That is
factually not true. You may try to discredit the source of the article, but the information they based it on is actual data from the police themselves, the DOJ, and from independent studies.
Thanks for sharing. Actually, I think the most useful study is the one that discredits information from the Police and FBI, calling them unreliable and incomplete because it's the only one that attempts to contextualize its findings. It also happens to be self-serving because that professor received a generous grant by liberal politicians for his, uh, contributions. But VF reserved "controversial" for Fryer's research because it didn't help their narrative.
Furthermore, with few exceptions, those studies were conducted in some of the most liberal cities/states by liberal organizations, carefully curated by one of the most liberal media outlets. For every one of those studies, there's another that says racism/bias doesn't exist.
Here are just two:
1. A 2015 Justice Department
analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.
2. The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was
published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that there is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police”.
Looking at neutral data, there is no evidence of cops systemically targeting and killing Black people. Much of the disproportionate # of police interactions with Black Americans can be explained by the disproportionate # of violent crimes committed by Black Americans.
In Manhattan, for example, the African American community tends to be
policed more heavily, because that is where people are disproportionately hurt by violent street crime. In New York City in 2018,
73% of shooting victims were Black, though Black residents comprise only
24% of the city’s population. And it's mostly Blacks killing Blacks. According to
FBI data from 2018 (single victim/single offender):
- Of the 2,925 Black people murdered, 234 were committed by Whites, 2,600 by Blacks.
- Of the 3,315 White people murdered, 514 were committed by Blacks, 2,677 by Whites.
Below are some figures from the
FBI arrest data from 2018 showing the % of various criminal activities committed by Black Americans (who make up 13% of the population):
- Murder: 53%
- Rape: 29%
- Robbery: 55%
- Aggravated Assault: 33%
- Burglary: 29%
More data from WP (a liberal paper that started tracking this stuff in 2015):
- In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people
- 235 were Black Americans, a number that remained stable since 2015.
- The police fatally shot 14 unarmed blacks and 25 unarmed whites as of June 2019. The Post (being the liberal paper that they are) defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase.
- In 2019 there were
7,407 black homicide victims. Those unarmed black victims of police shootings represent less than 0.2% of all African-Americans killed in 2019
I think the evidence is clear. Cops are not systemically targeting blacks in this country, and if there is a disproportionate # of interactions, there seems to be a much more valid reason than race. Sure, pockets of racism exists and there are some bad cops, but how is that different from any other industry/profession?
www.zinnedproject.org
