It has been a very difficult few days in America. It started with what appears to be the flat out murder of a man in Louisiana, followed by what appears to be the flat out murder of a man in Minnesota. Both of these events were at the hands of police, and the victims were black. Then, as the community marched in Dallas to protest these events, a deranged man shot 11 police officers and killed 5 of them. The deranged man was black.
The piece that is laying hard on my heart is the grossly negligent thinking that is endemic across the spectrum in America now. No one knows what numbers and statistics are correct. There is constant argument about the specifics. In general, the only thing we, as a nation, have completed successfully is to confuse and infuriate each other.
Some things that should inform us. More white people than black people are shot by police. This is a statement that nearly everyone agrees with, but it quickly degenerates into argument about the accuracy of the numbers. So, for the sake of this discussion, here is a website for the Washington Post database that tracks such things. These numbers are through the end of June, but if you bookmark it you can check back as they update the database.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings-2016/
If you look at those numbers, 238 white people have been shot and killed by police. 123 black people have been shot by the police. 79 Hispanics have been shot and killed by police. In total, 225 people that are identified as other than white have been shot and killed by police this year.
By the 2010 census, 63.7% of the population is white. 13% of the population is black. 17% of the population is Hispanic. If we break down the numbers by percentage simply on lines of race, the distribution should be: 320 white casualties, 66 black casualties, and 86 Hispanic casualties.
All that math tells us is what is claimed is true, black people are shot by police at more than twice the proportion they make of the population. White people are shot at much less than the proportion they make of the population. Only in the Hispanic community do we see something close to proportionality with numbers.
That is at least a basis of conversation and seems pretty damning, and exactly the reason mathematics can be a lying, sniveling dog. These numbers are utilized by people that should and do know better to taint the conversation for their particular purposes. What none of these numbers tell is the true story.
Looking at that story, it is easy to have the conversation that has been pushed upon us for years. The system is disproportionate to minorities. And while that is definitely true, I would suggest that it is less about race, and more about probabilities. Would it shock you to know that 26 police officers have been shot this year?
Let me lie to you with numbers, to show you how easy it is. Only .000326% of the black population has been shot so far this year by police. