Fake News and Fake Politics about Policing

If you made the same mistake I did and watched the evening network news tonight, you saw extended excerpts of the testimony to the House Judiciary Committee today from the brother of George Floyd. It was emotional, heartfelt, and powerful. What you didn’t see, or hear even a passing reference to, was the parallel testimony of Heather Mac Donald. I encourage you to read the whole thing at the link in the previous sentence, as every single paragraph is a gem, and it is scandalous that our major media do not look into or report Heather’s arguments. Here’s one little bit for people short of time:

What about unarmed victims of fatal police shootings? As of June 1, the Washington Post’s data base of fatal police shootings showed nine unarmed black victims and 19 unarmed white victims of fatal police shootings in 2019. That number of black unarmed victims is down 76 percent from 2015, when the Postbegan keeping its data base. The Post defines “unarmed” loosely to include suspects who have grabbed an officer’s gun or who are fleeing from a car stop with a loaded semi-automatic pistol in their vehicle. Those nine allegedly unarmed black victims represent 0.1 percent of all black homicide victims, which number about 7,500 a year—more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined.

Meanwhile, have a look at the first four minutes (at least) of this 14-minute talk from Columbia University linguist John McWhorter (who used to be a Berkeley, FWIW) on “Anti-Racism Hurts Black People”:

 

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