It has as much to do with the topic under discussion as the anecdote you provided, which you are right is not "anything." You see, I don't think anyone disputes that racism exists and that racial profiling occurs among police and civilians alike. The question is whether the data actually supports the notion that we have a systemic problem in our nation's police forces of denying that black lives matter.
So, let's look at the article you referenced:
My problem is with how the statistics are being used. For example, the article includes this paragraph:
According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.
Now, frankly, I don't know if I'm more surprised that this paragraph was written or that anyone with half a brain takes it as a serious indicator of systemic bias. I mean, seriously. How pathetically devoid of common sense must a person be to take seriously anything written after this paragraph? Are we really supposed to believe that the persons killed by police are just some sampling of the entire population? SMDH.
Hey, we also see that 95% of the civilians killed by police were men. When you consider that men make up just under 50% of the population, it's clear that police are nearly twice as likely to shoot men than women. Does this suggest an implicit bias against men? Do we need a "Male Lives Matter" movement? Give me a break.
Perhaps, we should conclude other factors are involved.
Now, the article, to its credit, seems to recognize this problem since it goes on to wave its hand at considering other factors. However, it still included that earlier paragraph, and it doesn't show the other factors considered and how they were considered.
So, let' s look at some data. According to the Washington Post database, 93 of the 948 civilians killed by police were "unarmed." Of these, 19 included signs of mental illness, and of the remaining 74, 25 were listed as "attack in progress," 40 as "other," and 9 as undetermined. Of the 40 "other," 16 were white, 13 black, 9 Hispanic, and 2 "other." However, if you read the descriptions of the various accounts, you see remarkable similarities in the context of the encounter: fleeing arrest, car chases, not following police instructions, etc. In other words, we don't have situations where police are encountering a sample of the total American population and just shooting some. They are serving warrants, responding to calls from the public, etc.
Now, the article you cited did mention a
Wall Street Journal study which alluded to this fact:
Because detailed FBI data on crime can lag by several years, the
most-cited statistics on this point refer to 2009 data. According to that data, out of all violent crimes in which someone was charged, black Americans were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the country’s 75 biggest counties — despite the fact that black Americans made up just 15 percent of the population in those places.
“Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force,” wrote Heather Mac Donald, a conservative researcher, in a Wall Street Journal column headlined
“The Myths of Black Lives Matter” that was originally published in February and re-published this weekend. ...
Unfortunately, the article obscures MacDonald's point in her article by asserting the thesis of her new book within the same paragraph:
The assertion that the black men and women killed by police are primarily violent criminals and the explanation for racial disparities in who gets killed by law enforcement is the premise of Mac Donald’s new book, “The War on Cops.”
The "assertion that the black men and women killed by police are primarily violent criminals" was not the point being made by MacDonald in the article, but it did set up a straw man which the WP article could then knock down with other obfuscating statistics.
The actual point is a simple one. Given the crime statistics, police likely have the types of encounters which may lead to the discharge of a firearm with African-Americans disproportionately to their population. The statistics cited suggest that the overall disproportion of percent population to percent crime parallels the disproportion of police shootings. Now, ideally, it would be nice to get data on the demographics of police encounters with the public, but I think the near enough is close enough principle should be sufficient.
And don't get me wrong. There are bad cops and bad shootings. There are police who are being prosecuted. I'm not denying that racism exists. I'm denying that the data supports the suggestion that America promotes a system of local policing in which Black lives don't matter. I'm also concerned that these protests will only make things worse. The heightening of distrust between the African American community and police may actually make things worse by encouraging more defiance of, and fleeing from police officers--two prevalent contexts for police shootings.
Furthermore, I do think that national policy has contributed to this worsening situation. I think the African-American community has suffered disproportionately from public assistance policy which discourages marriage and work, thereby contributing to cycles of poverty and delinquency. If people want to have a serious conversation about Black Lives Matter, rather than talking about the 13 African Americans who were killed by police in 2015 while being unarmed and neither attacking the police nor suffering from mental illness, let's talk about the 870 African American lives which are aborted EVERY DAY. Let's talk about the culture which tells mothers that their children's lives don't matter.
