By Heather Mac Donald
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
The Democratic presidential candidates have revived the
anti-police rhetoric of the Obama years. Joe Biden’s criminal-justice plan
promises that after his policing reforms, black mothers and fathers will no
longer have to fear when their children “walk[] the streets of America” — the
threat allegedly coming from cops, not gangbangers. President Barack Obama
likewise claimed during the memorial for five Dallas police officers killed by
a Black Lives Matter–inspired assassin in July 2016 that black parents were
right to fear that their child could be killed by a police officer whenever he “walks
out the door.” South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg has said that police shootings
of black men won’t be solved “until we move policing out from the shadow of
systemic racism.” Beto O’Rourke claims that the police shoot blacks “solely
based on the color of their skin.”
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.
Earlier studies have also disproven the idea that white
officers are biased in shooting black citizens. The Black Lives Matter
narrative has been impervious to the truth, however. Police departments are
under enormous political pressure to hire based on race, despite existing
efforts to recruit minorities, on the theory that doing so will decrease police
shootings of minorities. Buttigieg came under fire from his presidential rivals
for not having more black officers on the South Bend force after a white
officer killed a black suspect this June. (The officer had responded to a 911
call about a possible car-theft suspect, saw a man leaning into a car, and shot
off two rounds after the man threatened him with a knife.) The Obama
administration recommended in 2016 that police departments lower their entry
standards in order to be able to qualify more minorities for recruitment.
Departments had already been deemphasizing written exams or eliminating
requirements that recruits have a clean criminal record, but the trend
intensified thereafter. The Baltimore Police Department changed its qualifying
exam to such an extent that the director of legal instruction in the Baltimore
Police Academy complained in 2018 that rookie officers were being let out onto
the street with little understanding of the law. Mr. Biden’s criminal-justice
plan would require police hiring to “mirror the racial diversity” of the local
community as a precondition of federal funding.
This effort to increase minority representation will not
reduce racial disparities in shootings, concludes the PNAS study, since white officers are not responsible for those
disparities; black crime rates are. Moreover, lowered hiring standards risk bad
police work and corruption. A 2015 Justice Department study of the Philadelphia
Police Department found that black officers were 67 percent more likely than
white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect; Hispanic officers
were 145 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed
black suspect. Whether lowered hiring standards are responsible for those
disparities was not addressed.
The persistent belief that we are living through an
epidemic of racially biased police shootings is a creation of selective
reporting. In 2015, the year the PNAS
study addressed, the white victims of fatal police shootings included a
50-year-old suspect in a domestic assault in Tuscaloosa, Ala., who ran at the
officer with a spoon; a 28-year-old driver in Des Moines, Iowa, who exited his
car and walked quickly toward an officer after a car chase; and a 21-year-old
suspect in a grocery-store robbery in Akron, Ohio, who had escaped on a bike and
who did not remove his hand from his waistband when ordered to do so. Had any
of these victims been black, the media and activists would probably have jumped
on their stories and added their names to the roster of victims of police
racism. Instead, because they are white, they are unknown.
The “policing is racist” discourse is poisonous. It
exacerbates anti-cop tensions in minority communities and makes cops unwilling
to engage in the proactive policing that can save lives. Last month, viral
videos of pedestrians in Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn assaulting passive New
York Police Department officers showed that hostility toward the police in
inner-city neighborhoods remains at dangerous levels.
The anti-cop narrative deflects attention away from
solving the real criminal-justice problem, which is high rates of
black-on-black victimization. Blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of
non-Hispanic whites, overwhelmingly killed not by cops, not by whites, but by
other blacks. The Democratic candidates should get their facts straight and
address that issue. Until they do, their talk of racial justice will ring hollow.
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