Despite the lack of evidence that there is an increase in cops shooting blacks, let alone shooting blacks unlawfully, a few recent killings of blacks by cops has spawned the so-called Black Lives Matter movement. But over the past 45 years, per the Centers for Disease Control, police killings of blacks are down 75 percent. What are on the increase, year-to-year, are cop killings.
The No. 1 preventable cause of death of young black males is homicide -- usually at the hands of other blacks. The primary cause of preventable death among young white males is auto accidents.
Predictably, the Democratic National Committee recently adopted a "black lives matter" resolution. It promotes the phony narrative that blacks remain victims of racism. If Democrats truly want to help, they would rethink their welfare state policies that have decimated black families. In 1950, only 18 percent of blacks were born outside of wedlock. Today, that number is over 70 percent.
Left-wing-driven welfare state policies have incentivized women into marrying the government, and men into abandoning their financial and moral responsibility. Obama once said a kid growing up without a father is 20 times more likely to end up in jail.
Where is the Black Lives Matter movement on that?
In Chicago alone, an average of 35 to 40 people are killed each month, most of them black, almost all by the hands of other blacks. And most of the cases are unsolved! Nationally, in 2013, 90 percent of black homicide victims were murdered by other blacks.
Where is the Black Lives Matter movement on that?
Peter Moskos, associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice at the City University of New York, extrapolated figures between May 2013 and April 2015 from the website Killed by Police -- although he noted that 25 percent of the website's data, which is drawn largely from news reports, failed to show the race of the person killed.
Based on the site's data, Moskos found that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic and 2 percent were Asian and other races. "The data doesn't indicate which shootings are justified (the vast majority) and which are cold-blooded murder (not many, but some)," Moskos wrote on his blog. "And maybe that would vary by race. I don't know, but I doubt it."
Adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown of the U.S. population, he said black men are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. But also adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones.
"If one adjusts for the racial disparity in the homicide rate or the rate at which police are feloniously killed, whites are actually more likely to be killed by police than blacks," wrote Moskos. "Adjusted for the homicide rate, whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks (to) die at the hands of police. Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police."
Moskos speculates as to an explanation: "1) cops in more minority cities face more political fallout when they shoot, and thus receive better training and are less inclined to shoot, and 2) since cops in more dangerous neighborhoods are more used to danger; so other things being equal (though they rarely are), police in high-crime minority areas are less afraid and thus less likely to shoot."
Year to year, murders in many cities are up. As always, many factors affect the crime rate. But the "Ferguson effect," causing officers to be less proactive, appears to be one of them. Crime is up in places like Baltimore, New York City and Camden, New Jersey, as officers -- feeling under siege and falsely accused of racial profiling -- have pulled back and arrests are down. NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos were literally executed -- gunned down while sitting in a police cruiser -- by a black man who wrote on Facebook about his anger over the shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.
A piece about Baltimore officers in The Atlantic captures the mood of the city's cops: "The (Fraternal Order of Police) offers a bleaker, though related, rationale for the decrease in arrests: Officers are afraid, its leader says. On the one hand, they're beset by hostile citizens who carefully monitor every arrest, crowding around officers who are just trying to do their jobs and capturing the detentions on camera, lest they turn into another Freddie Gray situation. On the other hand, police are also afraid a prosecutor will haul them in front of a jury. ... They say that they don't know when they might be charged with a crime, just for doing their jobs."
Nice work, Black Lives Matter, nice work.