A new groundbreaking study soundly dispels some myths and tropes about racial disparities in police shootings. If you haven’t heard about it, you probably don’t peruse academic research findings in journals entitled Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Or maybe because the study fails to support the false narrative that has been used for partisan political advantage by demagogues like Al Sharpton and a number of Democratic presidential candidates, it hasn’t been shared as widely as it should be.
Opportunistic racial-arsonists like Sharpton aside, it has become de rigueur where two or more #Resistance Democrats gather to assail President Trump and his party by hyping the race chasm. It’s codswallop. Of course, our evolution as a nascent democracy that lives up to its founding ideals hasn’t occurred quickly enough for some predictable detractors. These critics remain supremely confident that our country is rife with white, racist cops that hunt young, unarmed African American males for sport. After all, that’s all we see on the news.
Researchers from the University of Maryland and Michigan State University released their report on June 24, laying out the case that, as suspected, disparities in patterns of offending, and not skin color, played a major role in fatal officer-involved shootings. Their study succeeded in knocking down the trope that claimed discrimination and implicit biases by white officers were the cause of white officers killing black civilians.
The coup de grâce, which should sound the death knell for the police-are-racist argument spouted by race-hustlers like Sharpton, and adopted by some of the Democratic candidates, should be delivered by this defining line from the researchers:
Sadly, this isn’t something the Left will ever have the political courage to acknowledge.
This isn’t the first study on this issue (and it won’t be the last). Tackling the inaccurate hyperbole and refuting the racist police myth is exactly what a black, Harvard-tenured economist, Roland G. Fryer, Jr., found in a 2016 study entitled, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” In a May 2018 follow-up to his study, “Reconciling Results on Racial Differences in Police Shootings,” Fryer acknowledges that “the conclusions one can draw about racial bias are fraught with difficulty” but that “the most granular data suggest that there is no bias in police shootings.” He then warns that the data is far from a representative sampling of police departments and is bereft of experimental variation. As an academic, he should be wary of his research conditions. Research methodology can be a most tricky pursuit. But available numbers can also be difficult to ignore.
The FBI, in my estimation, took far too long to accept ownership as the tracking authority for officer-involved-shootings, announcing their intentions in November of last year, following a steady and unrelenting national outcry for them to do the same. However, the glitch in the process is that they have no means to compel individual police departments to report relevant data, and have yet to release any results of their collection efforts.
This leaves the Washington Post as the only available source since they began tracking these incidents in 2015. The data related to “unarmed” individuals shot by police, broken down by race metric, simply doesn’t comport with the accepted trope.
Some will argue that African Americans only comprise 13.4% of the population, rendering their numbers a significant overrepresentation. But this fails to account for the disproportionate amount of crime committed by African Americans, particularly black males. Black males are responsible for some 52% of all murders, while representing approximately 6% of the population. Thus, they are naturally subjected to more interactions with police.
When you track law enforcement line of duty deaths between 2004 and 2013, 2,269 law enforcement officers were killed by 2,896 assailant-offenders. Broken down along racial lines, 52% of the offenders were white and 41% were black. Again, when compared to population percentages, blacks are disproportionately represented.
Or, as criminologist Heather Mac Donald pointed out in 2017 for City Journal, “contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.”
So why is the inaccurate trope about racist police so persistent and so frequently unchallenged when offered as a truism? The media undeniably plays a role. News reports of a white guy getting roughed up for resisting arrest in Kentucky aren’t nearly as “useful” as an urban black male videotaped being manhandled by cops after he refuses to comply with lawful commands during an arrest.
Lest anyone immediately conclude that I am not sympathetic to our nation’s imperfect history and systemic mistreatment of its African American citizenry, or that I am refusing to acknowledge the policing profession’s complicated history, as well, I wrote about all that here.
James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John’s University.
