I stand by my previous opinion that systemic police brutality toward minorities across America is a myth. Four recent academic studies have demonstrated this. One, in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, one by Harvard economist Roland Fryer in the National Bureau of Economic Research, one in the British Medical Journal for Injury Protection, and one by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan. Each demonstrates that there is no systemic police brutality directed towards minorities.
To give a sense of proportion, of the unarmed shootings by police in 2019, nine of them were against Blacks while 20 were against whites. As former New York Mayor Giuliani noted, more police officers are shot and killed by Blacks than police officers kill Blacks. Yet that is not the narrative we’re being told.
The FBI’s latest homicide data shows that 45 percent of all murder victims were Black, even though Blacks comprise only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Liberal logic says that demonstrates the American system is racist. Yet when you examine the data, it is almost exclusively young black men murdering other young Black men.
No one disputes that black lives matter. But that’s different than Black Lives Matter. The BLM movement says that it is white people that are disregarding Black lives, but the data shows that it is the Black community that is most at war with itself. Surely there are racists in the world, but racism is not the biggest cause of Black death in 2020. Last weekend in Chicago, 104 Blacks were shot, 14 fatally including a 3-year-old and a 13-year-old.
Patrisse Cullors and Alicia Garza founded Black Lives Matter together. In a 2015 video clip, Cullors tells the interviewer: “We actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular, we’re trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super versed on ideological theories.”
Furthermore, the BLM and M4BL (Movement for Black Lives) have many demands that have nothing to do with police reform. Their manefestos include (https://bit.ly/2YUECkb): A call to disband police departments (not simply reducing their budgets); dissolution of the nuclear family; reparations for slavery; Universal Basic Income for all Blacks; end to all jails, prisons, and youth detention facilities; end pre-trial detention and bail; remake of the current U.S. political system; rent and mortgage cancellation; a moratorium on utility and water shutoffs; cancellation of student, medical, and other forms of debt; and charging Israel with genocide
As President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. It provides the opportunity to do things that were not possible to do before.” These movements are seizing this opportunity to remake American democracy in the image of communism.
One need only to look to the better-named “Capitol Hill Autonomous Occupied Sector” (CHAOS) to see what their vision of the future looks like. But if you disagree with them you are labeled a racist, and if you are to the right of Karl Marx you are labeled a fascist. The linguistic hoops we’re forced to jump through to appease the ever-changing standard are quite Orwellian, especially considering that everyone agrees that Black lives do matter.
BLM is blind to the ultimate violence that occurs within the Black community. Do all Black lives really matter? In 2018 not only were there 2,600 Black-on-Black murders, there were 300,000 pre-born Black babies murdered.
I have three takeaways. First, we should change policies and procedures surrounding police brutality, specifically police union contracts concerning qualified immunity that exempts police officers from civil liability. This will require liberals to rethink their unqualified support for public sector unions and for conservatives to rethink their support of militarized of police departments.
Second, we need to recognize and acknowledge the hurt within the Black community. In 2018, over 75 percent of black families were headed by a single mother. Despite BLM’s call for ending the nuclear family, countless studies have shown that children born to parents that stay married have higher high school and college graduation rates, as well as high employment rates. Boys especially need male role models in their lives.
Finally, the Marxist solutions proposed by BLM will only further exacerbate the problems for America in general and the Black community in particular.
Dale Courtney served 20 years in nuclear engineering aboard submarines and 15 years as a graduate school instructor. He now spends his spare time chasing his grandchildren around the Palouse.
