By Heather Mac Donald, WSJ June 2020
A demonstrator kneels before a police line in Washington, May 31.
George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”
Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.
This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.
In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.
The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post 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 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.
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 the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.
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. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.
The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.
The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.
Ms. Mac Donald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the author of “The War on Cops,” (Encounter Books, 2016).
On the path to elito-klepto-socialsim! Only the middle class can save itself from globalization!
@ Bear Klein:
Hi, Bear
I just went off and did offline stuff. The problem had nothing to do with anything on my part. DuckDuckGo simply blocked all references to the NYPD, etc. — probably via a hack. Searches for “new york police” get plenty of hits now; problem fixed at the other end.
I see that not too many people on Israpundit give a ham about this matter, other than you. There’s a good commentary at
https://freepressers.com/washington-expose (Episode 38)
@ Michael S:
Searches for NYPD would work better. Change search words when it does not work. Also Google is getting less usable sometimes as they try and fix search results. Sometimes I use Bing now.
Has everyone left town? Here is an interesting read, from
“Ex-Obama officials embedded in corporations supporting Black Lives Matter radicals” By World Tribune on June 7, 2020. It may open a window into what is behind the systematic, orchestrated dismantlying of US cities:
“{Michael] Froman is a heavyweight Democrat fundraiser who served as U.S. Trade Representative for Obama from 2013-2017… It was revealed that Froman, an executive at Citigroup at the time, literally handpicked Obama’s Cabinet after the Illinois senator won election to the White House in 2008…
“Froman is currently chairman of the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth. According to his corporate bio, Froman’s job with Mastercard involves “advancing the company’s efforts to partner with governments and other institutions to address major societal and economic issues. He and his team drive financial inclusion and inclusive growth efforts and work to develop new businesses key to the company’s strategic growth.”
“…Froman was responsible for writing the failed globalist Trans-Pacific Partnership pact, which was roundly criticized for seeking to radically boost corporate rights over the interests of individual nations. Froman was a featured speaker in November at a Bloomberg New Economy Forum symposium titled “Can Cities Help to Reshape the World Order?” This is a special project dear to the heart of former New York City mayor, billionaire and major presidential candidate flop Michael Bloomberg.
“Cities, in particular, are taking the lead in ushering in an organically evolving new ‘networked’ world order, where NGOs, community activists, private corporations, non-national states, and other stakeholders all collaborate and offer their unique perspective to locate solutions to our common problems…”
— https://www.worldtribune.com/ex-obama-officials-embedded-in-corporations-supporting-black-lives-matter-radicals/
@ Bear Klein:
Odd. I searched for “New York Police” and “New York Police Department” on DuckDuckGo, and got zero results. I did get Breitbart London:
“London police squads were chased through the street and pelted with missiles by crowds yelling “run, piggy” at the Black Lives Matter protest on Sunday.”
I also got Fox News:
“‘Defund the police’ movement catches on with politicians – and steamrolls opposition”
I was also able to search out “Milwaukee Police”. It seems the NYPD has disappeared.
@ Michael S:
If Minneapolis goes ahead with the stupidity of taking down there police department and not replacing the County Sheriff’s Dept. they will have chaos.
Just on this announcement anyone who can will rent a moving van and go the suburbs or elsewhere. Will the homes be sold or will they be vacant and turn into junkie shooting galleries. Will gangs rule the streets?
There will be a lot of people who die in the anarchy. BLM has said this will not happen because they will have armed peace keepers. In other words vigilantes.
I predict that many people will also move out of Los Angeles and New York City.
In NY City 350 cops have been hospitalized, 600 have quit. The Police Commissioner Resigned for greener pastures. DeBlasio has not a clue nor any support among the police.
MINNEAPOLIS SOON TO BE SAFE (?) — POLICE TO BE ABOLISHED
“A veto-proof majority of the Democrat-dominated Minneapolis City Council announced Sunday that it had bowed to Black Lives Matter protesters’ demands to abolish the police, promising the demonstration a “police-free future.”
— https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2020/06/07/minneapolis-city-council-promises-to-abolish-the-police-police-free-future/
This is not a Purim joke — wrong season.
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
Hi Adam – As you say, there can be no fair trial – one possibility that will be met with screams of opposition is that Floyd died of natural causes, his own emotions, Covid-19 with drug stressors. It can’t be discounted. He was not in his 20’s but in his 40’s which for Covid-19 is higher risk, had a long history of activities that had weakened his heart. Until all is known as to whether Floyd and the officer worked tougher as bouncers and other matters, nothing can be decided- and all may be condemned as the hysterical witch trial of Salem of 1692 – which may by accounts be fairer than this trail by mob-media. “Nicodemus saith unto them, (he that came to Jesus by night, being one of them,) Does our law judge any man, before it hear him, and know what he does?” (John 7:50-51)
And that to me seems to be the point. To judge a matter before all the evidence of context is known?
@ Adam Dalgliesh:
Hi, Adam
This Milwaukee policeman tells it as it is:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1267474764442013702
I know he’s speaking the truth, because I lived in a Milwaukee inner city neighborhood, when we had a homicide in the city every other day. At that time, 90% of the perpetrators and victims were black.
A very valuable and informative article.
Everyone assumes that the four officers in the Minnesota incident are guilty, simply because of a few video clips of the deceased individual’s death, and the hysterical, accusatory commentary on them by the press. There has been a universal rush to judgment by politicians and journalists on the basis of this very biased and incomplete information. There has been nothing remotely like a thorough and impartial investigation of the incident.
A fair trial of the officers is now impossible. That the Minnesota attorney general lead investogator is Keith Ellison, a Muslim and black nationalist who was once
an admirer of Louis Farakhan, makes their chances of receiving a fair trial almost nil. And in the unlikely event that they are acquitted, they will be retried for the same offense following “protest” riots, and convicted–in violation of their rights under the Fifth Amendment, which forbids double jeopardy for defendants. That is what happened to the four police officers who were framed in the Rodney King case.
That the entire political and journalistic establishments support black American terrorists and racists who use these incidents to murder, loot and burn, is truly a horrific, insane injustice. It threatens the very survivial of my country, since no country can survive for long without law and order, and the police cannot be expected to enforce the law if they risk being charged with murder and thrown in jail for doing so.