Police use of deadly force is not about racism

Police use of deadly force is not about racism

Reality is far more complicated, but agenda-pushing activists don’t want to discuss it

David Wojick

The screaming headline said "Black Americans 2.5X more likely than whites to be killed by police." The statement is false. It is the kind of assertion that is used to claim police are systemically racist. It leads to fewer police, fewer arrests, more crime, more racial discord, and more innocent black deaths.

Accurate, honest statistics show just the opposite. When police must use deadly force, whites are more likely to be killed than blacks. But we rarely see these statistics, because they do not support claims of systemic, systematic racism against blacks. The statistics we do see are too often agenda-driven.

The sad reality is that, as a percentage of their total American population, black deaths by police are around 2.5 times white deaths. But this has nothing to do with likelihood, because the vast majority of people of both races have near-zero likelihood of being killed by police.

In fact, up to 88% of people killed by police were armed and being arrested at the time of their deaths. Such people are indeed at greater risk of being killed. However, racism has nothing to do with it.

On a per-arrest basis, the data say whites are much more likely to be killed by police than blacks. If so, the police are clearly not racist. Indeed, they seem to be deliberately trying not to kill blacks. Another study found that 36% of officer-involved shootings were “suicide by cop,” 16% of whom were blacks.

Statistical reality must begin with the fact that black males represent 6.5% of the US population – but according to FBI data they constitute 54% of arrests for robbery and 53% of arrests for murder. Far worse, nationally syndicated talk show host Larry Elder points out, in 2018 there were approximately 7,400 black homicide victims, more than half of America’s total homicides, and nearly all were murdered by other blacks. (Have Black Lives Matter or NFL-NBA-MLB athletes ever acknowledged any of this?)

Those are the real reasons blacks outnumber whites in the nation’s prisons – the real reasons more blacks are likely to be killed during arrests and other confrontations with police.

Even more telling, when we look at the issue that motivates and infuriates Black Lives Matter (BLM) and its allies – unarmed blacks killed by police – we learn that the Mapping Police Violence database tabulates “just” 25 such police killings in 2019, resulting from shootings, tasers, beatings, chokeholds and vehicles.  (A Washington Post database records only police shootings.) And then we read this:

“A wave of gun violence swept through the nation over the [July Fourth 2020] holiday weekend, leaving dozens dead from coast-to-coast – with children as young as 5 among the casualties,” the New York Post despaired. In Chicago, the article continued, police reported 87 shootings and 17 deaths, and nearly a dozen [of those shot] were children caught in the crossfire. The vast majority were black.

Think about that. In one weekend, in one city, we had three-fourths the number of deaths that BLM is raging about, for the entire nation, over the course of an entire year. Or consider this awful news:

“Every single person who has been shot in New York City [so far] this July, nearly 100 in total, has been a member of the minority community” and “97% of shooting victims in June were members of the city’s minority community,” NBC News reporter Tom Winter tweeted. New York City witnessed a 204% increase in shooting victims over the past 28 days, compared to the same period in 2019, he added.

Meanwhile, Darrius Sutton participated in at least three drive-by shootings after he was released from NYC jails without bail on attempted murder charges – a far too frequent occurrence in Di Blasio Town. Again, no comments, no outrage from BLM.

What about law enforcement officers like David Dorn and Patrick Underwood? What about Mekhi James, LeGend Taliferro, Secoriea Turner and too many other Black children gunned down by their fellow blacks? Seven-year-old Natalia Wallace was playing with other children in Chicago over this year’s Fourth of July weekend, when thugs leapt from a car and sprayed gunfire into a crowd, killing her.

Why don’t their black lives matter to Black Lives Matter, its often violent supporters, and its corporate, Hollywood and pro athlete funding sources? Does anyone really think the solution is “defunding” or “reimagining” police forces – perhaps replacing thousands of police officers with social workers?

The victims’ families certainly don’t. Natalia’s father told local news media he wants more police, not fewer. Her aunt said, “We talk about Black Lives Matter, but at the end of the day, we’re killing each other off. We’re killing our babies.”

