In 2015, Michael Brown robbed a convenience store and was justifiably shot in self-defense while assaulting the police officer who attempted to confront him.
Despite the facts behind that shooting, which were confirmed by the Obama Justice Department’s investigation, this self-defense killing set off a rash of anti-police activism that the news media have eagerly encouraged. In the hands of leftists, including the Black Lives Matter organization, who care nothing about the truth of incidents like Brown’s killing, the activism continues to this day, frequently in the form of rioting and lawlessness.
To judge their ideology by its fruits, it is evident that BLM activists do not really believe that black lives matter, no matter what they say.
In 2015, there were 6,237 black murder victims in the United States. FBI data released Monday show that this number rose to 9,941 in 2020. That is a 59% increase in just five years. Blacks now comprise 56% of all murder victims, the highest share since 1985.
Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. But extremely strong correlations such as this should be a start for definitively connecting the Left’s drive to abolish police with the rapid deterioration of public safety, especially for blacks.
Five years of anti-police activism did not save black lives. By giving criminal predators free rein, it probably caused thousands more black lives to be snuffed out violently.
The new data also point to a 30% year-over-year increase in murders overall, the largest increase on record. Democrats’ return to a discredited, soft-on-crime, anti-police agenda could not have come at a worse time.
The Left uses the phrase “disparate impact” to describe policies that disproportionately affect one racial group or another. It is clear, then, that the police have a highly beneficial disparate impact on nonwhite communities because, on aggregate, black people are eight times more likely than white people to be murdered.
If you are white, you live in a security bubble that your black friends and acquaintances do not have. If you are black, your safety is now statistically comparable (at 22.5 murders per 100,000 people) to that of someone living in Guatemala, a country so violent that people flee it to come here.
No one should have to live that way in America just so that leftist activists and gentry liberals can feel good about themselves and parade their ersatz virtue to others. There is no virtue in it.
Research and experience show that the way to prevent murders is to police proactively and to dedicate funds and manpower to solving cases so that killing has consequences and killers are brought to justice. This is a proven strategy that, until recently, had brought safety gains for people of all races. Forcing police into retreat, the way activists and left-wing politicians have demonstrably done in Minneapolis and other high-crime cities, encourages murderers.
The new crime data show it is time to cast aside anti-police ideologies and start doing what actually saves lives.
That does not mean ignoring unjustifiable police killings. All citizens should be able to trust the police, no matter their race. But police shootings of unarmed suspects are a much smaller problem than rising murders. The Left has skewed priorities greatly to the detriment and danger of racial minorities.
The Washington Post’s database of police shootings reveals that a grand total of 18 unarmed suspects shot and killed by police in 2020 were black. (There were 60 total police killings of unarmed people, of whom 26 were white). That is too many, but it is dishonest, irresponsible, and dangerous to pretend that, either in number or racial disparity, these 18 killings are more important than the nearly 10,000 blacks murdered in 2020.
An active, well-funded, well-trained, and well-deployed police force is the best guarantor of black lives. Democrats need to drop their vacuous, ideologically driven policy prescriptions on this and rejoin the consensus that once drove down crime rates. They must abandon their police-defunding foolishness before the bad old days of high crime and urban decay return.
