Friday, June 05, 2020

Police brutality, blacks and whites

Listening to people call the Mike Gallagher show to talk about what's open during this Covid19 crisis in their town. One from Virginia called to complain that during this time of protest and pandemic his governor (Mr. blackface) is addressing removing statues. Another from North Carolina (a Democrat) reports gathering for protests is encouraged and winked at, but the Republican convention which would have brought millions to the state coffers, is cancelled. Another (I think he was from California) complained that only 10 people are allowed at a private party and social distancing must be maintained, but 100 are allowed at a protest, and no social distancing. Now tell me folks, what part of this whole mess isn't political?

Grieving for a man who was killed in a terrible way during an arrest is understandable; allowing the nation to be destroyed based on a myth of police brutality is an evil, ugly plot to destroy the lives and living of millions. In 2019, 9 black men died at the hands of police during a confrontation. 19 white men died during a confrontation with police. Most were in the act of committing a crime. This information is from the Washington Post data base and is real, deep digging research investigating all the circumstances. So who blows it up? Our news media and social media.

39 black men had fatal confrontations with police in 2015 and 9 in 2019. We are a nation of 330, 000,000. Even for Obama's era, that's a tiny, tiny percentage of millions of confrontations with police.  However the drop is significant under Trump.

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/32/15877 is the link to the research. Probably to save their P & T promotion, the authors of this article, which makes perfectly clear that more whites are at risk than blacks in confrontations with police are trying to walk it back. I guess too many people were quoting it to bust the myth that unarmed black men are at terrible risk.

Academe is so far left, it's amazing anything but the party line ever got in to print. The hurdle would be funding, probably figured it was an easy thing to prove--systemic racism and police brutality. Then the next hurdle, finding a publisher--all the journals are also liberal with gate keepers who can shut the door. Then to get a group of people to do a peer review--that must have been a challenge once the results of the study were known. Of course, purchasing it had already been done. PNAS is on subscription and librarians (also gate keepers) probably couldn't reject it. I fully expect that after their clarification and apology, and after they've been run out of town, tarred and feathered, their careers have been ruined and the offending volume will be removed from library shelves.

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