As an economist who has studied racial discrimination, I’ve begun to look at these deaths from a different angle. There is ample statistical evidence of large and persistent racial bias in other areas — from labor markets to online retail markets. So I expected that police prejudice would be a major factor in accounting for the killings of African-Americans. But when I looked at the numbers, that’s not exactly what I found.
I’m not saying that the police in these specific cases are free of racial bias. I can’t answer that question. But what the data does suggest is that eliminating the biases of all police officers would do little to materially reduce the total number of African-American killings. Police bias may well be a significant problem, but in accounting for why some of these encounters turn into killings, it is swamped by other, bigger problems that plague our society, our economy and our criminal justice system.
To understand how this can be, let us start with the statistics on police killings. According to the F.B.I.’s Supplementary Homicide Report, 31.8 percent of people shot by the police were African-American, a proportion more than two and a half times the 13.2 percent of African-Americans in the general population.
* The actual percentage of murders committed by blacks is probably higher than the reported 52% by a fairly substantial margin.
About a third of the murders in the US are not cleared. The unsolved homicides are disproportionately urban and black, and probably committed by other blacks. In Chicago no suspect is arrested in two thirds of the homicides. It’s about the same in Detroit and Atlanta and New Orleans, all high bodycount cities that collectively have a significant effect of the nationwide statistics. The unsolved homicides are mostly the result of anonymous black urban street violence. In Chicago 77% of the victims are black, and it’s a good bet that most of the perps who killed them but whose race is unknown are also black. In contrast about 4% of the victims are white.
I suspect the actual percentage of murders committed by blacks nationwide is closer to 60%, maybe more.
* A “bad” shooting of a black guy in an urban area means the cop’s employer is out about about $5 million in a civil suit. Places with rowdier whites usually don’t have juries who will soak a city over a police shooting like this, so there is much less economic incentive to discourage police from opening fire.
As a further disincentive, shooting a black guy will often become a political headache in a way that shooting a white will not. You won’t have hundreds of people protesting, calling for you to be fired and jailed, and maybe vandalizing your house.
A couple years ago some tests showed that cops are less likely to shoot blacks all other things being equal.
Urban blacks have limited political capital, and they have stupidly but successfully used much of it to make police marginally less likely to draw their guns and fire in encounters with young black males.
* The BLM tards that held the Baltimore City Council hostage this week made a list of 19 demands including millions in handouts and carte blanche to commit “minor crimes”- not just misdemeanors but thefts as well. One of their state principles said “human life is always more important than property.”
I have heard this argument so many times from the hand wringing blacks that, “He just stole some jewelry, he didn’t deserve to lose his life over it.”
Uh, yeah, probably not, but when he decided to fight the cop that was trying to arrest him, he sealed his own fate.
“Well that cop should have just let him run off when he started to run/fight.”
This is a fundamental disagreement in how civilization should be structured. Whites see law-breaking and theft as always wrong and always deserving punishment from authorities. Blacks see theft as something everyone does- sometimes you get robbed and sometimes you get away with the loot. It’s yin and yang, take the good with the bad- no need for cops.
This is why both sides should be for separatism. Blacks will never be a majority in this country, therefore their utopian Detroit dreams will very rarely come to fruition. However, this particular brand of lawlessness is so potently detrimental to urban living (from a white perspective) that whites will always flee and dislike it. No compromise will make either side happy. Separation appears to be the only answer.
* A complete separation would bring out the truth about race. It would finally reveal how blacks would deal with the matter of justice and policing when left to their own devices. If a black was shot by a cop, it would be a black cop. If he were handed a tough sentence by a judge, it would be a black judge, black prosecutor, black prison authorities dealing with him when he’s incarcerated. It would soon be revealed that the administration of justice by whites, far from being harsh on blacks, actually had a moderating influence.
* Blacks violently offend at many, many times the multiple of whites. This has been well known for centuries. It is a pattern repeated in just about every society studied at every historic time period studied. I offer no explanations, but that’s just the way it is.
