Say you’re the Mayor of a city with a large percentage of minority citizens, many of whom want you out because you suppressed video of a Black suspect who wasn’t physically threatening anyone being shot dead by police…until you were re-elected to office?
Here’s a thought: how about appointing a task force which will come up with a frontal attack on police, so you can then use its findings to put the wood to police?
Is that what just happened in Chicago?
Here are the facts, from an Associated Press article via foxnews.com. You tell me:
Police in Chicago have “no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color” and have alienated blacks and Hispanics for decades by using excessive force and honoring a code of silence, a task force declared Wednesday in a report that seeks sweeping changes to the nation’s third-largest police force.
The panel, established by Mayor Rahm Emanuel late last year in response to an outcry over police shootings, found that the department does little to weed out problem officers and routine encounters unnecessarily turn deadly.
The group concluded that minorities’ fear and lack of trust in law enforcement are justified, citing data that show 74 percent of the hundreds of people shot by officers in recent years were African-Americans, even though blacks account for 33 percent of the city’s population.
If Black Chicagoans comprise 33% of the city’s population, and account for 33% of the city’s violent crime – especially murder, which would make apprehension a more dangerous undertaking for police – then Mayor Emanuel’s task force makes an excellent point.
So let’s take a look.
Here are the 2010 and 2011 murder data (the latest I could find):
-2010: Black Chicagoans accounted for 76.2% of murder arrests, Hispanics accounted for 19.3% and Whites/Asians/others accounted for 4.5%.
-2011: Black Chicagoans accounted for 71.3% of murder arrests, Hispanics for 24.6% and Whites/Asians/others accounted for 4.1%.
Now: does that 74% figure still look so out of line?
It seems to me that Rahm Emanuel’s task force has found that the percentage of Black suspects shot by police, at least for murder, is virtually identical to the percentage of murders committed by Blacks.
So where is the issue here? The task force appears not to have exposed the police’s work, but validated it.
This does not – repeat, not – mean there are no racist police who unfairly target Blacks. I have no doubt at all that there are.
What the task force findings do, therefore, is define the issue as rooting out the bad cops, not indicting the entire force.
On the other hand, it does make Rahm Emanuel look a little better to some members of Chicago’s Black population, doesn’t it? And if that was the idea, then mission accomplished.
Agree? Disagree? You decide.
