We should be angry about the death of George Floyd. It’s on video. It’s ghastly. And it was totally avoidable. Floyd did not have to die at the hands of the Minneapolis Police, especially over the allegation that he used fake currency. That was the reason why he was arrested. He died because when he was placed under arrested, handcuffed, and laid prone to the ground, Officer Derek Chauvin kept his knee on the back of his neck for nearly ten minutes. It killed him. Chauvin was rightfully fired and charged with second-degree murder. The three other officers involved also had their employment with the police department severed and were charged with aiding and abetting murder. Floyd was telling officers he couldn’t breathe. They ignored him.
The protests and anger that ensued are justifiable. How this devolved into rioting, looting, vandalism, and arson is not. The country was united in outrage over Floyd’s death, even members of law enforcement said Chauvin’s actions and that of the Minneapolis Police were ridiculous. They were; it was a prime example of excessive force. But then the rioting happened. It’s engulfed the nation. The cities are burning and there was even talk of President Trump invoking the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to use the military to quell the mob. Bush 41 invoked that in 1992 to get Los Angeles under control. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen here. Yet, for Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), he said the troops should be sent in, which sent the Left, especially the “woke” brigade of activists who write for the publication, into a frothed-induced tantrum. Remember, this is the 'bad words are violence' crowd. Young, stupid, coddled, and think constitutional right to free speech is an obstacle to change.
Well, if they thought Cotton’s op-ed, which was innocuous was triggering, they better not read Heather MacDonald’s op-ed in The Wall Street Journal about the myth of systemic police racism, which is grounded in multiple studies, which she cites. As the country burns, there’s also this heinous resurrection of a narrative in which all cops are racist, and all police departments must be defunded and abolished. This is nonsense, and it’s where this whole Black Lives Matter movement goes off the hinges. To make this a top issue, especially in an election year, is just to invite disaster to the Democratic Party. No one who isn’t a clown thinks this is a good idea. Heck, even some Vox writers thought this was insane. If words are violence to these lefties, and they do think this way, then this op-ed is bound to cause a Chernobyl-style meltdown with these folks. Cotton’s op-ed was Sesame Street compared to this:
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.
[…]
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.
It's this false narrative that has led to police being assaulted, shot at, and even killed. We see it with the George Floyd riots right now. Cops are being shot, run over by cars, and assaulted on the streets trying to bring some order to the situation. MacDonald, of course, adds that former Officer Chauvin should be held accountable, but the course the Left wants is anarchy. Gee—it sounds like the philosophy of some of the looters and vandals causing chaos out there, which the liberal media said is really the work of neo-Nazis. That would be another false narrative.
I’m pro-law and order. I love our police. But that also means calling out bad cops. And Minneapolis, and the surrounding areas, appear to have a lot of them. This must be fixed, but nothing can change when rioters burn, loot, and destroy cities with impunity and target police officers. Progress on police reform can be discussed. It’ll be a long discussion. It’ll be intense for sure, but none of that can happen until we put this mob down.
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