* Apartheid in South Africa appears to have been an approach based on that point of view; but, however satisfactory it may have been, it could not survive the opposition from other Western nations operating under the theology of Liberalism.
Section 8 housing is the weapon employed by American liberals to destroy the same kind of separation of the races otherwise achievable by White flight.
White people may find themselves with nowhere else to run to, and sooner rather than later.
* Both the NYT article and your comment focus on percentages, but neither cites an absolute number of persons killed by cops. Wouldn’t it help to know that in evaluating the problem? I tried Googling and came up with a total of 623 for 2014, the last complete year.
I don’t want to minimize the problem, but 623 does not sound like a terribly large number in a nation of more than 320 million people. I would venture to say that a large proportion of those 623 killings by cops involved criminals involved in serious crimes and very few involved people like Eric Gardner up in NYC or the 12-year old in Cleveland who was waving a plastic toy gun which looked awfully real. I decided to look up my old home town, Washington, D.C., and here is what Wikipedia says: “Washington was often described as the “murder capital” of the United States during the early 1990s.[107] The number of murders peaked in 1991 at 479, but the level of violence then began to decline significantly.[108] By 2012, Washington’s annual murder count dropped to 88, the lowest total since 1961;[109] though the number of homicides has since risen each year to over 100 in 2015.” For some reason, I couldn’t quickly locate a number of murders nation-wide.
* Yes, yet again more ink and human capital is wasted trying to intellectualize around the obvious genetic differences. It is a staple of the times – especially the progressive cause. Equality of outcome is the goal but one that proves more impossible with each passing year.
The progressive goal is to question and eradicate those institutions of society that they perceive to be racist/sexist/etc by arbitrary measures of “disparate impact” or “unequal outcome.” They concoct more convoluted theories with each passing moment to explain our differences as being the result of a rotten system or of individuals bent on the discrimination.
But they fail, and forever will, because they address the problems without understanding the root causes. It will never end and the problems that plague society will never be solved by their endless purges and constant decimation of the pillars that support our country. It will not end until they have laid bare the entire structure of the country, and in the process destroyed what makes America great.
* Michael Brown was only one perpetrator in that incident.
Three other African-Americans — Dorian Johnson, Piaget Crenshaw and Tiffany Mitchell — aggravated the situation by telling the mass media repeatedly that they saw Brown standing still, raising his hands and trying to surrender when he was shot dead.
None of those three saw the incident’s final gunshots. The hands-up yarn that those three told the mass media was a deliberate and malicious lie defaming Wilson — because he is a police officer and because he is White.
And then their lies were supported by other, even worse liars in the neighborhood. The latter said they saw Michael Brown down on his knees and pleading for his life, when Wilson shot him to death. Some said even that they saw Brown lying motionless on the street when Wilson approached his motionless body and fired the final gunshots.
None of us should ever forget how all our country’s Scientific Progressives supported all those liars in Ferguson. The Scientific Progressives furiously denounced as racists anybody who dared to express any skepticism about the liars.
On the other hand, White police officer Wilson ultimately was exonerated by the grand jury because many African-American and bi-racial real witnesses did tell the truth courageously. Even Eric Holder’s US Justice Department was compelled to acknowledge their courage.
* After ‘hate speech’ is banned, what will be next?
‘Disdain speech’?
Followed by
‘Dislike speech’?
Then, ‘ambivalent speech’? And then ‘unenthusiastic (about PC) speech’?
* But blacks tend to screw up spectacularly more than whites do across a wide range of fraught situations so the interesting question is why blacks don’t make up 50% rather than 30% of homicides by cops the way blacks make up 50% of homicide offenders?
One guess is that the total of whites getting shot by cops is inflated by a higher white propensity to decide to go out via suicide-by-cop. That was my impression from reading about a few thousand killings in L.A. County in Jill Leovy’s L.A. Times Homicide Blog, but I didn’t try to count it up.
One way to check that it to look at ages of blacks v. whites shot by cops. I think the white ages tend to be older, while blacks get shot a lot by cops at young ages whey they are full of life but not so much when they are older and tired of living.
