Do we have a racist cop issue in the United States? Based on the liberal media coverage, you’d think that there’s been an ongoing surreptitious and odious war against communities of color. Is the system racist? Attorney General William Barr said last week that there was explicit distrust among black Americans regarding our criminal justice system, which must change. He wants reform. That’s fine. There are multiple areas of reform that should be debated, especially regarding drug laws, mandatory sentencing, and nonviolent offenders. Yet, when it comes to policing and these tragic incidents where someone is shot and killed, the evidence has yet to bear out of any racist undertones. Multiple studies from academia to the Department of Justice under Obama has yet to yield a scintilla of evidence with regards to the talking points peddled by the far-left and Black Lives Matter about law enforcement.
Right now, we’re on a defund the police kick, which has the end goal of abolishing all law enforcement from our society. It’s insane. It’s not popular. And it will be a campaign issue—the ascendant left-wingers are slowly eating away the Old Guard in both the Democratic Party leadership structures, the base, and the various cultural institutions that have long been dominated by liberals. On the latter, you saw how The New York Times crumbled to the will of these unhinged woke operatives.
The publication ran an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), who argued that the military should be deployed to restore law and order in the wake of the unrest unleashed by the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police on May 25. Progressive reporters revolted, said the op-ed put black lives in danger (total nonsense), and forced the editorial page editor to resign. The ‘words are violence’ crowd is slowly taking over. And they’re totally insane.
But back to the Left's war on cops, we don’t have a racist law enforcement problem, but perception has overtaken reality on this issue. The evidence doesn’t support any aspect of the far-left’s positions on policing and race relations. None of it (via Inside Sources) [emphasis mine]:
Since 2015, The Washington Post has maintained a comprehensive database of fatal police shootings. The Post database shows that fatal shootings by police have run steadily at around 1,000 per year since 2015: 995 (2015); 963 (2016); 987 (2017); 998 (2018); and 1,004 (2019).
About twice as many white people as black people are killed by police. “In fact, in about 75 percent of police shootings, the decedent is not black,” says Andrew McCarthy, a columnist with the National Review.
[…]
While the current national narrative is that black Americans are, as some Black Lives Matter advocates claim, being “targeted” by police, Rafael Mangual, deputy director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute, says that view is backward.
“I think it is certainly fair to say that police have had a target on their backs for some time,” he told InsideSources.
“I believe the number is that police officers are eighteen and a half times more likely to be killed by black males than unarmed black males are to be killed by police officers,” he said. “And studies have shown that the odds of a black man being killed in police custody are about one in 1,000.
“And I think that the people holding the microscope — the special interests pushing for criminal justice reform — have found success in casting nuance and context aside to make police out to be this violent cog in a racially oppressive criminal justice system and I think it’s really problematic,” Mangual said.
According to The Washington Post database, there were nine cases in the United States last year in which unarmed African Americans were fatally shot by the police. Meanwhile, 48 police officers were murdered in 2019 in felonious assaults, according to FBI data.
The Post also notes that the number of citizens killed by the police has remained steady despite changing circumstances.
[...]
…critics say the Post and other media outlets promoting the “racist cops” narrative are misreading the numbers. For example, it’s frequently reported that 23 percent of those shot and killed by police are black, but black Americans only make up 13 percent of the population.
Heather MacDonald, also of the Manhattan Institute, cited two more studies, one from the Obama DOJ, in her op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, that undercuts the BLM narrative:
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.
Still, does this mean there’s ZERO bias? No. There never will be in any institution. We’re human. There will be flaws. One study from Stanford found that cops are less likely to pull over black Americans after sunset since they cannot properly identify their race in the dark. The threshold for searching cars driven by Black and Hispanic drivers is also said to be lower than for white drivers. The institution did this analysis by looking at 100 million traffic stops from across the country, according to Inside Sources. Is there bias? Yes. Is it the entire institution of policing engulfed by racism? No. That narrative is a false one but given who occupies the White House and race being the Left’s favorite issue to shove in all of our faces, it’s not shocking that the “killer” of “racist” cop narrative has become firmly entrenched. It’s also not real.