Stop Blaming The Police!

Yes, black lives matter, but the police mistrust and shootings are completely undeserved.

My family had always taught respect for the police and that they had a very hard job. “They are there to help you, not hurt you,” my mother would say, and I believed her. I have seen police officers in their cars or on the street quite a few times since then, and they are always friendly, never rude. Even when my car got stopped for speeding, they were helpful and respectful.

Then, a few years ago, stories started popping up in the news about police shooting black men who are unarmed or innocent. People came forward with stories. Newspapers and politicians started treating police like the villains. I was astonished! Could the nice police officers I had seen really be hurting innocent people just because of their race? As a person who has always believed internal bias exists but that outright discrimination and racism are very rare, I found this hard to believe. Were my experiences so different from these people’s just because I was white and they weren’t?

I was left wondering for a couple years. Then, the other day, I saw a video about a Black Lives Matter protester going through a day of police training (link below). I was absolutely intrigued by the result and the protester’s reactions. My trust of the police and my arguments that they had a hard job that they did well finally seemed vindicated.

In the video, a (black) BLM protest leader is given three situations where he is asked to control the suspect. The suspects include both blacks and whites. The protester “dies” once and shoots an unarmed man once (the other time he managed to control the suspect. A white news reporter then goes through the same scenarios with the same results.

In another video (link also below), Fox interviews the protester, who says that he has a new perspective on the difficulty of making split-second decisions. The man also admits that the police should be complied with, and that, while shootings should be investigated, civilians need to make an effort to be cooperative so as not to be put in a position to be shot.

I personally admire this man for having open-mindedness to go through this exercise and for being respectful and eloquent enough to make thoughtful remarks after the training. Both parties need more people like him who are willing to be respectful to those with opposing views and are well-spoken enough to effectively convey their opinions. But I digress.

The point is, what do these videos show us? They seem to point out a few things:

• Police are able to show much more restraint and patience than civilians (because most of us would’ve freaked out and shot all three.)
• Police officers’ jobs are anything but easy.
• Split-second decisions can mean life or death.
• The black participant and white participant treated the situations the same way.
• It is really easy to shoot an unarmed person because you fear for your life.

These seemed interesting, especially number four. Could this help dispel the narrative of white police officers shooting unarmed black men because of racism?

First, we need to look at whether whites are being shot by police too. Washington post says the following on deaths by police shootings:

“White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population.”

Oh. This seems condemning. But wait — let’s look at crime rates. If percentage of shootings match crime rates, then that will make sense. The Prison Policy Initiative provides this:

• Whites make up 39% of the U.S. prison population.
• Blacks make up 40% of the U.S. prison population.

Probably due to, in general, worse educations and socioeconomic conditions, blacks have higher crime rates than whites. So, to recap, whites make up only 39% of prison populations but 49% of officer killings while blacks make up 40% of prison populations and 24% of those shot. Since few enough people are shot to make a difference in prison populations, this seems to suggest that blacks are not discriminated against in shootings. If anything, whites are being discriminated against!

(Unless, of course, you think that there is a grand conspiracy between police, judges, and juries to arrest and convict more blacks instead of whites. This would make very little sense, however, as juries contain a mix of races. Not to mention all of the African-American judges and police officers out there.)

Anyways, this video (and the statistics) seemed to paint a different narrative than the media. Then came the Dallas and Baton Rouge police shootings.

Honestly, I was shocked. Eight innocent officers were killed in cold blood. In both set of murders, the shooters ambushed unsuspecting officers with the purpose of killing them. Both shooters’ motives seemed to be “payback” for shootings of blacks committed by other police officers. Ironically, one of the victims of the Baton Rouge shootings (Montrell Jackson) was African-American. Nine days before the shooting, he was heartbreakingly quoted as saying,

“I swear to God I love this city, but I wonder if this city loves me. In uniform I get nasty, hateful looks and out of uniform some consider me a threat. … These are trying times. Please don’t let hate infect your heart."

All shootings are tragic, and I hope for the day where people will no longer shoot a bullet at other people, regardless of the reason. There were, however, two things that made these shootings especially terrible:

1. The victims were ambushed. In both cases, the killer had obviously planned the attack. The Dallas perpetrator had clearly planned the ambush to coincide with protests, and the Baton Rouge shooter had been speaking on social media about killing police for over a week before the shooting. This is incredibly different from in-the-moment shootings by police who fear for their lives, and ambushing and killing police officers in retaliation for these deaths is wildly inappropriate.
2. The victims weren’t involved in any of the protested killings. Of course, even if they had shot somebody, their deaths wouldn’t be justified, but this makes it even worse. The two shooters were protesting black killings by killing innocent, unrelated police officers whose only crimes were trying to help their community by signing up for jobs as police officers. Their murders were absolutely disgusting.

(I understand that almost nobody in the BLM community supports these murders, and I am not trying to suggest that all BLM activists are like that. I merely point out these shootings as yet another injustice against the police, and a radical demonstration of the distrust of police officers.)

Maybe there is a racist police officer out there, and of course black lives matter. However, the majority of killings of blacks by police officers are fueled by fear for the officer’s personal safety, not by an evil, discriminatory government organization plotting against African-Americans. More whites are shot by police than blacks; it’s just that the media selects the rare instances of black victims and reports on them. The Black Lives Matter movement is (usually) well-intentioned, but their efforts are misguided and their conclusion of racism flawed.