
I don’t claim to have the answer to these problems, but I won’t pretend they don’t exist. In fact, Republicans need to take these issues seriously. I’m no libertarian, but it’s no surprise that Senator Rand Paul was polling so well with black voters before he dropped out of the Republican presidential race in 2016.115 Paul’s proposals for drug reform, prison reform, and education reform were specifically designed to address issues in the black community.
Discussing continued racial disadvantage in America will be frustrating for conservatives who are sick of constant, bogus complaints about racism. But that’s no excuse for ignoring the facts. The Left responds to uncomfortable facts with handwringing and denial. It’s time for the grownups to take control. Disadvantage does still exist, and something has to be done about it.
The Left is only making it worse, with ill-advised welfare programs that try to fix black poverty by throwing money at the problem. I know somewhere in this country there’s a brilliant conservative mind that has just the solution, but he is too fearful of being called a racist to bring it to the table. I hope this book will show him you can’t let idiots get in the way of real progress.
THE NARRATIVE
Black Lives Matter is instructive, because it illustrates how the political and cultural establishment can spread misinformation even when the truth is in plain sight. Anyone can access the information needed to debunk the selective truths promulgated by Black Lives Matter.