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Black Lives Don’t Matter to Black Lives Matter
The question should be a simple one. It should have nothing to do with feelings and everything to do with the data. The question that the entire Black Lives Matter movement centers around is this. Are racist police officers the greatest threat facing young black males in the United States today?
The answer is no, of course not, not even close. That is of course if you go by the facts and the data, and have a thick enough skin to handle being called a racist by the #factsAreRacist contingent.
According the Washington Post database that anylizes police shootings, In 2015, 990 people were killed by the police in the United States. Of that total number, 26% of them, or 258, were black. The vast majority of them were armed and posing a direct lethal threat to the police or someone else.
Many are quick to claim a racial disparity in the fact that blacks represent 26% of all police shootings last year in America, while only constitute 13% of the total population. This seems on its surface disproportionate.
Here is the fact that Black Lives Matter and the Left is trying to obfuscate. Where indeed blacks are 13% of the US population, the crime rate among blacks is much higher than any other racial minority.
According to FBI statistics from 2009 blacks were accused of 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders, 45% of all assaults in America’s 75 largest counties.
Blacks also constitute 40% of police shooters over the past decade.
The actual greatest risk of violent death to young black men in America does not come from the police, but overwhelmingly from other black males.
There are a staggering, approximately 6000 blacks murdered every year by other blacks. Blacks between the ages of 14 and 17 commit murder at a rate ten times that of whites and hispanics in the same age group. The entire black male population commits homicides at a rate eight times greater than that of whites and hispanics combined.
The claim of an ‘epidemic’ of racist cops shooting blacks can not be justified with the numbers.
So why does Black Lives Matter make this claim? Because if you remove the canard of racist cops being the greatest threat to black lives, you are left with black criminality and violence being the greatest threat to black lives.
The insidious result of the Black Lives Matter movement is that it actually places black lives in more danger by demonizing the police, the only public institution that actually can demonstrate a belief that black lives matter.
In 1990 the New York City police under the leadership of Mayor Rudy Giuliani instituted revolutionary police tactics to prevent crime, rather than respond to crime. Pro-active policing.
The results were astounding. In 1990 there were 2,245 homicides in New York City. In 2014 there were 333. That is an 85% drop.
Similar pro-active policing of high crime areas does indeed result in more confrontations with police, but has slashed crime rates across the United State. Violent crime dropped 40% across America between 1990 and 2014. This means that businesses that would have avoided certain areas have opened up in previously high crime areas. Elderly people and children feel safer walking the streets.
The Ferguson Effect
After the legally justified shooting of Michael Brown in 2014, Black Lives Matter launched a campaign against police. Police officers now routinely find themselves surrounded by people with cell phone cameras hurling insults, abuse, bottles, and as we have seen this past week, the anti-cop sentiment created by Black Lives Matter is turning increasingly violent.
The result is police in high crime areas are understandably engaging less in pro-active crime prevention and as a result the US is witnessing its largest violent crime increase in twenty years. In 2015 murders in America’s largest 50 cities rose 17%.
It has been the predominantly black populated cities however that have seen the largest spike in violence. Milwaukee had a 72% increase in murders last year, Cleveland 90%, Nashville 83%, Minneapolis 61%, and Baltimore had it’s highest per capita homicide year in its history.
Most telling perhaps is in Chicago where pedestrian stops by police decreased 90% after Ferguson, shootings were up 80% as of March of this last year.
Murders of police doubled in the first three months of 2016, that isn’t taking into account the five officers murdered this past week at a Black Lives Matter rally in Dallas.
The real victims though of Black Lives Matter are the black people themselves living in these Urban areas that are going to face the brunt of the violence that a decrease in policing in America’s highest crime areas are sure to bring about.
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Mottle Wolfe is host of The Mottle Wolfe Show available on iTunes and Stitcher Radio. You can subscribe to his YouTube channel here.
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