Jason Riley has a characteristically insightful column in the Wall Street Journal today. When one peruses the relevant data, rather than falling for the media-Democrat obsession with fitting notorious police-involved incidents into an increasingly incoherent racial narrative, one sees the “criticism of cops as racist and prone to excessive force” is meritless:
In a 2021 report published by the Manhattan Institute, the political scientist Eric Kaufmann noted that “police killings of African-Americans declined by 60%-80% from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and have remained at this level ever since.” A study published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Surgery in 2018 looked at more than a million service calls to police departments in Arizona, Louisiana and North Carolina and found that officers used physical force in the course of arrests less than 1% of the time. Moreover, 98% of suspects who were arrested using force “sustained no or mild injury.”
In New York City, home to the nation’s largest police department, police shootings have declined by about 90% since the early 1970s. Nationwide, police killed 999 people in 2019, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post. The victims, almost all of whom had weapons, included 424 whites and 253 blacks. Twelve of the black victims and 26 of the white victims were unarmed.
With such demagogues as Vice President Kamala Harris and Al Sharpton expected to descend on Memphis for Tyre Nichols’s funeral today, it’s worth keeping facts in the forefront of our minds.