The Lie That Created the NFL Protests

The lie, of course, is that racist white cops are wantonly killing black men in large numbers. As Heather Mac Donald explains in City Journal:

The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243.

Be sure to read the entire article.

Do You Really Want That?

Do Black Lives Matter?

It’s not so clear that they do to the activists who use that slogan.



We are not entirely sure that “broken windows policing” is quite as effective as the hype suggests, but there is no question that it’s a policy promoted by people who really do believe that black lives matter.

Interestingly, it seems that rank and file black people (as opposed to the race hustling activists) favor such policing.

Consider, for example, a poll of black people in New York City, as reported by the leftist outlet The Root.

Despite the looming specter of police brutality, which casts shadows over street corners, neighborhoods and homes across black America, 56 percent of black voters in New York City support “broken windows” policing tactics, compared with 61 percent of the city’s white voters, according to a new Quinnipiac University poll.

The controversial policing style frames community disorder and signs of neglect—such as broken windows, littering and loitering—as indicators of encroaching crime that will lead to more dangerous communities and must be addressed with the full force of the law.

In theory, broken-windows policing, and its variants stop-and-frisk, zero-tolerance and quality-of-life policing, are tactics used by officers who are hyperinvested in keeping communities safe, clean and crime-free. In practice, however, they provide opportunities for racial profiling and resulting antagonistic and abusive encounters between law enforcement and people of color.

Interestingly, when participants in the Quinnipiac poll were asked whether police officers should “actively issue summonses or make arrests for so-called quality of life offenses,” including selling small amounts of marijuana or making loud noise, 60 percent of black voters said yes, a negligible difference from the 59 percent of white voters who said the same.

“It’s different where you live from what you see in the media,” said Quinnipiac University Poll Assistant Director Maurice Carroll. “Overall, black New Yorkers are negative about cops citywide. White voters are positive. But looking at cops in their own neighborhood, the support turns positive among black voters and heavily positive among whites.

“Does it improve the quality of life in your neighborhood when police arrest someone for a low-level offense, or does it increase neighborhood tensions? New Yorkers decide for quality of life,” Carroll added.

Contrary to the activist myth, black people don’t see the courts as excessively harsh on criminals. The following tabulation is from the National Opinion Research Center General Social Survey, combining polls from 2008 through 2012 (to get a reasonable number of black respondents).

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The numbers show that while blacks are a bit more likely than whites to say the courts are “too harsh” (27 percent as opposed to 10 percent for whites) a robust majority of blacks (56 percent) say the courts are “not harsh enough.” Another sixteen percent of blacks say the courts are “about right.”

Given that rank-and-file black people don’t seem to agree with the race hustlers, how do the politically correct types respond?

The Root went to one Arlene Eisen to provide a politically correct gloss on the findings.

“If [we are to] assume the study is reliable, then you have to ask, ‘What black people?’ Generally, more middle class and professional people will prioritize protecting property,” said Arlene Eisen, the author and primary researcher of Operation Ghetto Storm, a frequently quoted study on the extrajudicial killing of black people. “Then, you need to consider the level of political education of whoever responded to the survey. This includes what a lot of people call ‘internalized racism’—where black people learn a lot of the same views of themselves as whites. Unfortunately, there is very little in the education system and corporate media to counter the hegemonic status of white supremacy.”

Thus politically correct people always end up demeaning the people they are supposedly championing. “Those ignorant blacks,” she seems to be saying, “are anti-black racists too. They just aren’t educated enough to see what’s going on.”

To whom do black lives matter?

To rank-and-file black folks, yes. To people who favor strict law enforcement, yes. To the race hustlers who would rather have a political grievance than to protect black lives, no.

The Real “Teachable Moment” on Race

From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON – The police officer at the center of a national dispute over race and law enforcement says a much-anticipated meeting at the White House was productive and all parties are looking forward.

Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley spoke after meeting with President Barack Obama and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., along with Vice President Joe Biden. Crowley described himself and Gates as “two gentlemen who agreed to disagree” about the confrontation that led to Gates’ arrest.

