Thursday, September 6, 2018
Larry Elder's Anthem Protest Article
This article about the NFL national anthem protests by conservative talk radio host Larry Elder is worth revisiting now that Colin Kaepernike (kaepernike.com is already taken — don't you hate it?) has been signed as a major endorser, symbol, icon, etc. Elder asks "Do facts matter?" Here are some of the facts he presents with the numbers; you can decide how to answer the rhetorical question best.
Yes; more whites are killed by the police than blacks.
Even the frequency of interactions with police are greater or the same for whites than for blacks:
Read the whole thing. Burning sportswear might be a dumb thing to do, but continuing to believe the false narrative of widespread police brutality against blacks is even dumber. It amounts to sacrificing everything we have learned by looking at the evidence.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, since 1968 police killings of blacks have declined nearly 75 percent. According to The Washington Post, almost 500 whites were killed by cops in 2015, an average of more than one a day. Two hundred fifty-nine blacks were killed by the police. Most suspects killed by police had a weapon.
Yes; more whites are killed by the police than blacks.
Last year, The Washington Post put the number of unarmed black men killed by the police at 17, less than the number of blacks likely struck by lightning. Twenty-two unarmed whites were killed by the police. Any death that results from police misconduct is one death too many, but the point is that police killing of a suspect is rare, no matter the race of the suspect or the cop. And a police shooting of an unarmed black male is still more rare.
Even the frequency of interactions with police are greater or the same for whites than for blacks:
According to Philippe Lemoine, writing in National Review, a white person is, on average, more likely to have interactions with the police in any year than a black person, 20.7 percent vs. 17.5 percent. It is true that a black person is more likely to have multiple contacts with the police. But according to the data, multiple contacts with the police are rare, as well. Lemoine writes that 1.2 percent of white men have more than three contacts with the police in a year versus 1.5 percent of black men.
Read the whole thing. Burning sportswear might be a dumb thing to do, but continuing to believe the false narrative of widespread police brutality against blacks is even dumber. It amounts to sacrificing everything we have learned by looking at the evidence.