The police are under attack right now by the Black Lives Matter movement. The fundamental argument of racially disparate use of force by law enforcement is so divisive it has caused a progression beyond mere protest to violence and attacks on the civil order, personal property and the lives of others including physical attacks on police and anyone even expressing support for the police. Thus the BLM movement has morphed into a violent attack on our entire system of law enforcement in this country. Essentially, it has become an insurrection against the established order. The question is whether that attack is justified.
The police are generally referred to as law enforcement, but actually they are only a part of our system of law enforcement. Law enforcement includes lawyers and judges. Judges are, by their ethical code, not allowed to speak out on public and political issues. The trade off is they render their judgments inside a court and these judgments become law but they do not offer opinions outside of the courtroom. Lawyers, on the other hand, have no such limitation. In fact, lawyers are duty bound to seek the truth. Their job is to represent the injured and victimized and seek justice and remedies for their losses; but at the same time, they are charged with the duty to defend the unjustly accused. In fact, they are ethically bound to do so. Lawyers are obligated to represent even the most reviled and to do so against the prevailing winds of public opinion when necessary. This is their role.
So where are they on this most important issue of whether one of the essential branches of our system of justice is under attack for unjustly targeting a racial minority. The silence is deafening.
You see commercials on TV all day from lawyers beating the bushes for auto accidents and cases against manufacturers of drugs and other products. But where are their ads for blacks victimized by the police or other types of injuries from discrimination such as housing and employment discrimination. Many leftists claim that there is discrimination by physicians against blacks in medical treatment leading to deaths and birth related brain injuries. If they exist, these would be big money cases many with presumptions in favor of the claimant and attorney fees which do not exist in auto and product liability cases. Yet, I see no lawyers ads for such cases. Lawyers do not spend their advertising dollars seeking these cases, because they know they are very rare. However most lawyers who sue for damages and defend those accused of crimes are very liberal and very politically active. This is largely because Democrats tend to protect the lawyer's rights to unlimited damages in auto and product liability cases and are very favorable to criminals. Democrats released convicted criminals during the Covid crisis, support voting rights for criminals even while incarcerated, oppose cash bail, support legalization of recreational drugs and support illegal immigration and much more. So, these lawyers stand by mutely while their party and its far left allies trash our law enforcement and, by extension, our cherished legal system, which they know well is the most fair, just and racially unbiased in the entire world.
One lawyer who has spoken out is Leo Terrell. Mr. Terrell is a black civil rights lawyer who has been involved in police excessive use of force cases. He has claimed that, based on his forty years of experience in the field, there is no systematic or disproportionate use of excessive force or brutality against blacks as opposed to any other group. In fact he has flatly said that Black Lives Matter is a fraud. This lawyer agrees.
Let’s be clear here, the essential policy point of BLM and the movement it has spawned, is that there is a disproportionate use of excessive force against blacks by police that is based on racial animosity. The disparity and the persecution of blacks above all others is their central adamant claim. This is the reason that people who say “all lives matter” are attacked by BLM, because it detracts from the BLM central premise that law enforcement systematically persecutes blacks by regularly using excessive force against them during arrest significantly more than other groups, specifically whites.
So, what are the actual facts of deaths during arrests? The Bureau of Justice statistics has been keeping statistics since 2003 under a law passed in 2000. The Bureau does not just collect law enforcement reports but also follows news reports and collects death certificate and other information from multiple sources to try to have a complete and objective data base. It analyzes all deaths of persons in custody or otherwise while in contact with law enforcement. During the period January 1, 2003 to December 31, 2009, the Bureau reports there were 2,931 deaths classified as homicide by law enforcement personnel. Of these 42.1 % were classified as White, 31.8% were Black and 19.7% were Hispanic.
