Let’s Have that “Conversation” about Race

Heather Mac Donald, guest-blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy, gets the ball rolling:

[A]s of July 9, whites were 54 percent of the 440 police shooting victims this year whose race was known, blacks were 28 percent and Hispanics were 18 percent, according to The Washington Post’s ongoing database of fatal police shootings. Those ratios are similar to last year’s tally, in which whites made up 50 percent of the 987 fatal police shootings, and blacks, 26 percent. (The vast majority of those police homicide victims were armed or otherwise threatening the officer.)…

Typically, activists and the media measure police actions against population ratios. Given that blacks are 13 percent of the nation’s population, a 26 to 28 percent black share of police gun fatalities looks disproportionate. But policing should be measured against crime rates, not population percentages, because law enforcement today is data-driven. Officers are deployed to where people are most being victimized, and that is primarily in minority neighborhoods.

In America’s 75 largest counties, comprising most of the nation’s population, blacks constituted 62 percent of all robbery defendants in 2009, 57 percent of all murder defendants, and 45 percent of all assault defendants — but roughly 15 percent of the population in those counties. In New York, where blacks make up 23 percent of the city’s population, blacks commit three-quarters of all shootings and 70 percent of all robberies, according to victims and witnesses. (Whites, by contrast, commit less than 2 percent of all shootings in New York City and 4 percent of all robberies, though they are nearly 34 percent of the population.)

New York City’s crime disparities are repeated in virtually all American metropolises. They will determine where officers are most often called to a drive-by shooting or an armed robbery, and where officers are most likely to face violent and resisting criminals — encounters which can lead to officers’ own use of deadly force.…

In 2015, the police fatally shot 36 unarmed black males, according to The Washington Post’s typology, and 31 unarmed white males. The Post’s classification of victims as “unarmed” is literally accurate but sometimes misleading. The label can fail to convey the charged situation facing the officer who used deadly force.

At least five “unarmed” black victims had tried to grab the officer’s gun, or had been beating the cop with his own equipment. Some were shot from an accidental discharge triggered by their own assault on the officer. One had the officer on the ground and was beating him on the head so violently, breaking bones and causing other injuries, as to risk the officer’s loss of consciousness. And one individual included in the Post’s “unarmed black male victim” category was a bystander unintentionally struck by an officer’s bullet after an illegal-gun trafficker opened fire at the officer and the officer shot back. If a victim was not the intended target of a police shooting, race could have had no possible role in his death.…

[C]ontrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, there is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police. The data-driven, proactive policing revolution that began in the mid-1990s has saved tens of thousands of black lives that would have otherwise been lost to urban gun violence had crime remained at its early 1990s rate. Unfortunately, those crime gains are now at risk, thanks to the false narrative that police officers are infected with homicidal bias.

(See Mac Donald’s subsequent guest posts, here, here, here, and here.)

Here’s the bottom line of my post, “Crime Revisited“:

[T]he following equation explains the rate of violent and property crimes (VPC) as a function of:

BLK — the number of blacks as a decimal fraction of the population

GRO — the change in the rate of growth of real GDP per capita in the previous year, where the rate is expressed as a decimal fraction

PSQ — the square of the decimal fraction representing the proportion of the population in federal and State prisons

ORA — the number of persons of other races [mainly Hispanics and Asians] as a decimal fraction of the population.

The equation is highly significant (F = 1.44179E-31), as are the intercept and the coefficients (p-values in parentheses):

VPC =

– 333768 (3.30579E-28)

+ 339535 BLK (1.06615E-29)

– 6133 GRO (0.00065)

-174136761 PSQ (1.00729E-15)

– 27614 ORA (0.0018)….

In sum, blacks are a major cause of violent and property crimes, which are reduced by incarceration.

Propaganda from Black Lives Matter to the contrary notwithstanding, law-abiding blacks — which is the majority of them — would be foolish to yearn for a cop-free world.

* * *

The Opposition and Crime

Heather Mac Donald reacts to

Obama’s extraordinary statement last week alleging systemic racism in American law enforcement. He was speaking in the aftermath of two highly publicized fatal police shootings. Viral video captured the shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., as officers attempted to disarm him, and the aftermath of the shooting of Philando Castile during a car stop outside St. Paul, Minn.

Those shootings look horribly unjustified based on the videos alone; but information may emerge to explain the officers’ belief that the victims were reaching for a gun.

A few hours after…Obama made his remarks, the Dallas gunman assassinated five police officers, in a rampage that police officials later reported was driven by hatred of white officers and white people generally.

…Obama’s statement undoubtedly had no causal relationship to the Dallas slaughter. But it certainly added to the record of distortion and falsehood that has stoked widespread animus toward the police.

