Just The Facts, Ma'am

                Last week on Fox News Tomi Lahren—one of my favorite commentators at only 25-years-old—speculated that if you asked 100 different NFL football players to clarify specifically what they were protesting by kneeling during the national anthem before football games across America you would likely get 100 different answers.

                About a month ago Denver Bronco’s Head Coach Vance Joseph said of the protest, “I’m not even sure what it’s about anymore and that’s the issue in my opinion.”

                Several teams and individuals have been going out of their way to make clear they are not protesting our military or our flag although if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck I don’t know how it’s a turkey.

                It seems like misguided football mouthpieces, the media plus a lot of white and black liberals who depend on a “victimized” coalition of black votes to stay in power and make money would like us to believe it’s only about police brutality against young black men and racism and oppression against blacks by white people in general. I am particularly confused but entertained by the young black millionaires who feel like they are enslaved.

                I have never been a black inner-city youth but Brandon Marshall, Gerald McCoy and Michael Bennet haven’t been old white fathers of police officers either. No one on the left has any interest in listening to anyone but themselves but if they did I could assure them that I know my son the police officer does not awaken each morning buoyed by the hope that today will be the day he gets to gun down some black guys.

                Because my son is a cop I may know more police officers than some of you.  Most of them say, “yes sir,” and “no ma’am” more than most young men I would speculate are raised in liberal households. Some of the cops I know have been shot at. Some have been the target of criminals using moving automobiles as weapons with the intent to maim or kill.  Some have shot back. Some have killed criminals in the line of duty. Fortunately, no cop I have known has been killed in the line of duty.

                All of them get up each day and put on their uniforms and, hopefully, their bullet-proof vests, and hit the streets with an actual and genuine interest in doing what the rest of us are hesitant to do to keep us safe from those who would harm us, take our property or our lives. Every single cop I know is a hero and I suspect almost every single one of them that I don’t know is also a hero.

                And those that don’t get that are a bigger part of the problem than the solution. In my opinion, of course.

         
              Anderson Cooper should roll his eyes and sigh heavily at this point at my ignorance of what he believes the problem to be. Silly white republicans.

                Do I realize that some cops are racist and bigoted and probably never should have been issued a badge? You bet. And when they’re discovered they should be stripped of their jobs and punished if they’ve committed a crime. There are about 670,000 police officers in the country. It is highly unlikely that every single one of them is the hero of whom I speak. It is highly likely that some of them need the consequences I just suggested. Satisfied?

                Does the left lie machine realize that black cops are 3.3 times more likely to shoot black criminals than white cops? Not my number. Root it out of Department of Justice statistics. It’s there.

        
                Let’s try looking at a few more facts instead of listening to the lamestream media and the broken-record liberal narrative, shall we? Using The Washington Post’s own research, Heather MacDonald (the attorney, author and researcher at The Manhattan Institute, not the comedienne who sometimes appeared on the Chelsea Handler Show) offers that in 2015 there were 987 total victims of fatal police shootings.

                White people accounted for 50% of those deaths, while constituting 62% of the population. Black people accounted for 26% of those deaths while only constituting 13% of the population. The good kids at WAPO thought they were really onto something.

                MacDonald has pointed out, however, that WAPO conveniently overlooked the statistics on the same DOJ website that point out that 62% of all robberies, 57% of all murders and 45% of all assaults are committed by blacks. It is a small wonder only 26% of cop-related fatalities were black people.

                Of 6,000 black homicides in 2015, 4% were the result of police shootings. (Twelve percent each of white and Hispanic homicides in 2015 were cop-related.) Almost all the rest of the 5,743 black homicides were black on black crime and that’s not even culling the police shootings for which deaths were the result of black cops shooting black perpetrators (3.3 times more, remember?).

                Can the myth of rampant white cop shootings of blacks really be the issue? Maybe the liberal narrative just means “unarmed” blacks. Ok. In 2015 there were 36 shootings of unarmed blacks by cops. Five were trying to grab the officer’s gun when they were shot. Somehow only two were the result of stray bullets (are bullets racist?) and one of those was a getaway driver for a criminal who was actively shooting at police at the time. Two more, originally identified as blacks (one with blond hair) turned out to be Hispanics. An undisclosed number were shot from accidental discharges in struggles with police.

                Let’s leave it at no more than 27 unarmed blacks were intentionally killed in police encounters, again, not culling for how many of those shootings were by black officers. Oh, hell, just say 36, why ruin a good narrative, plus someone already did the math for me with 36. Each death is tragic and sad to someone, even if the shooting were 100% justified and cleared by an investigative board, I’m not saying they aren’t. But I want to illustrate how out of proportion this NFLsteria may be. Those 36 deaths represent .0000018 of the black population per capita.

                I am sad for each and every one of them. I am sad for the 5,743 black people murdered by other black people for every reason from drug-deals-gone-bad, to gang disputes, to mistakes, to accidents, to being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

                But if I were going to protest or ask for a focus of resources on a problem, would I want to focus on eliminating 36 deaths? Or even 257? Or would I be more concerned about what we could do to minimize 22 times that many deaths?

                What is really going on?

                I have more data, and I’ll get to it. I don't have much else to do on Sundays this Fall. But I do have some observations about things some football players are doing about the 5,743 that I truly respect. But in the interest of keeping things close to 1,000 words which is where most attention spans end with stuff I write apparently, for now, that’s 30.

                (“That’s 30” is an old news term that meant tonight’s 30-minute news broadcast was over. It dates back to when there were actually journalists.)