The Facts: Obama and Cop Killing

“When African-Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment[;] when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently[, s]o that if you’re black, you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested[,] more likely to get longer sentences[,] more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime[;] when mothers and fathers raised their kids right, and have the talk about how to respond if stopped by a police officer—yes, sir[,] no, sir—but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door [and] still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy.

“When all this takes place, more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid.” [emphasis added]

—Barack Obama, Speech After Killing of Five Dallas Cops

“the latest assassination of police officers, this time in Baton Rouge. . . taking the lives of three officers and wounding at least three more, is the direct outcome of the political and media frenzy that followed the police shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, less than two weeks ago. That frenzy further amplified the dangerously false narrative that racist police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today.

“the influence of [Obama’s] rhetoric on the hatred in the streets is absolute. Obama’s imprimatur on the Black Lives Matter demagoguery gives it enormous additional thrust and legitimacy, echoing throughout public discourse into the most isolated corners of the inner city.” [emphasis added]

—Heather MacDonald, City Journal

Facts from Heather MacDonald, fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute:

• Between the Dallas assassinations and [Baton Rouge], officers have been shot at and ambushed in Tennessee, Missouri, Georgia, and Washington, D.C. . . . The difference between the 1960s and today is that the hatred of law enforcement and of whites is being stoked by the highest reaches of the establishment [i.e., Obama]. 

• massive racial differences in criminal offending and criminal records . . . account for arrest rates and sentence lengths. (Blacks. . . commit homicide at 8 times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined, and at about 11 to 12 times the rate of whites alone.) 

More MacDonald facts:

• Assertions about systemic, deadly police racism are false. That has been true throughout the period following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014; recall that the cop involved was ultimately exonerated by the Justice Department. But no number of studies debunking this fiction has penetrated the conventional story line. 

• A “deadly force” lab study at Washington State University by researcher Lois James found that participants were biased in favor of black suspects, over white or Hispanic ones, in simulated threat scenarios. The research. . . confirmed what James had found previously in studying active police officers, military personnel and the general public. [emphasis added] 

• In 2015 a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. And this month “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” by Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr., analyzing more than 1,000 officer-involved shootings across the country, reports that there is zero evidence of racial bias in police shootings. [emphasis added]

• Every year, officers confront tens of thousands of armed felons without using lethal force. According to the Washington Post, police officers fatally shot 987 people in the U.S. last year; the overwhelming majority were armed or threatening deadly force. 

• Blacks made up a lower percentage of those police-shooting victims—26%—than would be predicted by the higher black involvement in violent crime. Whites made up 50% of police shooting victims, but you would never know it from media coverage. Note also that police officers face an 18.5 times greater chance of being killed by a black male than an unarmed black male has of being killed by a police officer. 

• [Chicago born and raised] Hillary Clinton has . . . decried “systemic” and “implicit bias” in police departments [and] called on “white people” to better understand blacks “who fear every time their children go somewhere.” [Yet in] Chicago [t]hrough July 9, 2,090 people have been shot this year[. Nine] of the 2,090 victims in Chicago were shot by cops.