OK, so Obama has handed out beers to Gates and Crowley and sort of (but not really) apologized for saying the Cambridge, Massachusetts police acted “stupidly.”

Liberals like the term “teachable moment,” and when they apply it to race, they mean a “moment” when white Americans realize how racist they are (or at least have been) and how they need to grovel before black people whom they have victimized.

Except this time it didn’t work that way. Obama took the standard politically correct tact on the issue -- the “Cambridge cops” (meaning Crowley, who arrested Gates) had “acted stupidly.” But instead of knee jerk acceptance, the remark created a firestorm, and Obama had to start practicing damage control.

The public simply wasn’t buying the standard “blame whitey, blame the cops” line. On online poll on the ABC News website shows 85% of respondents saying that Obama “went too far” attacking the Cambridge Police.

(The poll isn’t scientific, but this is ABC News, not Fox, and there is little reason to believe there was a conservative selection bias.)

Playing the race card had not worked. Gates, who like many blacks in academia has been coddled, pampered and catered to for talking about black victimization, found that people weren’t buying it. At least, outside the rarefied environment of academia and the media the product wasn’t selling.

One genuinely heartening thing about the whole affair was the way in which black and Hispanic cops in Cambridge rallied around the comrade. Their white comrade. Apparently, they saw themselves not as black victims, but as people doing the same tough, demanding and (often) dangerous job as Crowley. Black cops too are often vilified when they stop black suspects.

All this is racial progress. But it’s not the sort of change that liberals and race hustlers want. They, not the fair-minded majority of Americans, are going to need a lot more “teachable moments.”

Stopping and Searching People Just to Obtain Racial Balance

It’s the “logic” of affirmative action taken to its logical (or rather illogical) conclusion.

From The Guardian:

Thousands of people are being stopped and searched by the police under their counter-­terrorism powers – simply to ­provide a racial balance in official statistics, the government’s official anti-terror law watchdog has revealed.

Lord Carlile said in his annual report that he had “ample anecdotal evidence” of it happening, adding that such a practice was “totally wrong” and constituted an invasion of civil liberties.

“I can well understand the concerns of the police that they should be free from allegations of prejudice,” he said. “But it is not a good use of precious resources if they waste them on self-evidently unmerited searches.”

He said there was little or no evidence that the use of section 44 stop and search powers by the police could prevent an act of terrorism.

“While arrests for other crime have ­followed searches under the section, none of the many thousands of searches has ever resulted in a conviction for a terrorism offence. Its utility has been questioned publicly and privately by senior Metropolitan police staff with wide experience of terrorism policing,” said Carlile. He added that such searches were stopping between 8,000-10,000 people a month.

Under the Terrorism Act 2000, the ­“section 44 stops” allow the police to search anyone in a designated area without suspicion that an offence has occurred.

But Carlile is critical of the use of the powers by the Met police, saying that he felt “a sense of frustration” the force did not limit its use of section 44 authorisations to some boroughs or parts of boroughs but used them across its entire area.

“I cannot see a justification for the whole of the Greater London area being covered permanently. The intention of the section was not to place London under permanent special search powers.” He noted that the damage done to community relations was “undoubtedly considerable”.

Examples of poor use of section 44 abounded. “I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest ­possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop.”

He later said that while the police should not discriminate racially, it was equally important that they should not balance the statistics.

“If, for example, 50 blonde women are stopped who fall nowhere near any intelligence-led terrorism profile, it’s a gross invasion of the civil liberties of those 50 blonde women.

“The police are perfectly entitled to stop people who fall within a terrorism profile even if it creates a racial imbalance, as long as it is not racist.”

Former British diplomat Sir Edward Clay told BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight programme he was subjected to a stop and search five weeks ago while on his way to work at the National School of Government, near Victoria Station in central London.

He said he had found the experience “sinister” and “intimidating”. He told the programme: “I’m 63, I’m a grey-to-brown-haired white male, I’m 5ft 10 ins tall, looking extremely conventional.”

The latest police figures show that ­117,278 people were stopped under section 44 in 2007-08, of whom 73,967 were white, 20,768 were Asian and 15,218 black.