3 thoughts on “Racist Police Violence”

  1. Math doesn’t favor the mob’s preferred actions. You have about 260 black men getting killed by police each year, of which about 75% are going to be pretty clear cases of taking down somebody who is shooting or threatening immediate violence, who are probably going to get killed under any conceivable set of police reforms that still result in what we would term “policing”, or who are going to get shot by somebody else – perhaps a rooftop Korean. So, on the plus side of the ledger, taking a knee and bowing to the outrage could conceivably prevent about 65 black deaths a year.

    Here’s a paper examining the effects of police stand-downs.

    For investigations that were preceded by a viral incident of deadly force – Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Riverside and Ferguson – there is a marked increase in both homicide and total crime. The cumulative amount of crime that we estimate due to pattern-or-practice investigations in the two years after the announcement for this sample is 21.10 (5.54) per 100,000 for homicides and 1191.77 (429.50) per 100,000 for total felony crime. Put plainly, the causal effect of the investigations in these five cities – triggered mainly by the deaths of Freddie Gray, Laquan McDonald, Timothy Thomas, Tyisha Miller and Michael Brown at the hands of police – has resulted in 893 more homicides than would have been expected with no investigation and more than 33,472 additional felony crimes, relative to synthetic control cities.

    The homicide increases in those cities alone dwarfs the number of lives saved on the plus side of the ledger. If you go back to more violent periods in recent history, such as parts of the 1980’s and 90’s, the homicide rates were twice those of today, and the vast majority of it was black-on-black. One could plausibly predict that the US homicide rate could increase from about 5 per 100,000 to over 10 per 100,000. That would mark an increase from about 16,000 homicides per year to 32,000. Of those, I’d expect somewhere between 9,000 and 12,000 excess homicides victims to be black, and a great many of those would probably be innocent blacks gunned down while going to work or school. Just one year of that would swamp the black lives lost in an entire century of questionable police shootings.

    But heck, we don’t even need to wait for the increase in violent crime. We’re predicted to have about 100,000 more Covid deaths by late fall, and probably a quarter of those will be black people who attended the protests. If that’s how events transpire, one could argue that the protests themselves killed more innocent blacks than the police would kill in an entire century, even including the clearly justified police shootings.

    It’s enough to make one thing that the Klan and Aryan Nations hacked liberal activists phone, e-mail, and twitter accounts and are playing them like puppets, getting them to advocate for policies that only the Klan would dream up. Or maybe the liberal activists don’t care about the predictable effects of their goals because they can’t pass up an opportunity to bathe in white guilt and virtue signal all the way to the funeral home. In that case, even if the Klan had hacked all their accounts, the Klansmen probably can’t see any part of the liberal’s plans that they’d want to change, other than perhaps correcting a few spelling errors.

    This episode of Trump derangement is going to take a terrible toll on black people, and white liberals will push it for all their worth because black caskets make such a great podium. After they flee the cities and wonder if the OCP should build Robocops for urban pacification, they’ll still of course be blaming Republicans for the predictable mess they created.

    In all the liberal discussions I’ve seen about the need for reforms, the need for deep societal changes, the need to re-examine and re-legislate everything, not once I have I seen even a suggestion that maybe we should get violent criminals to commit less crime, which is by far and away so much of the homicide rate that everything else we could do disappears into the round-off error.

  2. The math is pretty simple. There are approximately 800,000 police officers in the US. African Americans are about 13% of our population. Thats about 39 million. If police are racists out to kill blacks, then each cop needs to take out about 49 people. Shouldn’t take very long to get the job done. Unless the cops are not racist. I think 9 unarmed black men lost their lives in the US in 2019 at the hands of police.

  3. If you want to really know what the data says, look at this data set:

    https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/criminal-immigrants-2017-their-numbers-demographics

    Apparently, legal immigrants are by far the safest people to know! This jives with my life experiences. Illegal immigrants are safer people than natives, which is also not a shock (but blows many conservative arguments out of the water).

    But note that legal and illegal black immigrants have roughly the same arrest rate as hispanic immigrants, while native blacks are arrested at twice the rate of hispanic blacks. This is some pretty serious evidence in favor of culture problems rather than police racism.

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