Today’s paragraphs come to us from Rich Lowry, writing for nationalreview.com.
Mr. Lowry is no fan of President Obama’s selective use of statistics to make a case regarding racial injustice – and is even less a fan of the #blacklivesmatter “movement”.
Here, from his latest commentary on the subject, is part of the reason why:
“African Americans,” Obama said in Warsaw (Poland), “are arrested at twice the rate of whites.” But African Americans commit about 24 percent of violent crimes, even though they are 13 percent of the population. Of course they are going to be arrested at disproportionate rates. About half of murderers are black, and over 40 percent of killings of police officers are committed by blacks. The picture painted by Black Lives Matter of pervasive police predation is a politicized lie.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t bad cops or that there isn’t bias in policing, but the picture painted by Black Lives Matter of pervasive police predation, and an open season on blacks, is a politicized lie.
A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found racial disparities in lower-level use of police force — e.g., police placing hands on civilians or pushing them into walls. But it concluded that “on the most extreme use of force — officer-involved shootings — we are unable to detect any racial differences in either the raw data or accounting for controls.”
How is that possible, given the outsize role of allegedly racist police shootings in our politics? It just might be that Black Lives Matter and the media take a few instances of police-involved shootings and dramatize and obsess over them to create a sense that cops are itching to shoot black people. Some of these cases involve genuine crimes by the police; others harrowingly mistaken judgments; and still others completely justifiable acts that are lied about by Black Lives Matter, most notably the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo.
I do not know how Mr. Lowry feels about the fear many Black people (just about all teh Black people I know) have regarding interactions with police. I hope he understands that, both historically and contemporaneously, there are very good reasons for it.
But I certainly know how Mr. Lowry feels about statistics being manipulated to pour gas on the racial fires. And, in that, we completely agree…
…which is why I award Rich Lowry Paragraphs Of The Day honors today.
