The "math" from Black Lives Matter sounds like it came from Common Core

Apparently the Democrats – including both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders – have cast their lot with the Black Lives Matter movement for next year, no doubt hoping to hang on to the full share of the black vote which Barack Obama drove to the polls in the last two cycles. If that’s how they’re going to play it, then it’s time to prepare for the inevitable media assault and ensure that some measure of truth leaks out during the process. One good place to start would be the grade school level math required to analyze the most common claims being tossed around.

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Just this week the former First Lady told the Huffington Post that she was going to be taking a good, long look at the police around the country if she’s elected president.

Expanding the federal government’s abilities to investigate police departments across the country would be a key part of Hillary Clinton’s approach to criminal justice reform if she were president, an aide told The Huffington Post on Friday.

Clinton’s plan would include doubling funding for the Justice Department’s collaborative reform program that works with police departments to implement change, expanding the Civil Rights Division unit that investigates law enforcement agencies, and adding funds for training for officers on the federal, state and local level.

And you know why they need more people watching the cops, right? Because, as Deroy Murdock writes at the NY Post, bloodthirsty, racist cops are blasting black men like clay pigeons at a shooting range. At least they are if you listen to the “figures” being slung around by the BLM movement and their supporters in the media.

“Every 28 hours, a black person is murdered by police,” Black Lives Matter activist Cherno Biko told Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly. “It feels like we’re in a war.”

If true, killer cops are rubbing out some 313 innocent, law-abiding blacks annually.

Rise Up October asserts that there are “over 1,000 people a year killed by police.”

Those are some alarming figures, aren’t they? We’re talking about a veritable open hunting season. And you’ll see those figures repeated on cable news shows all winter, as well as on the stump with Democrat candidates. So it’s going to take some work to get the word out that these figures are not only wrong… they are grossly, fundamentally, wildly wrong, at least if you ask the FBI and Centers for Disease Control.

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From 2003 through 2012, law-enforcement officers killed an average of 429 people per year in “legal interventions.” These include a relatively small number of innocent people killed by cops and many more who died due to reasonable use of force…

hanks to the Ferguson Effect, blistering anti-law-enforcement rhetoric and sometimes fatal attacks on police have made cops timid, if not terrified. The result? A murder explosion that, ironically, is killing the very black people whom Black Lives Matter claims to champion. Year to date, homicides are up 8.3 percent in New York, 19.2 percent in Chicago, 51.5 percent in St. Louis and 52.5 percent in Baltimore.

On average, 4,472 black men were killed by other black men annually between Jan. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2012, according to the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports. Using FBI and CDC statistics, Professor Johnson calculates that 112 black men, on average, suffered both justified and unjustified police-involved deaths annually during this period.

This equals 2.5 percent of these 4,472 yearly deaths. For every black man — criminal or innocent — killed by a cop, 40 black men were murdered by other black men. The, at most, 2.5 percent of the problem generates relentless rage. And, yet, it is rude-to-racist to mention 97.5 percent of the problem.

I understand where Murdock is coming from here, but it’s also worth remembering that we’re talking about two entirely different and only vaguely related situations here. True, there is a fundamental hypocrisy in expending all your social and political capital on the number of black people killed by police while calling anyone who brings up the number of black on black murders a racist. (Particularly when you’re talking ratios in the 40 to 1 range.) But that massive number of murders is taking place disproportionately in broken urban centers where failed Democrat policies have led to scarred stretches of gang war real estate.

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The issue at hand here, however, is the allegations of black citizens feeling “unsafe” because of the vast numbers of them being gunned down by cops. Much like the deceptive numbers which Hillary Clinton tosses about concerning “gun deaths” in her speeches, the murderous cops figures are distorted beyond belief. Murdock brings up the NYPD as a prime example, particularly given the reputation they have in liberal talking points. In 2014 the Big Apple Boys in Blue shot and killed a grand total of eight people. Four of them were black. All were armed. (Eric Garner isn’t counted in those numbers because he was put in a choke hold and had a coronary.)

In that same year, civilian murders fell to a record low of 328. Yes, that’s right. 328 was a record low and it’s still a number equal to a war crime level massacre. That number includes 101 black-on-black murders.

Stack that up against the average of 429 people per year who die during “legal interventions” by police around the entire nation. The majority are white, though blacks are disproportionately represented. The vast majority are armed in one fashion or another and the number that are either tragic accidents (such as Tamir Rice) or at least questionable in terms of procedure where black citizens are killed is in the range of a dozen. That’s out of 1.1 million full time police officers in the nation.

Not exactly clay pigeons at a shooting range numbers, are they? Call out these dishonest figures being slung around by BLM and Democrats wherever you see them.

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Ed Morrissey 12:40 PM | November 21, 2024
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David Strom 11:20 AM | November 21, 2024
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