Jan. 8, 2021 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
11:08
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hello, I'm Jared Taylor with American Renaissance. | |
| The United States is in an uproar over the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police. | |
| There have been demonstrations in over 400 cities and looting and arson in every major U.S. city. | |
| Why are so many people in the streets? | |
| Because they believe that American society is systematically racist and that the police brutalize and even casually murder black men. | |
| The news constantly tells them that the police are racist, and many people think the gruesome video of the death of George Floyd bears this out. | |
| But let's look at the facts. | |
| Some may surprise you. | |
| Police in America make 12 to 13 million arrests every year. | |
| How often does this lead to the death of an unarmed black person? | |
| We know the exact number thanks to a Washington Post database of every killing by the police. | |
| No one else has better figures. | |
| So please, stop and guess how many unarmed blacks are killed every year. | |
| 200? 500? | |
| Last year, the figure was 9. Just 9. And that number is going down, not up. | |
| In 2015, police killed 38 unarmed blacks. | |
| In 2017, they killed 21. Well, what about white people? | |
| Last year, police killed 19 unarmed whites in addition to the 9 unarmed blacks. | |
| In almost every case, whether the person who died was black or white, an inquiry found that the officers' actions were justified. | |
| Now, you may find this hard to believe, but in 2019, the chances of being unarmed, arrested, and then killed by the police were higher for whites than for blacks. | |
| For both races, it was something very rare. | |
| One out of 292,000 arrests for blacks and one out of 283,000 arrests for whites. | |
| But, to repeat, the chances of an unarmed white man being arrested and killed by the police are slightly higher than for an unarmed black man. | |
| What about the people the police kill who are armed? | |
| Since 2015, When the Post began tracking these numbers, the police have killed about 1,000 people every year. | |
| One quarter of them were black. | |
| Now this is about twice their share of the population, which is 13%. | |
| So is this proof of police racism? | |
| Probably not. | |
| The data tell us that blacks are considerably more likely than whites to commit crimes and therefore come into potentially violent contact with the police. | |
| Here are numbers for 2018, the most recent year available. | |
| Blacks accounted for 37% of arrests for all violent crimes, 54% of arrests for robbery, and 53% of arrests for murder. | |
| In the overwhelming majority of cases, it's people who commit crimes like these, who threaten the police and others, who are shot by the police. | |
| For blacks to be only 25% of the people police killed can seem like a surprisingly low figure. | |
| Here's another statistic. | |
| Every year, criminals kill about 120 to 150 police officers, and we know from this FBI table that every year, on average, about 35% of cop killers are black. | |
| So to repeat: Blacks are 13% of the population and account for 25% of the people killed by police. | |
| But look at these high levels of involvement in violent crime. | |
| They suggest it would not be surprising if blacks accounted for more than 25% of the people killed by the police. | |
| Now, I have mentioned the high black percentages of arrests for violent crime. | |
| You may think that these figures reflect police racism. | |
| And not racial differences in crime rates. | |
| You may think that biased police are arresting innocent blacks and letting guilty whites go and that's why the black arrest rates are so high. | |
| Well, we have very valuable survey data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics that disproves this view. | |
| As this page explains every year, Data are obtained from a nationally representative sample of about 240,000 interviews on criminal victimization, involving 160,000 unique persons in about 95,000 | |
| households. The government asks these 160,000 people if they have been a victim of violent crime. | |
| They're then asked lots of details, including the race of the person who attacked them. | |
| Many of these crimes are not even reported to the police. | |
| So the numbers in this survey are always greater than the numbers of arrests for the same crimes. | |
| However, and this is the key point, the racial proportions track almost perfectly. | |
| For example, the American public says that over half the muggers were black. | |
| So when half the muggers, the police arrest, turn out to be black, is that proof of police bias? | |
| No. The police are doing what they're supposed to do: arrest criminals without regard to race. | |
| There have been scientific studies of possible police bias against blacks and Hispanics. | |
| This paper, published last year, is from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, probably the most prestigious peer-reviewed journal in the country. | |
| It built a sophisticated database for all the fatal police shootings in 2015 and looked at them from every possible racial angle. | |
| Its findings? | |
| Under the heading"Significance," it wrote,"We find no evidence of anti-black or anti-Hispanic disparities across shootings, and white officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers." You will not be shot, | |
| in other words, by the police unless you are threatening them in a dangerous way. | |
| You will not be shot because of your race. | |
| And this is true of officers of all races. | |
| Roland Fryer is a black economist at Harvard. | |
| He was angry after the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. | |
| So he did his own research on police killing. | |
| He carefully studied 1,332 police shootings in 10 big city police departments. | |
| When he compared the circumstances of each killing, he too could find no evidence of police bias. | |
| If anything, police were more likely to shoot a non-threatening white than a non-threatening black person. | |
| Professor Fryer said,"It was the most surprising research result of my career." Well, why did Roland Fryer find it surprising? | |
| Because just like the people who are demonstrating now, he believed what he read in the papers. | |
| And let me give you a very relevant example. | |
| On June 3rd, just two days ago, the New York Times published a long article with this headline, Minneapolis police use force against black people at seven times the rate of whites. | |
| Sounds pretty awful, doesn't it? | |
| But this article, Says nothing, nothing at all about racial differences in crime rates or arrest rates. | |
| Not one word. | |
| It would be like learning that the police were seven times more likely to use force against men living in Minneapolis than against women and getting outraged over anti-male bias. | |
| But wouldn't it be important to know that men were much more likely than women to commit crime, to be arrested, resist arrest? | |
| Wouldn't male behavior? | |
| And not police bias. | |
| Explain why police use force on men more often than on women? | |
| So, what was the situation in Minneapolis? | |
| Here are graphs taken from a Minneapolis Police Department report from 2009 to 2014. | |
| Here are the racial percentages of victims, suspects, and arrests for an aggregate of violent crimes: murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault. | |
| Blacks were 12 times more likely than people of all other races combined to be suspects in these crimes and 9.5 times more likely to be arrested. | |
| In light of these figures, can it be surprising that the Minneapolis police use force on blacks seven times more often than on whites? | |
| Once again, the reasonable conclusion is that the police are reacting to behavior, not race. | |
| For the Times, not to have included this information about racial differences and arrests is either grossly negligent or just plain dishonest. | |
| This kind of reckless reporting gives people a completely false impression of the police. | |
| Now, I'm not trying to justify what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis. | |
| He was a big guy. | |
| He was resisting arrest to the point that even with cuffs on, A team of three officers couldn't get him into a squad car. | |
| The police had a problem on their hands. | |
| But keeping a knee on Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes may have been homicide. | |
| Of course, the solution is to indict the officer and punish him if he's guilty. | |
| But even if he is guilty, who can be sure that race had anything to do with what he did? | |
| He might have restrained a violent white criminal. | |
| The solution to all this is not to demonstrate and riot against police racism, for which there is so little hard evidence. | |
| There may be some bad apples among police officers, but the system is working just as it should. | |
| Almost without fail, police deal with criminals properly, without regard to race. | |
| I know that there is a tremendous head of steam built up behind the idea of police racism. | |
| But it's not the police who need reform. | |
| It's the media. | |
| This crisis will not end until the press stop presenting a false and dangerously inflamed picture of the American justice system. | |
| Rioting and looting are wrong, no matter what the reason. | |
| Rioting and looting over an illusion. |
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