Systemic Racism

Systemic Racism

As fellow Americans with the same rights, and living under the same laws, we need to be sympathetic to American citizens who have a darker skin color, because bigotry does still exist in parts of our American society, and unfortunately this includes some of our law enforcement. That is not to say, as identity politics professes, and that is now being echoed by every left-wing voice in the country, that racism is “systemic” across our culture. The vast majority of Americans in the 2020’s are tolerant and fair-minded people that accept the equality and equal rights of all Americans, regardless of skin color, ethnicity and ancestral origin.

But we continue to hear stories of black Americans, being harassed and killed simply because of their skin color. Although these stories are anecdotal, they are always egregious. The recent examples include the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and Breonna Taylor in her bed in Louisville.

These are examples of that residual bigotry that needs to be stamped out in our society. But how? These racist beliefs are ingrained in a small segment of our society, and that includes some police, and cannot be blasted out with laws, social mores or any other immediate social niceties. Only long-term education can slowly wear down these unhealthy beliefs.

Legal, First Amendment demonstrations and protests can serve to highlight grievances, and raise awareness of abuses. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, every day since May 11th when George Floyd was killed, the originally peaceful protests have either been incited to violence and looting by outside elements such as Antifa and various other extreme left-wing anarchists, or hijacked by socialist democrat city administrations, which include so-called “social justice” leftists to support “police defunding” and other social upheavals reminiscent of Marxist-Leninist revolutions.

Where is the “SYSTEMIC” racism in our country, other than in the leftist rhetoric of the Trump-haters in the streets? And it is evident that the street crowds are nearly all 20-something, liberal, Trump-haters. I don’t see any of this crowd wearing MAGA hats, or carrying “Trump” signs.

As an aside, this make me wonder just how effective even the legal, First Amendment protesters are? Since there are pretty large numbers of young people demonstrating every day, (probably a million, or so, total in the country), I would assume that they are unemployed, and many of them have just emerged from their parent’s basements after a three month lock-down, and perhaps after getting their degrees in gender studies or social awareness at one of our $50k per year liberal institutions. Will any of these protesters run for office to try to change things? Will many of them even vote? Or will they return to their parents’ basements, once the euphoria of the camaraderie from the crowd-based protests wear off? I’m being a little cynical here, but I really can’t help it after seeing some of these buffoons in action.

This is from Heather MacDonald’s op ed in the Wall Street journal, citing statistics, rather than the incendiary rhetoric that we have been hearing about “systemic racism”, from the angry instigators of the mobs and their biased media allies.  –

 “George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis has revived the Obama-era narrative that law enforcement is endemically racist. On Friday, Barack Obama tweeted that for millions of black Americans, being treated differently by the criminal justice system on account of race is “tragically, painfully, maddeningly ‘normal.’ ” Mr. Obama called on the police and the public to create a “new normal,” in which bigotry no longer “infects our institutions and our hearts.”

Joe Biden released a video the same day in which he asserted that all African-Americans fear for their safety from “bad police” and black children must be instructed to tolerate police abuse just so they can “make it home.” That echoed a claim Mr. Obama made after the ambush murder of five Dallas officers in July 2016. During their memorial service, the president said African-American parents were right to fear that their children may be killed by police officers whenever they go outside.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz denounced the “stain . . . of fundamental, institutional racism” on law enforcement during a Friday press conference. He claimed blacks were right to dismiss promises of police reform as empty verbiage.

This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.

The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.

The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.”

Ray Gruszecki

June 6, 2020