Whenever people disagree about controversial things, the best way to proceed is to look at what the evidence says. In this case, we’ve got a new PNAS study authored by professors at several different universities which concludes that white officers are not more likely to shoot black civilians than black or Hispanic police officers.
Heather McDonald writes about it in the centrist National Review:
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings, which holds that white officers are engaged in an epidemic of racially biased shootings of black men. It turns out that white officers are no more likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot black civilians. It is a racial group’s rate of violent crime that determines police shootings, not the race of the officer. The more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that members of that racial group will be shot by a police officer. In fact, if there is a bias in police shootings after crime rates are taken into account, it is against white civilians, the study found.
The authors, faculty at Michigan State University and the University of Maryland at College Park, created a database of 917 officer-involved fatal shootings in 2015 from more than 650 police departments. Fifty-five percent of the victims were white, 27 percent were black, and 19 percent were Hispanic. Between 90 and 95 percent of the civilians shot by officers in 2015 were attacking police or other citizens; 90 percent were armed with a weapon. So-called threat-misperception shootings, in which an officer shoots an unarmed civilian after mistaking a cellphone, say, for a gun, were rare.
This study builds on previous work, which also showed that white police officers were not more biased than other officers to shoot black civilians.
McDonald notes that progressive policy of hiring more minority police officers won’t reduce the rates of shootings of minority civilians, since all races fire their weapons at minority civilians at roughly the same rate.
The real problem with outrage at white police officers is that it doesn’t address the problem of black-on-black crime, which is a FAR greater threat to black victims of crime.
A recent editorial by George Mason University professor of economics Walter Williams explains:
Each year, roughly 7,000 blacks are murdered. Ninety-four percent of the time, the murderer is another black person.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, between 1976 and 2011, there were 279,384 black murder victims. Using the 94-percent figure means that 262,621 were murdered by other blacks.
Though blacks are 13 percent of the nation’s population, they account for more than 50 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, the black homicide victimization rate is six times that of whites, and in some cities, it’s 22 times that of whites.
Coupled with being most of the nation’s homicide victims, blacks are most of the victims of violent personal crimes, such as assault and robbery.
[…]It’s a tragic commentary to be able to say that young black males have a greater chance of reaching maturity on the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan than on the streets of Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, Newark and other cities.
And all those cities are run by Democrats. And they have been run by Democrats for decades. Democrat policies don’t work to solve the problem how making cities safer for blacks.
The real root cause behind crime is, of course, fatherlessness, as this interview about fatherless boys in the Daily Signal with Warren Farrell makes clear:
They’re far more likely to be the mass shooters. About 90% of the mass shooters that I studied since Columbine have been boys brought up in homes that have minimal or no father involvement or products of divorce or so on. And so that really shocked me to see that common denominator.
I then looked beyond that and went to ISIS recruits. There was a big study of ISIS recruits that found that the common denominator among ISIS recruits was dad deprivation, but not only among the boys, but also the female ISIS recruits as well, which, of course, are in much smaller numbers.
Then I started looking at prisoners and the prison population. We all know that 93% of the prisoners are male, but what very few people know is that about 90% of those 93% are dad-deprived boys.
Kay Cole James, the president of the Heritage Foundation (my favorite think tank), wrote about some of her ideas on how to solve the problem for Fox News.
She writes:
First, we must ensure that we’re encouraging families to stay together and that fathers and mothers raise their children together. Decades of studies have shown that children raised in single-parent homes are statistically more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, exhibit poor social behaviors, and commit violent crimes. They’re also more likely to drop out of school, which often leaves them struggling to find good-paying jobs as adults.
We could go a long way toward strengthening inner-city families by changing the system of government assistance that routinely weakens them.
A child of welfare, I can tell you that an overreliance on government assistance has deprived millions of children of the love and security they would have gotten from a family with two parents.
In the rest of the article, she explains how she was able to put that into practice, and what results she obtained by doing it.
Welfare “frees” women to try to start relationships with men who demonstrate no ability or willingness to commit. She doesn’t have to care about whether he is chaste, sober, drug-free, loyal, educated, a hard worker, etc. because the government is taking over the role of provider. The side effect of this is the high inner-city crime rates that we observe in cities that reward women for making fatherless children with men they never vetted for commitment ability.
