By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, March 10, 2015
The U.S. Department of Justice issued two reports last
week, both growing out of the Ferguson, Mo., shooting of Michael Brown. The
first report, about “the shooting death of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Missouri
police officer Darren Wilson,” ought to be read by every American.
It sets forth in plain English the facts that have been
established in this case — by an autopsy on Michael Brown’s body (by three
different pathologists, including one representing the family of Michael
Brown), DNA examination of officer Darren Wilson’s gun and police vehicle,
examination of the pattern of blood stains on the street where Brown died, and
a medical report on officer Wilson from the hospital where he went for
treatment.
The bottom line is that all this hard evidence, and more,
shows what a complete lie was behind all the stories of Michael Brown’s being
shot in the back or while raising his hands in surrender. Yet that lie was
repeated, and dramatized in demonstrations and riots, from coast to coast, as
well as in the media and even in the halls of Congress.
The other Justice Department report, issued the same day
— “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department” — was a complete contrast.
Sweeping assumptions take the place of facts, and misleading statistics are
thrown around recklessly. This second report is worth reading just to get a
sense of the contrast with the first.
According to the second report, law enforcement in
Ferguson has a “disparate impact” on blacks and is “motivated” by
“discriminatory intent.”
“Disparate impact” statistics have been used for decades,
in many different contexts, to claim that discrimination is the reason why
different groups are not equally represented as employees or in desirable
positions or — as in this case — in undesirable positions as people arrested or
fined.
Like many other uses of “disparate impact” statistics,
the Justice Department’s evidence against the Ferguson police department
consists of numbers showing that the percentage of people stopped by police or
fined in court who are black is larger than the percentage of blacks in the
local population.
The implicit assumption is that without “discriminatory
intent,” these statistics would reflect the percentages of people in the
population. But no matter how plausible that outcome might seem on the surface,
it is seldom found in real life, and those who use this standard are seldom, if
ever, asked to produce hard evidence that it is factually correct, as distinct
from politically correct.
Blacks are far more statistically “overrepresented” among
basketball stars in the NBA than among people stopped by police in Ferguson.
Hispanics are similarly far more “overrepresented” among baseball stars than in
the general population. Asian Americans are likewise far more “overrepresented”
among students at leading engineering schools like M.I.T. and Caltech than in
the population as a whole.
None of this is peculiar to the United States. You can
find innumerable examples of such group disparities in countries around the
world and throughout recorded history.
In 1802, for example, czarist Russia established a
university in Estonia. For most of the 19th century, members of one ethnic
group provided more of the students than any other (and a majority of the
professors). This was neither the local majority (Estonians) nor the national
majority (Russians), but Germans.
An international study of the ethnic makeup of military
forces around the world found that “militaries fall far short of mirroring,
even roughly, the multi-ethnic societies” from which they come.
Even with things whose outcomes are not in human hands,
“disparate impact” is common. Men are struck by lightning several times as
often as women. Most of the tornadoes in the entire world occur in the middle
of the United States.
Since the population of Ferguson is 67 percent black, the
greatest possible “overrepresentation” of blacks among those stopped by police
or fined by courts is 50 percent. That would not make the top 100 disparities
in the United States or the top 1,000 in the world.
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