Dissident Veteran For Peace

If Black lives really mattered to BLM, the media, and academia then they would tell the truth about the Black homicide rate instead of promoting specious, unfounded narratives about racism and police brutality. I was reminded of this once more while listening to an almost hour-long program on National Prevarication Radio (NPR) yesterday.

The show was Freakonomics Radio and the episode was "What Are the Police for, Anyway?" I actually agree that the US has a murder and incarceration problem. I also support an end to the War on Drugs and evidence-based police reforms that are effective at increasing the safety of both officers and the communities they serve. 

Unfortunately, BLM, most of the media, and most academics don't care about facts. They are driven by false narratives that sow division and enhance their careers and the power of politicians and business elites.

Here's an illustrative excerpt from the radio show transcript:

Black Americans are five times more likely to be arrested than white Americans. On a per-capita basis, Blacks are also much more likely to be fatally shot by the police. There has of course been a racial reckoning around policing lately

    PROTESTORS: Hey, hey! Ho, ho!  These racist cops have got to go!

Highlighted by the police murder [sic] of George Floyd. According to a recent Gallup poll, just 51 percent of U.S. adults have either 'a great deal' or 'quite a lot' of confidence in the police.

Anyone with even a modicum of common sense, let alone statistical education, realizes that on "a per-capita basis" is a wholly inadequate way to analyze police shootings by demographic group.

According to the Washington Post 2015-2021 police shootings database, 95.5% of the people shot and killed by police in the US are males and yet they make up slightly less than half of the US population. Thus, on a per capita basis, men are far more likely to be shot and killed by police but no one screams about systemic police misandry. An honest, sensible person looks at that discrepancy and say, yes, but males commit proportionality far more violent crimes than females.

In fact, year after year, Blacks commit around 50% of the murders in the US and most of their victims are Black. Anyone who thinks this fact bears no relation to outcomes of police encounters with Black people is profoundly stupid, profoundly dishonest, or both. Cops of all colors may not be able to cite the precise statistics but they know by experience that, ceteris paribus, Black people they encounter are far more likely to be a threat to police and others than people of any other race. (That doesn't mean police should not regard everyone as putatively law-abiding individuals, most Black people are not violent criminals and they deserve to be treated respectfully unless objective circumstances dictate otherwise.)

Moreover, FBI data (Zip file) reveals that Black criminals upped their game in 2020.^* In 56.6% of cases where the race of the "murder offender" is known that offender is Black; the comparable figure for Whites is 40.6%.^† Academics have long known that Black Americans have a criminal violence problem that dwarfs that in all other communities but, by and large, they haven't had the courage or integrity to vocalize that and hold the media and activists accountable in discussions of police conduct.

For instance, in 2013, Siegel et al. published an article on the predictors of firearm homicide rates in arguably, the premier US public health journal, but they buried the lede. They claimed "ours is the most up-to-date and comprehensive analysis of the relationship between firearm ownership and gun-related homicide rates among the 50 states."

In their final statistical analysis they found that the strongest predictor of "gun-related homicide" rate was a racial factor. In their tables 2 and 3 they reported: "For each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of Black population, firearm homicide rate increased by 5.2%" and "For each 1-SD [standard deviation] increase in proportion of black population, firearm homicide rate increased by 82.8". The comparable firearm homicide rate increases associated with an "increase in proportion of household gun ownership" were 0.9% and 12.9%.

There is no discussion whatsoever of the relationship between proportion of Black and firearm homicide rate in the body of their paper, which was titled "The Relationship Between Gun Ownership and Firearm Homicide Rates in the United States, 1981–2010". Now, if you really cared about reducing homicides wouldn't you foreground the strongest predictor found in your analysis? Needless to say this finding, as far as I can tell, has never been reported in any mainstream media outlet. In the only coverage I could find of the study anywhere was in Science Daily and they didn't report on any predictor but household gun ownership.

Notes

^* See "Expanded Homicide Data Table 3, Murder Offenders by Age, Sex, Race, and Ethnicity, 2020".

^† 8,142 ÷ (20,982  - 6,592) = 0.5658 = 56.6%; 5,844 ÷ (20,982  - 6,592) = 0.4061 = 40.6%

Labels: Black America, crime, George Floyd, guns, media, National Public Radio, police, race, science