Instead of Looking at The Real Reasons for Police Shootings, the Democrat-Media Complex Chooses to Gaslight the Public

James Varney and Abigail Degnan write that when you study police shootings, you'll tend to find a disproportionate number of black men being shot.

Not because of racism.

But because black men commit a disproportionate amount of crime.

The Democrat-Media Complex absolutely will not admit that basic fact, and will in fact punish anyone who mentions it.

Leaving the only possible reason for a disproportionate amount of black men being shot by police "Because racism."

Numerous professional criminologists told RealClearInvestigations that the problem isn't racist or trigger-happy police officers. Instead, a handful of intertwined factors are at work: the almost immutable math of crime and demographics; media sensationalism; distorted public perceptions about race and guns; and the inability of inertia-bound police departments to adapt in ways to make a difference.

The first lie pushed by the Regime is that there are a huge number of bad shootings. In fact, 0.002% of police interactions with civilians result in lethal gunfire.

This is such a tiny number that it's hard to even talk about statistics at this level.

...

What's more, police aren't exaggerating the lethal threats they face. In 2023, the Washington Post database showed 83% of people killed by police bullets were armed -- 62% with a gun and another 15% with a knife -- percentages that criminologists said have held steady over the years. In other cases, officers are facing potentially lethal situations with vehicles, or even deranged people charging them with swords, hatchets, or garden tools.

-- Second, media coverage distorts the circumstances of most fatal police shootings. Several criminal justice professors stressed that the overwhelming majority of lethal shootings by police involve clear justification. Nevertheless, the media and its audience tend to focus on those deaths where there is no clear justification, or where the claim of justification appears dubious.

If the media wanted to report reality accurately -- which we know they don't -- they'd also report all the well-justified shootings.

(But of course they take well-justified shootings and claim they're unjustified, as we're currently seeing with the Dexter Reed shooting.)

All of the media's attention is on what cops did wrong to wind up in a shooting incident.

They never bother to ask: What did the suspect do wrong to wind up in a shooting incident?

You know -- like resisting arrest, grabbing a cop's gun or taser, etc.

The fatal Reed shooting is an illustration. Overlooked by many in the furor over the heavy fire poured out by Chicago Police Department officers -- 96 shots -- is the fact Reed deliberately disobeyed repeated orders from increasingly nervous police officers, then opened fire and wounded one of them, precipitating the bloody ending.

And then there is the fact you're never allowed to mention: Black men commit more crime than any other group and therefore we should not be surprised to find that black men are being arrested at higher rates than any other group, or are involved in more police-involved shootings than any other group.

In 2023, The Guardian newspaper published a dataset -- Mapping Police Violence -- including not just shootings but all lethal encounters involving police. It concludes that black people "were killed at a rate 2.6 times higher than white people."

But such raw numbers ignore the fact that blacks are more likely to commit crimes. In a seminal study of Houston police that echoes other findings, Roland Fryer, a black economist at Harvard University, reported, "On the most extreme use of force -- officer-involved shootings -- we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account." Once the number of police encounters was factored in, Fryer found, police were markedly less likely to shoot at blacks and Hispanics than at whites. After publishing his paper -- whose conclusions he found so surprising that he ran the numbers twice -- Fryer said, "all hell broke loose." He told Bari Weiss of the Free Press, "I had colleagues take me to the side and say, 'Don't publish this. You'll ruin your career.'"

The article then looks at the possibility that better training could reduce the number of shooting incidents.

But I don't buy this:

Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) is one who believes "business as usual" can change. At its core, this involves abandoning the ancient mantra of cops beginning a shift -- get home safely -- to "the sanctity of human life." Wexler said it will be "much more challenging" to shift the numbers on the 60% of lethal shootings that involve a suspect with a gun, "but with the other 40%, that's where I believe we can make a difference."

"Instead of 'get home safe' we should be thinking, 'everyone gets home alive' -- arrested, in custody, but alive," he told RCI.

So you're saying that police should adopt the mentality that it doesn't matter so much if they themselves survive the shift? That it's just as important that violent arrestees survive too?

I don't see many police adopting this "my life is less valuable than this violent criminal's life" mentality.

I think we could slash the number of police shootings if the media would propagate the rule that police orders should be respected during an arrest, and any problems with the arrest should be sorted out later in front of judge, instead of a perp deciding "I'm not going to be arrested today because I'm a Bad M*****f*****." I think that establishing that resisting arrest is itself a crime and that people shouldn't do it would do a lot more to reduce officer-involved shooting than telling cops "Some nights you're just going to have to eat a bullet, because it's the perp's life that matters."

Somewhat related:

The media is determined to take all facts and bend them to fit their narratives.

And they're doing this to stoke war, strife, and revolution.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 06:20 PM

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