It bears repeating: Unjustified shootings by police officers are an aberration, not the norm, and there is no evidence that racism drives police actions.

Every year, officers confront tens of thousands of armed felons without using lethal force. According to the Washington Post, police officers fatally shot 987 people in the U.S. last year; the overwhelming majority were armed or threatening deadly force.

Blacks made up a lower percentage of those police-shooting victims—26%—than would be predicted by the higher black involvement in violent crime. Whites made up 50% of police shooting victims, but you would never know it from media coverage. Note also that police officers face an 18.5 times greater chance of being killed by a black male than an unarmed black male has of being killed by a police officer.

Indifferent to these facts, …Obama on Thursday, referring to the police killings in Baton Rouge and St. Paul, said: “[T]hese are not isolated incidents. They’re symptomatic of a broader set of racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system.” He made another sweeping allegation of law-enforcement racism, saying that there “are problems across our criminal justice system, there are biases—some conscious and unconscious—that have to be rooted out.” And he claimed that higher rates of arrests and stops among blacks reflect police discrimination; naturally, Mr. Obama remained silent about blacks’ far higher rates of crime.

Such corrosive rhetoric about the nation’s police officers and criminal-justice system is unsettling coming from the president of the United States, but it reflects how thoroughly the misinformation propagated by Black Lives Matter and the media has taken hold. Last month Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in a case about police searches, wrote that blacks are “routinely targeted” by law enforcement, adding that “Until their voices matter, too, our justice system will continue to be anything but.”

Hillary Clinton has also taken up this warped cause. On CNN Friday, she decried “systemic” and “implicit bias” in police departments. She also called on “white people” to better understand blacks “who fear every time their children go somewhere.”

Mrs. Clinton ought to take a look at Chicago. Through July 9, 2,090 people have been shot this year, including a 3-year-old boy shot on Father’s Day who will be paralyzed for life, an 11-year-old boy wounded on the Fourth of July, and a 4-year-old boy wounded last week. How many of the 2,090 victims in Chicago were shot by cops? Nine.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump emphasized “law and order” in a video released Friday, saying: “We must stand in solidarity with law enforcement, which we must remember is the force between civilization and total chaos.”

Given the nightmarish events of the past several days, Mr. Trump could do worse than making this presidential campaign one about that line between civilization and anarchy.

I am about to recant my opposition to Trump. Recent events remind me why the election of another Democrat to the presidency would be a deep disaster for the country. For one thing — but far from the only thing — Democrats have a penchant for seeing criminals and terrorists as victims, not as the enemies that they are.

As I wrote more than ten years ago, in the context of terrorism,

[w]e had better get used to that idea that war is the answer, and see to it that adequate force is used, sooner rather than later. Those who would use force against us will heed only force. Whether, in defeat, they will respect us or “merely” fear us is irrelevant. We are not engaged in a popularity contest, we are engaged in a clash of civilizations, which Norman Podhoretz rightly calls World War IV.

On our present political course, however, we will suffer grave losses before we get serious about winning that war. The Left (or the Opposition, as I now call it), seems insensitive to the danger that faces us.

And so it is with crime. The Opposition is just as feckless about law and order as it is about terrorism.

* * *

“Conversing” about Race

UPDATED BELOW, 08/04/13

The “conversation” about race so devoutly wished by Barack Obama, Eric Holder, and their ilk (of all colors) doesn’t seem to be on the track that they have in mind. That track, as some have noted, is for Obama, Holder, et al. to tell us white folks how to think about black folks, and thenceforth to think and act accordingly.

It seems that it has become acceptable for commentators outside what are known as “racialist” circles to acknowledge openly certain facts of life that are strongly tied to race. Thus, on July 20, we have Ron Unz declaring that

if we examine the official FBI arrest statistics, we find that these seem to support the most straightforward interpretation of our racial crime correlations. For example, blacks in America were over six times as likely to be arrested for homicide in 2011 as non-blacks and over eight times as likely to be arrested for robbery; the factors for previous years were usually in a similar range. The accuracy of this racial pattern of arrests is generally confirmed by the corresponding racial pattern of victim-identification statements, also aggregated by the FBI.

This declaration of facts is especially noteworthy, coming from Unz, who is a firm disbeliever in the proposition that intelligence has a strong genetic component. (I have addressed Unz’s treatise at length — and negatively — in this post.)

Then, along came Victor Davis Hanson on July 25, writing at National Review Online — the organ whose editor had fired John Derbyshire for his infelicitous comments about race (in another venue). Among other tidbits about young black males and crime, Hanson offered this:

I suspect — and statistics would again support such supposition — that [Attorney General Eric ]Holder privately is more worried that his son is in greater danger of being attacked by other black youths than by either the police or a nation of white-Hispanic George Zimmermans on the loose.

