Heather Mac Donald on Protests Following George Floyd's Killing

Heather Mac Donald talked about policing in the U.S. and the protests following the death of George Floyd.

[www.c-span.org]

This whole crapload of violence and destruction by Thugs is based on another Lie Of The Left - "Systemic Racism" and "Police Bias" - just like The Ferguson "Hands Up; Don't Shoot" False Narrative that spawned the Evil BLM.

But everybody's scared to say the truth - Blacks get arrested more and go to prison more because Blacks commit more Crime! Duh!

The Myth of Systemic Police Racism

Hold officers accountable who use excessive force. But there’s no evidence of widespread racial bias.

[archive.is]

George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”

Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.

This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. 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 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.

The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently 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. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.

A 2015 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. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.

The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.

Tucker Carlson and Heather MacDonald

Heather Mac Donald: America Is Being Ripped Apart By Lies (of The Left)

[www.realclearpolitics.com]

"City Journal" editor and author of "The War on Cops" Heather Mac Donald joined FNC's Tucker Carlson to discuss the (Lib) narrative that there is a huge wave of police murdering unarmed black people.

TUCKER CARLSON: Are African-Americans being "hunted," as Joy Reid recklessly claimed on MSNBC recently? Or is something else happening? Is our nation being ripped apart by a total and complete lie, a provable lie, a lie used by cynical media manipulators and unscrupulous politicians who understand that racial strife and race hatred is their path to power -- even if it destroys the country. You have the facts now and you can decide what's really going on.

Heather Mac Donald is the author of the book "The War on Cops," she joins us tonight. Heather, you wrote a book on this end because so much is at stake and because people have died and are dying in the country is being ripped apart, we want to be sure that we have these numbers right. We bow to you, someone who just wrote a book on this, are the numbers we just read correct and what do you make of them?

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Absolutely they are correct, Tucker. This is a narrative that is both false and dangerous. In 2015 and 2016, when we went through what now is in retrospect a minimal amount of civil unrest and riots throughout the country, 2,000 additional black males were killed because cops backed off of policing. Right now, we are already seeing crime going to the roof, we've seen the assassinations of cops, and I fear we're going to see more.

And who are the people who are going to be hurt when these cops back off, if we defund cops, defund the cops. The delegitimization of them is so great, the hatred being arrested when they arrest gang bangers, gun toters, people who have just shot innocent children in the city, the hatred being directed at officers is extraordinary. Who is going be hurt? The thousands of law and abiding residents in inner-city neighborhoods, people like a cancer amputee in the Bronx who told me, "please, Jesus, send more police," because the only time she feels safe to go into her building lobby is when the cops are there because it's otherwise colonized by trespassing youth selling drugs and smoking weed. There was an elderly lady in the 41st precinct of the South Bronx who stood up in the middle of the community meeting and said, how lovely when we see the police, they are my friends. These are the voices that the media deliberately silences because they completely undermine their phony narrative about systemic police racism and white supremacy in this country.

TUCKER CARLSON: I mean, phony doesn't begin to scratch the surface, I would say. We are being told by demagogues on television, officeholders, people who run the country are telling us genocide is occurring, there is a never-ending wave of racist attacks on African-Americans by police officers in which many are dying. We came up with ten in 2019, how can they say something like that? When there are no facts to support it.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: The irony is it is The Washington Post's own database collects the statistics, but "The Washington Post" doesn't write that. Here's another interesting fact, a police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be murdered by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be murdered by a cop, or killed by a cop. So there are so many facts about crime, about policing. We should not racially profile blacks for any crime rates, we should also not racially profile cops for one absolutely horrific arrest. The cops desperately want more tactical training, they want more help in de-escalating and controlling stress but they are not systemically biased.

TUCKER CARLSON: We need to decelerate, de-escalate the rhetoric here because this is actually threatening the country.