I would say you should first-up read the FB post by Michael Jackson-Miller, (referenced by Reuter’s) who is himself a Black man, a relevance today when everything is about race, and cis white males like me are dismissed as part of the privileged White supremacist patriarchy.
Jackson- Miller points out that there are vastly more Blacks killed by Blacks than by police or Whites. He can say that (and it’s true). I can’t say that (though I do) on pain of being told I have “White Fragility”, if not worse.
Two points:
1. Reuter’s says that comparing per million is not valid. I don’t see why. Let’s say you have two groups of 100 people, GroupA and GroupB, each one hundred people. GroupA murders 10 people in B. GroupB murders one in A. And let’s say that pattern holds true over time. Surely it’s fair to say that GroupA are more murderous than B. And you can scale that up.
2. BLM are focussed more on police killings of Black men, rather than the overall population. As I showed here, there are somewhat more Whites killed by police, than Blacks, when corrected for the number of interactions with police. We have to correct for the number of interactions, just as we don’t assume the justice system is misandrist because 93% of the prison population are men, when men are only 50% of the population. We understand that men commit more crimes.
Yet in terms of police killings the critics point only to the number of Blacks killed by police, 25% of the total, when they are only 13% of the population — “racist discrimination!” But it’s not if you look at the interactions with police. Which are more in the Black community. There are reasons for that and they need to be (and are being) analysed and addressed, but that’s a separate social issue, not one of policing.
The point is that claiming, as BLM do, that the police are irredeemably racist who are carrying out genocide against Black youths, that it’s not safe to walk the streets if you’re Black, all this simply adds to Anger without adding to Solution.
It’s my forlorn hope that Facts Matter. And ought be the basis for reform of the police*. Not abolition of the police, which will most harm Black and minority communities.
RELATED: Black academic on the facts of police killings.
*There are plenty of proposals to improve policing. One thing is, it seems US police forces are very poorly trained prior to being out on the streets, especially compared with the training of European police forces. Another thing to note: there is really no such thing as “a police force” in America. There are some 18,000 Police Departments around the country, and presumably very different levels of training and preparedness.
