Especially this being an election year, mainstream
media and their liberal political allies have intensified
their old habit of flogging this idea when able to find an incident they
can shape to support it. Recently, this has come in the form of black crime
suspects dying incident to arrests with white police officers involved. Reporting
that has sensationalized such events in Louisiana spurred policy-makers
invested in the narrative to succeed in formation
of a legislative panel to address policing.
Meeting
last week, legislators heard from proponents of the narrative. A
functionary from the Louisiana branch of the American Civil Liberties Union,
Advocacy Director Chris Klein, testified that in state blacks represent 53
percent of those killed by police even though they comprise 32 percent of the
state's population. “There are some trends that are not in dispute," he said.
“There are very real trends that create stark disparities in Louisiana.”
Indeed, and let’s start with the one he didn’t mention.
In 2018, blacks make up 32 percent of Louisiana’s population but are 64
percent of the arrestee population (reported from two-thirds of all
state law enforcement agencies). Not all who get arrested are convicted of a
crime, but likely the proportions by race of those convicted isn’t far off.
Which means that in Louisiana black suspects are proportionally less likely
to be killed by law enforcement than those of other races.
This is consistent with the idea that white
police officers are less likely to shoot black suspects out of concern they
will face overly-intense scrutiny of such an act. That concern must magnify as
the issue now has become so politicized that academicians
retract their research
on this matter, even if they express confidence in their data and analysis, if
they think it can be used to confirm that very point.
So, in order to get around this inconvenient fact,
you would have to buy the argument that racism so permeates America and
Louisiana that law enforcement officers – white and black and anything else – arrest
huge numbers of blacks they know are innocent of crimes against people and/or
let off numerous whites they discover committing those same crimes. Not only on
face does this make no sense, but data
contradict that as well.
Again, the notion that government policy supports
an institutionalization of racism in society, and especially that this reflects
in police treatment of black citizens, is a disingenuous canard, yet too many institutions
in America propagate the notion uncritically. Any institution, including
government down to law enforcement agencies, will have individual rogue racists
that it must try to prevent from abusing citizen trust, but any insinuation
that racism permeates the operations and interactions of those agencies as a whole
lacks empirical support and distracts rather than contributes to the policy
debate over improving policing performance.
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