What the Washington Post doesn’t want you to read about “implicit bias”

I wrote here about the Department of Justice’s efforts to push “implicit bias training” on law enforcement personnel and about a lame column in which Joe Davidson of the Washington Post cheers on the DOJ. In his column, Davidson attacked Hans von Spakovsky for, among other alleged offenses, questioning the “science” behind implicit bias training.

Davidson didn’t take on Hans’s analysis. Instead, he suggested, circularly, that by questioning the “science,” Hans displays “implicit bias.”

Hans responded the old-fashioned way; he wrote a letter to the editor. The Post, whose left-wing bias is becoming more explicit by the day, declined to publish it.

Here is what Hans said in his letter to the editor:

In his recent column praising “implicit bias” training at the Justice Department, Joe Davidson includes a gratuitous swipe at me that is unfair, uncalled for, and beneath the usual standards of the Post. He snidely suggests I should talk to Howard University’s Lenese Herbert, who claims that the U.S. has a “scourge of officers killing unarmed Black people in extraordinarily disproportionate numbers.”

I would suggest instead that Davidson and Herbert start looking at actual evidence on this issue. Serious questions have been raised about the credibility, reliability, and validity of the supposed “science” behind implicit-bias testing.

As for the “scourge” of “disproportionate” killings, they might familiarize themselves with statistics from the Justice Department, which show blacks disproportionately commit crimes. In 2009 in our 75 largest counties, blacks were involved in 62 percent of all robberies, 57 percent of all murders, and 45 percent of all assaults while representing only 15 percent of the population.

Less than a third of the individuals killed by police are black despite the fact that they commit crimes at a much higher rate than other racial/ethnic groups. Thus, when police are apprehending armed defendants, they will be disproportionately confronting black criminals. That is why, according to the FBI, black criminals also represented 40 percent of cop killers from 2005 to 2014.

The only implicit bias I have is to look at the facts and the hard evidence instead of making unsupported claims against the law-enforcement officers who risk their lives every day to protect members of the public, no matter their skin color.

Hans has much more to say about “implicit bias training” and anti-white bias at the DOJ, as well as about Davidson’s pathetic column which does indeed fail to measure up even to the Post’s usual standards. Please read the whole thing.

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