Shooting "Unarmed Black Men"

The Washington Post ran an article this week whining about the number of unarmed black men who have been killed by the police recently. This article is the latest liberal attempt to get people to care about “police brutality.” Of course, the article is completely biased and, naturally, avoids or sidesteps all sorts of relevant information to make its biased point. Let’s discuss.

For starters, the article states that “24 unarmed black men” have been shot by the police this year. Without knowing anything else, that works out to 3 a month or 36 a year. That’s a tragedy, but it’s hardly an epidemic as the left wants to claim. Indeed, that represents only 0.0013% of the deaths in the country each year.

Moreover, compare that to other causes of death that don’t seem to upset liberals:

40 die each year from salmonella
2,988 die from ulcers
3,697 die each year from the flu
16,121 die from homicide
30,208 die from falls
46,471 die from drug overdoses

Sorry, but your 99,000 lives don’t matter.

Now, 36 death is certainly too many in my book, but it is hardly evidence of some vast anti-black conspiracy by racist cops. What’s more, it turns out that the cops actually shoot more people than blacks. In fact, in the same time period in which they shot these 24 innocent noble black males, the “racist” cops also killed 36 unarmed non-blacks. What’s more, they actually killed a total of 585 people in that period with most of those being killed being white or Hispanic. “Surprisingly,” The Post doesn’t actually give a percentage because that presumably distracts from the point they want you to believe.

The article also makes no comparison to other time periods. If, say, 1,000 were killed each year on average in the 1960’s, then today’s number is to be commended, not condemned. But again, that would interfere with the point if it showed dramatic improvement... as I guarantee you it does.

At one point, the article makes the shock-value claim that 40% of the unarmed people killed were black males, yet black males make up only 6% of the population! O... M... G!!! Well, if we’re going to play the game of misusing statistics, let me point out that zero of those killed were black females, whereas statistically at least 3.6 of those killed should have been black women. So what gives? Why aren’t cops shooting more black women? Are they pro-black woman? They don’t seem to shoot enough Jews or Asians or Muslims or white women either. What is wrong with cops?

Oh, wait, I know. You’re thinking that you can’t use statistics like that because groups choices make broad statistical comparisons like this invalid for predicting this type of behavior. In other words, what I said isn’t valid because black women (and Jews and Asians and Muslims and white women) simply don’t put themselves in situations where they are likely to get shot by a cop. Hmm. Yeah, that’s right. So why do we accept that black women do something to warp the statistics to make them less likely to get shot, yet we consider it impossible (or even racist) to think that black men are doing something that makes them more likely than others to get shot?

Interestingly, the article starts by identifying three or four of the unarmed blacks who were killed. The idea is to show the best case scenarios where the killing was the biggest outrage, and thereby to implant the idea in the reader that these blacks did nothing that could lead to the statistical bulge. But there are two problems with this.

First, by only listing a handful of the instances, it makes you wonder how “unarmed” and “innocent” the other 20 or so were.

In fact, secondly, looking at the ones they list already throws into question whether or not the cops were justified. One of the men was yelling and jumping in traffic; irrational, potentially violent behavior often leads to shootings. Another was “harassing” people on a beach. That suggests an aggressive demeanor. Two started their nights with the burglary of corner stores. Only one seems plausibly innocent, and he was driving without a front tag. Of course, we are not told if the car was stolen.

They even mention the shooting Friday of “Christian Taylor, 19, a promising defensive back on the Angelo State University football team.” Angelo crashed an SUV through the front window of a car dealership and seems to have acted violently.

This is the key point actually. If these blacks are doing something to provoke this, then the real issue is not “why are the cops shooting them,” it’s “what is wrong with young black males that they are forcing cops to shoot them.” See, the article glosses over that. It even starts with this utterly deceptive statement:

“I begins with a relatively minor incident: A traffic stop. A burglary. A disturbance. Police arrive and tensions escalate. It ends with an unarmed black man shot dead.”

I hate to break this to my retarded liberal friends, but “burglary” is not “a relatively minor incident.”

Moreover, let’s consider the idea of stopping a driver without tags. An Alabama Police Detective pulled over a young black gentleman this weekend for a moving violation. This would have been described by The Post as “a relatively minor” traffic stop. Yet, lo and behold, said unarmed black gentlemen, got out of his car, took the cop’s gun and beat him until he was unconscious. He then left him for dead. Oh, and it turns out that this innocent black gentleman had a prior record... assault, attempted murder, unlawful breaking and entering a vehicle, and robbery. Other than that, no doubt, he was an angel, and if he had been shot, he would be one of the “unarmed black men” The Post is lamenting.

Finally, for the record, 18 cops have been shot and killed this year so far. The Post mentions this at the end of its article in a throwaway line, but it doesn’t break down their killers by race, because that would probably make the 40% number seem tiny by comparison and might send the wrong impression about who is really at fault here.

Thoughts?