Systemic Police Racism Is a Fiction

Systemic Police Racism Is a Fiction

Systemic police racism is a fiction despite the recent nationwide protests and the incessant liberal narrative to the contrary. Multiple studies – including several by black academicians who expected to find otherwise – using data collected around the country have repeatedly shown otherwise.

George Floyd’s murder was a tragedy and inexcusable. But importantly, it was an exception. His fatal encounter with Derek Chauvin was a rarity among the 375 million annual encounters that police have with civilians. The following facts show a sharp contrast with recent headlines and protests.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people almost all of whom were armed. Of these, 235 were African-Americans, about the same percentage as in the previous five years.

Police shootings are proportional to the number of armed and violent suspects they encounter, yet the number of black victims is less than the black crime rate would predict.

Although they are 13 percent of the population, African-Americans made up 53 percent of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and committed about 60 percent of robberies.

Police killed nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015.

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 one-tenth of one percent of all African-Americans murdered in 2019.

Over this past Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Over the following May 30-June 1 weekend, 80 people were shot, 21 fatally; most of the victims were black.

As unpleasant as these facts are, they are ignored by the liberal media and hence unknown to most of the public.

The question of the day: Does this vastly disproportionate crime rate inevitably lead to systemic police racism? In a word, no.

A 2015 Obama 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.

Roland Fryer, an African-American Harvard professor, authored a 2017 paper loaded with facts and figures on racial differences in police use of force. To his surprise, he found no evidence of bias in police shootings. His study completely undercuts the liberal mantra of systemic police racism.

The latest rebuttal to the racist police storyline was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers found that the more frequent 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. They concluded that there is “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police.”

So, what about Derek Chauvin, the officer who murdered George Floyd? The answer of course is that there are indeed racist police officers just as there are racists in varying degrees in all professions and in all ethnic and racial groups.

But police officers are different as I stated in a previous column. Police officers represent the government and must be held to a higher standard. When they violate that standard, especially when that violation results in a needless loss of life, they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Egged on by the liberal media, elected officials need to be seen doing something. Often they announce an investigation when a police officer has killed an unarmed African-American. Turns out that’s a bad idea that has cost many African-American lives.

Harvard’s Fryer reviewed over two dozen federal and state investigations that were initiated following fatal incidents that had gone viral. He discovered that police activity declined and violent crime jumped.

The investigations themselves weren’t the problem but if they started following a widely-publicized incident, Fryer said “when I look at cities in which the investigation was preceded by a viral event, homicide goes up considerably. Total crime goes up considerably.”

What happens is police effectively pull back. They don’t stop doing their jobs, but they become less proactive and curb their interactions with civilians. Fryer said that nationwide, “my estimates show that we lost a thousand more lives, most of them black as well, because of an increase in homicides.”

Bottom line: when police pull back, black communities are hit hardest. Minneapolis may be facing a crime wave especially if it falls for the latest liberal bad idea du jour, defunding its police department.

Even one police killing of an unarmed suspect is one too many. Is there a way to spot trouble before it comes?

Kyle Rozema and Max Schanzenbach, writing in the Journal of the American Economic Society, offer a better approach to rooting out bad apples in the police force. Analyzing Chicago data, they recommend paying much more attention to citizen complaints that often identify problem officers.

Citizen complaints are often brushed aside by city administrations and police unions in disciplinary hearings. In my opinion, it’s time to get citizen complaints out of police union arbitration and into the courts.

Systemic police racism just ain’t so. A few horrendous, high-profile cases hyped by the liberal media to promote black victimhood, have done a disservice to police, to African-Americans, and to the public.

Race relations in this country should and can improve, but claiming African-Americans are victims of systemic police racism is not the place to start.

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