The Black Lives Matter fairy tale that police use black Americans for target practice took another hit as new FBI statistics showed the black homicide rate is skyrocketing and that cops had nothing to do with it.
Apart from the FBI data, four separate studies were published last year refuting the claim that police shootings are racially-biased, but facts often have little effect on committed left-wingers who hate America. Democrats, whose party officially endorsed the violent, subversive Black Lives Matter movement, won’t allow their bubbles to be burst by hard evidence, no matter how persuasive.
Although police, who are routinely demonized by left-wingers nowadays, don’t run extrajudicial anti-black death squads, as the radicals claim, the Left will no doubt find creative ways to dismiss the new FBI study.
“Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police,” writes Heather Mac Donald, Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at City Journal.
The data in the FBI’s newly released official report on crime for 2016 undermines the virulently anti-cop rhetoric that is increasingly flowing from the mouths of overpaid, under-educated professional athletes who signal their contempt for America by kneeling during the playing of the national anthem.
Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population.
The spike in black homicide deaths in 2016 comes after a previous 900-black-victim increase in 2015, she adds. Who killed these black victims? Mostly other blacks, she writes.
Comparatively few blacks were killed last year by police officers or whites. “Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243,” Mac Donald writes. Police fatally shot 233 blacks, most of whom were armed and dangerous, as well as 16 unarmed black men, some of whom may have assaulted officers or offered violent resistance to arrest.
Mac Donald notes that in 2015 “a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer,” and that the 18.5 ratio no doubt worsened in 2016 “in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males.”
Over the past decade, 42 percent of all cop-killers were black males, even though they constitute just 6 percent of the population.
Violent crime has been on the rise for two years in a row. The number of violent crimes went up 4.1 percent last year, while estimated homicides surged 8.6 percent. Violent crimes rose by almost 4 percent in 2015, while estimated homicides shot up almost 11 percent. The most recent period when violence rose two consecutive years was 2005-2006.
“The reason for the current increase is what I have called the Ferguson Effect,” she writes. “Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened.”
Meanwhile, the kneeling contagion is spreading like flesh-eating disease in a leper colony for swingers.
Two uniformed black Chicago police officers knelt in support of Colin Kaepernick’s national anthem protests in a photo with a Black Lives Matter activist while raising Black Power fists. The men face disciplinary action for making a political statement while in uniform, but hey, it’s Chicago, so nothing will happen to these two men who are unworthy of the uniform they are privileged to wear. They may even get promoted, or a show on MSNBC.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), whom Daniel Greenfield calls “America’s dumbest congresswoman,” knelt in the House of Representatives to demonstrate solidarity with the showboating, racist kneelers of the National Football League. “But there are excellent odds that Sheila Jackson Lee has no idea what the protests are about,” he writes. “This is the woman who thought that we won the Vietnam War. And that the Constitution is 400 years old.”
Now, according to one leftist, standing for the national anthem is itself proof of racial bigotry.
Huffington Post contributor Jesse Benn, who calls himself a “Dad, partner, engaged citizen, opinionated writer, leftist, PhD student,” and features a hammer and sickle on his Twitter profile, claims that any white athlete who stands during the playing of the national anthem is showing his complete support for white supremacy.
“It’s a question of privilege,” Benn writes. “See, for white athletes the anthem and American flag do represent freedom, liberty and whatever other amorphous American values one might ascribe these symbols. So, from their view, kneeling would be disrespectful to the privileges a white supremacist nation affords them.”
This means the Steelers’ offensive tackle Alejandro Villanueva is a racist because he stood for the national anthem. And those patriotic football fans swamping retailers in search of Villanueva jerseys must be racist as well.
This kind of thinking is par for the course for Benn. In a 2015 exchange this writer had with him on Twitter, Benn absurdly refused to name any of Hillary Clinton’s accomplishments after making supportive statements about her. “It’s not that I can’t,” he tweeted in reply. “I won’t. I’m not going to validate your sexist bullshit question.”
Benn and other cop-hating Black Lives Matter supporters cannot be reasoned with.
They won’t allow the truth to get in the way of their narrative.