“The No. 1 cause of preventable death for young white men is accidents, such as car accidents and drownings,” Larry Elder notes. “The No. 1 reason for death, preventable or otherwise for young black men, is homicide, almost always at the hands of another young black man.” How depressing.

Police have to deal with way too many criminals, attacks, confrontations and murders, especially in poor and minority areas of our cities. They never know who will pull a gun, even during a routine intervention, traffic stop or domestic disturbance – or which incident might be a setup, an ambush. That’s part of the reason some officers are jumpy or feel they must use potentially deadly force when they would much prefer not to. But racist tendencies, much less systemic racism, have nothing to do with it.

The United States once had systemic, government-decreed racism. This is no longer the case, and elevating individual, thankfully now pretty rare cases of racism into something systemic gets us nowhere.

It is much more likely that what is happening today is the result of too many black boys being raised fatherless, by gangs, amid street violence – and to their not attending school, and thus growing up with no education, skills or future. They likewise receive no grounding in civics, humanity, morality or religion, and have few scruples and little remorse over murdering someone to settle a score or perceived insult.

Just as in medicine, getting the diagnosis wrong can be much worse than useless. Trying to blame or cure systemic white racism or supposedly widespread individual white racism will only make matters worse. Blaming people for things they are not doing just makes them angry. Intimidating them into silence over these accusations just makes them angry and resentful.

Honest, probing social science, media coverage and debate could help us find solutions. Name calling, guilt trips and false assertions of systemic racism will make the situation worse. That people are being told everything is due to racism is tearing us apart, instead of pulling us together in search of solutions. It is a political trick that is causing horrific, widespread social upheaval, whether by accident or design.

Marching, screaming, burning, looting and simplistic, deceptive slogans are not solutions. They are not even calls for constructive action. They are certainly not calls to ponder the points presented here and in countless other articles and reports – or to reexamine some of the well-intended but woefully misguided government programs that helped get us where we are today.

Angrily demanding that “things have to change” is not a step forward. It may even be a step backward, if it leads to more confusion, and more stupid or useless programs. Promoting racial division and discord will ensure that the real causes of crime, violence and murder in our black and other minority communities are never addressed

These issues cry out for attention they are not getting. Perhaps after the elections, after the insanity and riots are over, we can have honest, no-holds-barred conversations about this, without being shouted down and canceled out. We must hope so. Otherwise, our nation’s future is bleak indeed.

David Wojick, PhD is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. He writes regularly about climate change, energy and social issues.

My Comments:

Many violent young men in black communities were forced to attend government-run schools that were little more than holding pens.  They received extremely inadequate educations, despite the fact that the school systems often cost taxpayers very high ratios of money per student.  It is extremely frustrating to be forced to spend your time in a boring environment for many hours a day.  It also does not help that the mostly government education establishment in the name of feminism decries males as brutish and chauvinist suppressors of women, thereby depriving males of their role as protectors and providers of women and children.  This is hardly conducive in convincing young men to behave responsibly, to care for the women they have sex with, and to care for the children who may result.  Being so poorly educated, taking on such responsibilities becomes much harder.  So more children wind up without a father at home.  In these poorly educated communities, most of the people are not knowledgeable enough to vote intelligently.  It is common for them to cast 90% of their votes for the Democratic Party, which was almost always responsible for their extremely inadequate educations and for providing less policing than is needed to make their neighborhoods more secure. The lack of security and Democratic barriers to business formation, make it more expensive to live in their neighborhoods and result in few job opportunities.

A very vicious cycle has been set up in many black communities, especially those where there has long been Democratic Party control of the local government.  That party fights hard to prevent educational choice by suppressing non-government schools, it provides poor teachers, a poor school curriculum, and surprisingly poor school facilities and safety given the education budgets.  The Democrat Party is especially likely to create many barriers to starting businesses and causes business expenses to be much greater than they should be.  That party also underfunds police who are much needed to make these black communities safe enough to raise families in them and to operate businesses that provide needed services and jobs.

