Powerline Asks … Are Blacks Disproportionately Involved In Police Shootings?

MEDIA BIAS: WHEN YOU CAN’T TRUST THE WORDS, LOOK AT THE NUMBERS …

When you can’t trust the words of a dishonest agenda driven media, pandering Democrats and an ideologue like President Barack Obama, look to the new media to do the number crunching and analysis to report of whether Blacks are being targeted by the police as the MSM would like you to believe. The folks at Powerline ask the question … . Are Blacks disproportionately involved in Police shootings? To listen to the liberal MSM one would say of course, they are reporting it all the time, it must be true. And if you were a lazy, apathetic non-caring info bot, you would be wrong. Check out the statistics and analysis below from Powerline and learn something, rather than just believe what the MSM wants you to hear.

Its not just as simple as 258 blacks represent 26% of the total number of med shot and killed by law enforcement, which is about double the percentage of blacks in the American population and thus the police must be targeting blacks. Sorry WAPO, you might want to dig a little deeper into the numbers and use other qualifiers like blacks have an unusually high rate of contact with the police, both as victims and as perpetrators.

But when the MSM reports white cops killing all blacks as an unarmed and bad shooting, even when the facts state otherwise and forget the fact that believe it or not, some of the police officers involved in the shootings are Hispanic and dare I say it, black. There is a bad element in every profession, teachers, doctors, politicians and yes, police. But let’s take the false narrative out of the equation. It’s a terrible thing when any innocent person is killed, All Lives Matter.

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.)

The 258 blacks represent 26% of the total. That is about double the percentage of blacks in the American population. Is that prima facie evidence of racism on the part of law enforcement? Of course not. It is common knowledge that blacks have an unusually high rate of contact with the police, both as victims and as perpetrators. In 2012-2013, the Department of Justice found that blacks were the perpetrators of 24% of all violent crimes where the race of the perpetrator was known (in 7.8% of violent crimes, it was unknown).

So the percentage of blacks fatally shot by police officers (26%) is almost exactly equal to the percentage of blacks committing violent crimes (24%). Indeed, given that the black homicide rate is around eight times the white rate, it is surprising that the portion of blacks fatally shot by policemen is not higher.

From Instapundit: Heather Mac Donald has a lot more on this in her new book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. Remember that all the noise about this is just a cynical effort to boost black turnout in November. They create a new cause celebre the summer before every election.