Are ‘Black Lives Matter’ Claims Fact or Fiction?

The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald, author of War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, writes about politically incorrect crime statistics and defends law enforcement.

She noted in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published earlier this year that the “Black Lives Matter” movement has managed to convince other liberals that “racist” white cops are out to get black people.

Such rhetoric is going to heat up as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders court minority voters before the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary.

But what if the Black Lives Matter movement is based on fiction? Not just the fictional account of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., but the utter misrepresentation of police shootings generally.

To judge from Black Lives Matter protesters and their media and political allies, you would think that killer cops pose the biggest threat to young black men today. But this perception, like almost everything else that many people think they know about fatal police shootings, is wrong

Mac Donald contended that the police fatally shoot a larger proportion of whites and Hispanics, and what accounts for the lower proportion of blacks killed by cops is the rate at which blacks kill each other.

Police officers—of all races—are also disproportionately endangered by black assailants. Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.

Young black men commit over half the violent crimes in the country, disproportionate to their percentage of the population. Because this is the case, they have more encounters with the police, which raises the risk of fatal shootings.

Instead of demonizing the police, reduce crime rates to reduce police interaction.

Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers’ own risk of using lethal force.

The Black Lives Matter movement claims that white officers are especially prone to shooting innocent blacks due to racial bias, but this too is a myth.

Does anyone know the name Tyshawn Lee? Plenty know the name Michael Brown. A black gang criminal murdered 9-year-old Tyshawn in Chicago last fall.

Tyshawn was one of dozens of black children gunned down in America last year…Those were black lives that mattered, and it is a scandal that outrage is heaped less on the dysfunctional culture that produces so many victims than on the police officers who try to protect them.

Photo credit: Tony Webster (Creative Commons) – Some rights reserved