The systematic racism that does exist is that perpetrated by the Democratic Party.  It is hardly surprising that this is the same party of slavery, of Jim Crow laws, of the KKK (including President Woodrow Wilson and Senator Robert Byrd, who Joe Biden said was his Senate mentor), and the party that provided many more of the votes against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did the Republicans who voted for it with much higher percentages in both the House and the Senate.

If you want a society in which every life is valued, then you should understand that such a society is one that believes that every individual has many broad rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.  These rights include the right to pursue an education, to pursue a livelihood, freedom of contract, freedom of privacy, freedom of conscience, and freedom of association.  None of these rights require that anyone else has to serve you or provide for you, but they certainly do require that no one initiate the use of force to prevent you as an individual from pursuing your values and managing your own life while enjoying these individual rights.  In our society, as in many, it is the government which is the main initiator of the use of force to prevent individuals from exercising their individual rights.  None of these individual rights is neither enhanced, nor diminished by virtue of one's ethnicity or skin color.  These are not collective, block, or faction rights.  They are the rights of each and every individual human being and must be honored for every citizen of the United States of America.  For that matter, every government and every society around the world should be doing the same.

Multilateral anti-Development Banks by Paul Driessen and David Wojick

USA finances prolonged poverty, misery, disease, and death through international banks

“Foreign Operations” appropriation bills now working their way through Congress supposedly provide funding to “advance U.S. diplomatic priorities overseas,” “increase global security,” and continue “life-saving global health and humanitarian assistance programs for the world’s most vulnerable populations.”

The bills include handsome funding for the World Bank and other so-called Multilateral Development Banks: some $1.8 billion in total. The United States is by far the World Bank Group’s largest donor, and a major funder of four other MDBs: the African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

In recent years, these banks have embraced manmade climate change alarmism as a key foundation for their lending policies. In particular, they refuse to fund the development of electric power generation via fossil fuels – thereby starving impoverished nations and families of desperately needed electricity.

Instead, the MDBs are pouring money into solar and wind power schemes that simply cannot produce affordable, reliable electricity on a large enough scale to help raise their client countries out of poverty.

In fact, they are ramping up their green madness. The five just-named MDBs, along with the European Investment Bank and Islamic Development Bank, recently released a joint report on what they call “climate finance” – which last year jumped a whopping 30% – to a staggering $34 billion dollars!

With over $13 billion in its coffers, the World Bank has the lion’s share of this green oppression money. But every one of these banks has greatly increased its climate focus, some even doubling it.

That is not just appalling. It is immoral and contrary to the supposed purposes of the appropriation bills. The MDBs have become anti-development banks, anti-vulnerable people banks. Their virtue-asserting “climate finance” terminology is more accurately described as climate callousness.

These tens of billions of dollars should help support projects that provide real, affordable, dependable power for the nearly 1.2 billion people around the world who still do not have electricity. Another 2 billion have electrical power only sporadically and unpredictably. In India alone, almost as many people as live in the USA still lack electricity. In Sub-Saharan Africa, nearly 700 million people (the population of Europe) rarely or never have electricity, and still cook and heat with wood, charcoal, and animal dung.

Every year, hundreds of millions become ill and 5 million die of lung and intestinal diseases from inhaling pollutants from open fires, and from lack of clean water, refrigeration and bacteria-free food. Largely because their nations lack energy to power modern economies, nearly 3 billion survive on a few dollars per day, and more millions die every year from preventable or curable diseases.

But the anti-development banks simply double down on their lethal policies. Their new report asserts: “The joint methodology for tracking climate change mitigation finance recognizes the importance of long-term structural changes such as the shift in energy production to renewable energy technologies, and the modal shift to low-carbon modes of transport.”

They’ve served notice that they stopped financing coal-fired power in 2010. Now they intend to stop financing oil and gas exploration by poor countries, and instead will push for total “decarbonization.”

Just like that. Fossil fuels gone from developing nation energy funding. No discussion. No vote. No actual evidence for climate cataclysms. No recourse. Just a policy decision by unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats – supported by self-serving pressure groups, politicians and “green” energy companies.