Social “scientists” claim that this statistic, in and of itself and without further analysis, establishes systematic racism against blacks. They claim that since blacks account for only 13.4% of the population and Hispanics or Latinos account for only 18% of the population their deaths during arrest are disproportionally high, thus proving discrimination by law enforcement. This, however, is a superficial analysis at best and at worst, a fraud. Although African Americans comprise 13% of the population, according to FBI statistics they account for 39% of all arrests for violent crime. Thus, we see that there is a direct correlation between the number of deaths by race and the number of arrests by race. Blacks represent 31.8% of deaths during arrest, but they also represent 39% of arrests for violent crime. If anything, blacks are killed less often by cops during arrest than whites per arrest since they are involved in 39% of arrests yet represent only 31% of the deaths during arrest.
Left leaning Harvard Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr., studied the differences in the use of force by police according to the race of the arrestee as recently as 2017. In his published paper, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force,” he found that, “there are no racial differences in officer-involved shootings.” In fact, upon the most thorough analysis of the data Fryer found that in regard to use of tasers or firearms during an arrest, “Controlling for all characteristics from incident reports, black suspects are 24.2 percent less likely to be shot than non-black suspects.” He suspected that officers are less likely to use lethal force on blacks because of the negative consequences resulting from high profile alleged abuse cases, but on analysis ruled that out since the statistic was consistent over the entire time period of the data even predating high profile shooting cases. The fact remains that in spite of being overtly biased against the police in his report, having concluded from the outset that police are biased against blacks in his introduction to the article, Fryer could not find any evidence of racial disparity in the use of lethal force against blacks and even found they are less likely than whites to be the subject of lethal use of force by police during an arrest. It bares noting that according to both of these studies, regardless of race or ethnicity, the use of force during an arrest of anyone is extremely rare.
Some might argue that the fact that blacks are arrested more often than whites per capita is because of racist targeting of blacks. This is a legitimate concern that should be analyzed; however, this is irrelevant to the central BLM issue which is that blacks are more likely to be killed during arrest than whites. An arrest is an event, regardless of its legitimacy. Assume all black arrests are false arrests for the purpose of this analysis, the conclusion is the same: regardless of why they are being arrested, blacks are not more likely, but, rather, less likely to be killed by a cop than whites during an arrest.
As a result, based on the actual statistics, we see that the central premise of the Black Lives Matter movement, i.e. that blacks are shot, tasered and or killed more often during arrest by cops than whites, is simply false.
I do not argue here that there is no abuse by police during arrest. Certainly there is. Nor, do I argue that George Floyd was not abused. Few people deny this. Nor do I disagree there may have been some racial animus component to the death. There clearly was probable cause to charge the officers involved. However, one incident does not prove the fundamental claim that blacks are disproportionately killed during arrests than whites as the facts show that is not true. There are killings of whites just as often and some of these are also clearly abusive. That, however, is not the BLM issue. it is alleged disproportionate abuse by police of blacks based on racism that is the BLM issue and the facts show that their issue is false.
The question then must be why is this false narrative so widely accepted by the left and the media as true when there is no objective proof that it exists? The only answer is that the facts don’t matter. This is a contrived and planned malicious movement to inflame the public, to pit one race and group against another with the end being a radical change of the entire social order.
No one in America could have been more aware of the results of the Bureau of Justice Statistics than Barak Obama. The results are based on the period 2003 through 2009 and were reported during his administration. Obviously the study was intended to inform the government, most principally the President as chief law enforcement officer, of the true facts at the time regarding police use of force and specifically if there were racial disparities. The results do show there is no racial disparity in the use of force during arrest. Nevertheless, in spite of the certainty that Barak Obama was fully aware of the facts to the contrary, throughout his presidency he waged a virtual war against the police of the United States. Either Barak Obama knew the true facts and nevertheless engaged in a false campaign against the police or, even worse, he failed to educate himself on the facts. We are witnessing the results of his labors today.
In the next series of articles, I will discuss the false campaign by Obama/Biden against the police aided and abetted by the DNC, Democrat politicians in general and the press. This includes the many episodes of exaggeration and outright false representation of incident after incident as police brutality. Ultimately I will explore the real reason behind the campaign to inflame the people with a false narrative of "systemic racisim" and to undermine the police and ultimately the rule of law itself.