Will Hanson go the way of Derbyshire and be fired by NRO? It seems unlikely. Hanson is far more temperate than Derbyshire, as Derbyshire gladly demonstrates in his commentary on Hanson’s column; for example:

The race issue in America is a tadpole, with black/nonblack the mighty head and everything else an inconsequential tail.

In per capita intensity of feeling, black hatred of nonblacks is about an 8 out of 10, nonblack dislike of blacks about a 3 or 4, and any other antagonism you care to name—Hispanic hostility to East Asians, Hmong feelings about Native Americans, whatever—well down below 1.

And in the sheer amount of sturm und drang generated, the conflict is, as I keep telling you, really just between two big blocs of white people who loathe each other, the liberal bloc recruiting nonwhites as not-much-trusted support troops—a Cold Civil War. As Prof. Hanson said, the liberal bloc personally avoids the great mass of blacks as much as they can—except when a latrine trench needs digging.

That’s more like it. And there’s a lot more where that came from. (UPDATE: Derbyshire’s followup, in which he tackles Hanson’s distortions of his views, is here.)

Well, I can be as inflammatory as Mr. Derbyshire, and so I will quote a recent bit of advice about how to be stupid:

… Intelligence is largely potential and theoretical, but stupidity is practical….

The key ingredient in applied stupidity is lack of effort….

Teachers often blame poor educational performance on the home lives of their students, insisting that lack of parental involvement deprives the children of motivation, and keeps good study habits from taking root….

Stupid behavior correlates fairly well with childish behavior, because let’s face it, kids do a lot of silly things. This is to be expected – they’re children, after all. They have limited experience, they have trouble staying focused, and they can’t control their impulses. An adult who displays these traits on a constant basis will reliably behave stupidly. Acting in a mature manner – seeking information, staying focused, delaying immediate gratification, and remaining patient – is therefore a good strategy for avoiding stupidity. Courteous behavior, the hallmark of adult communication, is a combination of these behaviors. The acolyte of stupidity should therefore be short-tempered, rude, impatient, and hostile at all times.

Anyone can make mistakes, but consistency is the difference between error and folly. Smart people make mistakes and learn from them. Stupid people make the same mistakes over and over again. That’s not necessarily because they can’t learn from their mistakes. Sometimes they refuse to learn…..

Apathy is another sinkhole for energy. Apathetic people don’t care, so they don’t try. The result is functionally equivalent to stupidity. A mind pumped full of despair, and convinced the world is hopelessly stacked against it, loses the enthusiasm necessary to process information and make good decisions.

The inability to express yourself clearly may lead others to conclude you are stupid. This could be viewed as yet another manifestation of apathy and carelessness. The basic rules of grammar and syntax are durable, fairly straightforward, and taught repeatedly to children during every year of their primary education. Someone who doesn’t make the effort to express themselves using those basic rules of clear speech, knowing that listeners expect them to be followed, is either being lazy or arrogant, which for the purposes of stupidity engineering have similar practical results….

Most people have the neural capacity to conduct themselves in a reasonably intelligent and expressive manner, so if you want to be stupid, the key technique is to avoid putting any effort into thinking. Tell yourself that you shouldn’t have to try hard, or that the rest of the world should accommodate your indolence. Insist that it’s unfair to expect patience or diligence from you. Share your raw emotional reactions with the world around you, in the most crudely impassioned manner possible…. Rely on aggression instead of co-operation, demands instead of persuasion, and nihilism over optimism. Focus on what you deserve, not what you have earned. Accept responsibility for nothing, because that’s the first step in learning from your mistakes, and you can’t afford a single step in that direction, if you wish to remain stupid.

There’s plenty of such stupidity to go around, but too much of it seems to find its way into black communities. Thomas Sowell would say that this is mainly due to what he calls “black redneck” culture — a position that I have addressed by saying:

If “black redneck” culture is the cause of the inter-racial gap in IQ, and if blacks choose to perpetuate the “black redneck” culture, then the perpetuation of the IQ gap might as well be genetic. For, it will be the result of blacks’ self-imposed servitude to the forces of ignorance.

That is the kind of “conversation” about race which Obama, Holder, and their ilk ought to initiate. Bill Cosby tried, and for his pains has been vilified, and his message has been ignored by spineless, race-baiting politicians — black and “liberal” white, alike.

UPDATE — Related reading: Bill Vallicella, “Cleveland Heights Coventry Art Fair Canceled Again,” Maverick Philosopher, August 4, 2013

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