These bankers, pols and activists couldn’t even run their own operations (or their homes) on sporadic, unpredictable, 14/4/265 wind and solar power. The companies couldn’t even manufacture their wind turbines and solar panels. Yet they demand that entire developing nations accept whatever jobs, medical facilities, schools, homes and living standards can be supported by this fairy tale energy.

It is an obscene global tragedy. These MDB policies condemn billions to poverty and millions to slow, agonizing death. America should no longer support any of this. No decent country should.

Thankfully for the sidelined nations, Chinese banks have begun helping to finance coal- and gas-fired power in Asia and Africa. In the process, they have gained tremendous political and strategic leverage, at the expense of the United States, Europe and MDBs. Other banks can and should do likewise.

All developing countries should avoid doing what rich nations are doing now that they are rich. Instead, they should do what rich nations did to become rich. They should remember that wealthy industrialized countries did not have MDBs to help them. They created institutions to finance the power generation and factories that created the jobs, middle classes, health and prosperity that paid for it all – and far more.

China, India and other emerging economies are doing the same thing. They are effectively telling the World Bank and other MDBs: “Get lost. We don’t need your funding, with all your anti-development strings. You eco-imperialist banks and activists will not hold us back any longer. We are going to chart our own destiny and take our rightful places among Earth’s healthy and prosperous people.”

The MDBs claim their policies reflect Paris Climate Treaty vision of “making financial flows consistent with low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development” – by coordinating climate “mitigation” (prevention) and “adaptation” programs. This moral preening ignores critical realities.

To be resilient in the face of climate change (natural or manmade), countries must be wealthy and technologically advanced. That is impossible with existing or foreseeable renewable energy on scales required to replace today’s fossil fuel energy and power up countries that are still in the dark ages – especially if the banks and their allies remain opposed to nuclear (and hydroelectric) power.

Moreover, the obsessive, unbending focus on alleged fossil-fuel-driven climate chaos ignores the enormous social, economic, health and other benefits that fossil fuels have bestowed on humanity over the past 150 years. It ignores the ways actual temperature and weather observations have been revised, “homogenized” and exaggerated to reflect alarmist narratives and computer models.

It ignores the unsustainable amounts of metals, hydrocarbons, concrete, and especially scenic and habitat land that would be required to convert the world to wind, solar, battery and biofuel power. And for what?

At this point, there is no convincing evidence (observations instead of models) demonstrating that carbon dioxide levels drive climate and weather; today’s temperatures, polar ice, sea level rise, storms or droughts are dangerously or profoundly unprecedented; humans can control all of this by limiting CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions; or anything on the horizon can replace fossil fuels anytime soon.

Indeed, on what basis was it decreed that a crisis or tipping point would be reached if Earth experienced 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius (2.7 or 3.6 Fahrenheit) in higher average global temperatures since 1850, when the Little Ice Age ended and the modern industrial age began? Where is the real-world evidence?

For MDBs to remain focused on alleged climate and weather chaos, mostly in the distant future – while ignoring today’s massive, horrendous poverty, disease, malnutrition and death – is morally depraved.

President Trump, Senate Majority Leader McConnell, House Speaker Ryan and Secretary of State Pompeo need to end the insanity and manslaughter. They need to give this money to agencies and programs that will support fossil fuels and real life-saving actions for the world’s most vulnerable people.

Congress and the White House are a short trek from the World Bank headquarters. They should have no trouble delivering the message – and making it resonate with the other Multilateral Development Banks.

If Congress isn’t up to the task, perhaps Mr. Trump can redirect some of this money – or other billions that are being wasted on climate alarmism and renewable energy fantasies.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of books and articles on energy, climate change and economic development. David Wojick is an independent analyst specializing in science and logic in public policy.

My Comments:

I am not an advocate of taxing Americans to provide economic aid to other nations.  But if you are going to do this, do it so that you maximize raising their standard of living and their productivity so that they will make better trading partners and become better people in the future.  The Multilateral Development Bank policies to prevent people of the underdeveloped nations from having reliable power are contrary to good policy and a sad, sad waste of the American taxpayers' money.