Lies from the Highest Levels Fueled the Dallas Fire

[Draggingtree]

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Robert C. J. Parry / July 8, 2016 / 20 COMMENTS

Less than three months after President Obama first took office, a rapist shot and killed four Oakland, CA police officers. The President sent a letter to their funeral. Eighteen months into his second term, a robbery suspect was killed after beating and trying to disarm a Missouri police officer. The President sent an entourage to the suspect’s funeral.

 

Just a few weeks after the Oakland tragedy, the President hosted his infamous “beer summit.” That hastily concocted “teachable moment” came after he described a Massachusetts police officer as “acting stupidly” while investigating a possible burglary. If you don’t recall, the officer’s error was insisting on getting identification from a man at a house that was reported as being burglarized. The man happened to be a black professor, Henry Louis Gates, who inflamed a simple encounter into baseless racial animosity by steadfastly refusing to simply identify himself. Unfortunately, the teachable moment taught the President nothing about the nuance and consistent uncertainty of policing.

[Valin]

Are Blacks Disproportionately Involved In Police Shootings?
John Hinderaker
July 9, 2016

Listening to liberals like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, you would think that enormous numbers of black men are being gunned down by police officers. When the issue is debated, many take it for granted that a vastly disproportionate number of blacks are involved in police shootings–in fact, if you didn’t know better, you might think that only blacks are ever shot by policemen.

The numbers tell a different story. Like all statistics, they bounce around from year to year, but let’s go with the Washington Post’s study of police shootings in 2015. The Post found that 990 people, almost all of them men, were shot and killed by law enforcement last year. Before you start calling them victims, however, note that the Post also found that in three-quarters of these incidents, police were defending either themselves or someone else who was, at that moment, under attack. That leaves around 250 cases that were not obvious self-defense or defense of a third person. That doesn’t mean, of course, that those shootings were unjustified.

 

What was the racial breakdown of those who were shot by police in 2015? The largest number, 494, almost exactly half, were white. 258 were black, 172 were Hispanic, and the remaining 66 were either “other” or unknown. (Interestingly, Asians are rarely shot by police officers.)

 

(Snip)

 

In short, the data on police shootings show that blacks are involved in such incidents just about exactly as often as one would expect, given their violent crime rate. Slicing and dicing the numbers is interesting, but doesn’t generate any obviously relevant correlations that would change that finding. Which means that, unless someone can make a compelling argument based on the data, which we have not yet seen, the Black Lives Matter movement is founded on a lie.