Do Black Lies Matter?

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.