Despite the heated rhetoric, leftists and their media allies do not wish for a “complex conversation” on policing; if they did, they’d be confronted with myriad facts and lessons that demolish their warped and bigoted views.
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While we still don’t know every disgusting thing that happened last month to Tyre Nichols in Memphis, corporate media should provide vital context if it wants to play a responsible role. They would include that deadly encounters between police officers and civilians — including African-Americans —are quite rare in America. Even though annual contacts between police and the public total over 60 million.
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Memphis is among the most violent jurisdictions in America. Per capita, the west Tennessee city had nearly 350 murders in 2021, while New York City — a dozen times larger — had about 480.
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In recent years, these incidents have gained more attention simply because of social media, but that doesn’t mean they’re happening more frequently.
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In a 2021 report published by the Manhattan Institute, Eric Kaufmann relayed that “police killings of African-Americans declined by 60%-80% from the late 1960s to the early 2000s and have remained at this level ever since.”
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A study published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Surgery a few years prior looked at more than a million service calls to police departments in Arizona, Louisiana, and North Carolina; it discovered that officers used physical force during arrests less than 1% of the time. Moreover, nearly all suspects arrested using force “sustained no or mild injury.”
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In the nation’s largest police department, police shootings in New York City declined by about 90% during the last half-century. Nationwide, police killed fewer than 1,000 people in 2019, according to a Washington Post database. Nearly all those victims had weapons, including 424 whites and 253 blacks. Only a paltry 12 black victims and 26 of the white victims were unarmed.
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Presuming the police officers in the Nichols video are guilty, it’s factually wrong and insulting to generalize about policing based on this incident. The data simply do not back up the lies from Joe Biden and the deceitful Black Congressional Caucus, nor does emotional ranting on cable news or among naïve young socialists in the streets, who portray cops as racist or prone to excessive force.
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Because of the left’s lies and insulting narrative of “white supremacy” supposedly causing five black men to kill Nichols, violent crime in Memphis or any major city will worsen before it gets better. (Not that Biden or leading Democrats are concerned with blacks killed every weekend by other blacks in America’s Democrat-run cesspools.)
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If, as you should, you sincerely believe that all people are equal, then you cannot cast some of them as mere automatons when it is politically convenient to do so. https://t.co/F4xwBoIOi4
— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) January 30, 2023
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When police departments are investigated following deadly force incidents that go viral, police activity tends to decline, and violent crime increases. It happened in St. Louis after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer, in Chicago after a cop fatally shot Laquan McDonald, and in Baltimore after Freddie Gray died in police custody after his arrest.
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Perhaps we can target individual officers rather than rushing to MSNBC or NPR to lazily blame entire departments or professions or let local investigations run their course before calling in the feds?
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Sadly, the media remains more interested in maniacal hot takes than introspection or explaining the difference between anecdotes and statistical evidence.
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Because of racialist provocateurs like Ben Crump, Joy Reid, Al Sharpton, and Maxine Waters, law-abiding residents in black communities will face a crime surge — in Memphis and elsewhere.
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They know criminality remains an infinitely bigger issue than policing, even if hard-left activists, Democrat politicians, and their obsequious press prefer to endanger society by pretending the opposite is true.
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Ari Kaufman is a correspondent for several U.S. newspapers and magazines from Minnesota and Ohio to Tennessee and Virginia. He taught school and served as a military historian before beginning his journalism career. The author of three books, he is also a frequent guest on radio programs and contributes to Israel National News and here at The Lid.
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