Tag Archives: Bias

New study: white police officers not more likely to shoot black suspects

Murder rates in major U.S. cities - all run by Democrats
Murder rates in major U.S. cities – all run by Democrats

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.

Pro-life student Nathan Apodaca wins case against California State University

House Republican leader tweets about Nathan's case
House Republican leader tweets about Nathan’s case

I have some good news! Last week, a pro-life student who attends California State University San Marcos was able to sue for discrimination, and he won. The case has implications for the entire CSU system, and every university in America. What’s more, the plaintiff in the case is a friend of the Wintery Knight blog! Let’s take a look at the details of the case and the judge’s decision.

Nathan told me that this story from The College Fix had the most details, and here it is:

Six months after a federal judge ruled that California State University officials could be held personally liable for funding policies that disfavor pro-life students, the largest four-year university system in the country has agreed to revise policies across its 23 campuses.

CSU’s board of trustees and the student government at CSU-San Marcos entered into a settlement agreement with the campus chapter of Students for Life and its former president Nathan Apodaca.

[…]The lawsuit challenged CSUSM funding policies that overwhelmingly favored two pro-choice campus organizations: the Gender Equity Center and LGBTQA Pride Center. They receive nearly $300,000 from Associated Students, Inc. each year with no strings attached.

Alliance Defending Freedom are the masters of defending religious liberty, and as they usually do, they made a video of their client explaining the facts of the case:

And here are the details of the decisions:

CSU is paying $240,000 in legal fees to the students’ lawyers at the Alliance Defending Freedom and $3,000 in damages to the club. The student government is giving Apodaca a $300 refund of his mandatory student fees, which he paid into a funding system that favored pro-choice viewpoints and disfavored his own pro-life views.

[…]Lorenz ordered CSUSM to revise the $500 application process to require “specific and detailed standards guiding decision making” on funding requests. They can no longer judge “the content of the speech” seeking funding by asking questions about its “purpose” and the “student benefit” of clubs’ events.

[…]The student government will adopt viewpoint-neutral standards for the allocation of mandatory student fees to any registered student organization “that involves viewpoint expression.” They must comply with the Supreme Court’s 2000 ruling in a similar case, known as Southworth.

The process must “not discriminate against any funding request based on the viewpoint to be expressed by the RSO or proposed event.” Funding applications that are “denied or reduced” must be accompanied by “the reasons” for the decision and a “right of prompt appeal” to an official or administrator.

All 23 campuses are getting a policy makeover as well. The agreement directs Chancellor White’s office to issue a “policy directive” across the system that imposes viewpoint-neutral criteria and procedures on student association funding requests for “student speech events.” It lays out five specific policies getting revisions.

This is the part that made me say “WOW!”:

In a major setback for the feminist and LGBTQ centers, the agreement bars them from funding via mandatory student fees, retroactive to July 1. The student government’s Board of Directors and Campus Activity Board will also not use those fees “unless and until” the student government adopts viewpoint-neutral criteria.

[…]In a statement on the settlement, the [ADF] emphasized that the two CSUSM centers received “57 times more than” the 100-plus recognized student organizations combined.

[…]Lorenz had rejected the defendants’ arguments that White and Haynes had a “reasonable belief” that forcing pro-life students to fund pro-choice speech, while denying them funding for their own speech, “was lawful.” The judge said “the development and state of the law” on compelled speech made clear to both officials that the funding mechanisms they oversaw were unconstitutional.

Things were really bad before Nathan and the ADF got the win.

I know that after he finishes his undergraduate degree, Nathan has plans to apply to law school in the future, so this may not be the last you hear about him. If you want to hear more from him before he argues for the reversal of Roe v Wade at the Supreme Court in 2035, then you can check out his articles at Human Defense Initiative.

My job right now with Nathan is to collaborate with him about what books to read, and annoy him about not doing a degree in computer science. (This is my job with all the young adults I advise) We exchange book suggestions in order to develop our worldviews. He also bullies me to watch movies in the theater like 1917 and to care about Star Wars, which I most certainly do not. I feel that if Nathan had one piece of advice to give my readers, he would say that you need to read books and watch movies about great people, which is what you can see on his Amazon wishlist. One of his favorite recent books was a book about Churchill, which he also bullied me into buying. It’s enormous, I will never finish it. He also likes to make fun of the way youth pastors offer young Christians pizza and movies instead of apologetics and bioethics training.

I think it’s important for old Christians to have a hand in what is going on in the minds of our Christian college students, and in their battles on campus. If you are looking for a good person to partner with, look up your local university’s pro-life club or Ratio Christi club. (I’m told by Carla that Nathan not only started a pro-life campus group, but also was part of a Ratio Christi campus group). At the local university, you’ll find lots of action going on that you can get involved with or financially support. Every older Christian should be in contact with a younger Christian who is making a difference. People think that older Christians need to care about the nonsense that young people are interested, like Tide pods and their weird music (I don’t know what their names are). That’s false. My job is to tell the young people about what I have learned about being a Christian. Not every young Christian will care about making a difference for the Kingdom of God, which is why you should focus on the ones who do.

New study: white police officers not more likely to shoot black suspects

Murder rates in major U.S. cities - all run by Democrats
Murder rates in major U.S. cities – all run by Democrats

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.