On
May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed in the city of Minneapolis,
after white police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for almost nine
minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down on the street.
From
a cell phone video, taken by one of the many witnesses, we learned that four
cops ignored Floyd's repeated plea, "I can't breathe." By the time
paramedics arrived, Floyd was unresponsive and apparently lifeless. After about
an hour of attempted resuscitation by EMTs and emergency room staff, he was
pronounced dead.
Like
with the current pandemic, millions around the world were affected by this
barbaric act in America. Many ignored social distancing guidelines and
protested in major cities of the United States. Whereas protesting is perfectly
legitimate, the accompanying destruction of property and looting are not.
Ostensibly,
the protests are about “the alleged epidemic of widespread and race-based
police brutality against blacks and the lack of confidence, in the case of
Floyd, that justice will be done”. The problem with these assertions is that
they are not supported by the data.
My
research indicates that there is no epidemic of racist cops killing black
suspects in America. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,
police killings of blacks declined almost 80% from the late '60s through the
2010s, while police killings of whites have not increased. Meanwhile, in 2017,
according to the CDC's National Vital Statistics Reports, non-Hispanic blacks
were eight times more likely to be a victim of a homicide (homicide death rate:
23.2 per 100,000) than non-Hispanic whites (homicide death rate: 2.9 per
100,000).
The
number one cause of preventable death for young white men is accidents, such as
car accidents and drownings. The number one reason for death, preventable or
otherwise for young black men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of
another young black man.
In
2018, there were approximately 7,400 black homicide victims, more than half of
the nation's total number of homicides, while the black population is 13% of
the U.S. total. Of that number, the police killed a little more than 200
blacks, and nearly all of them had a weapon or violently resisted arrest.
In
recent years, the police have averaged killing about 1,000 Americans per year.
Of that number, half are white, and one-quarter are black, with the race of
remaining suspects of another race or unknown. Of the approximately 1,000
killed by cops, less than 4% (40 persons) involve a white officer and an
unarmed black man.
Recent
studies not only find no systemic abuse of black suspects by the cops, but if
anything, cops are more hesitant, more reluctant, to use deadly force against a
black suspect than against a white suspect.
The
Manhattan Institute's Heather MacDonald writes: "Regarding threats to
blacks from the police: A police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed
by a black male, than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police
officer." Last year, according to The Washington Post, the police
killed nine unarmed blacks. They killed 19 unarmed whites. In recent years,
about 50 cops have been shot and killed annually in the line of duty. So, more
cops are killed each year than are unarmed black suspects.
Minneapolis
in 2020 is not Birmingham, Alabama, in the '50s. The top cop is not a racist
segregationist like Birmingham's infamous Bull Connor, who released dogs and
turned water hoses on civil rights protesters. The police chief of Minneapolis
is Mexican American and black. The district's U.S. House representative is
black. The vice president of the city council is black, as is the state
attorney general.
In
Baltimore, where in 2015, a black man named Freddie Gray died in police
custody, how could one, with a straight face, argue that resident blacks suffer
from institutional racism? The mayor was a black female; the top two officials
in the police department were black; the city council was majority black; the
state attorney who brought the charges against six officers was black; three of
the six charged officers were black; the judge before whom two officers tried
their cases was black; the U.S. attorney general was black, as was the then President
of the United States.
Meanwhile,
over Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, 10 persons were killed and 49 were shot.
In a city where roughly one-third of the population is black, 70% of the city's
homicide victims, according to the Chicago Police Department, are black.
As
a black citizen of the United States, I must ask, do these figures confirm that
there is systemic, structural or institutional police brutality against blacks
in the United States? Agreed, there are despicable cases of brutality against
blacks by deranged white law enforcement officers. But do the statistics rise
to the level of “systemic, structural or institutional brutality?”
I
recognize that my position will incense many. That is not my intent. My intent
is to maintain the conversation, based on truth and less on emotion. Agreed,
justice
must
be available to everyone, and so must truth - justice and truth are
inseparable.
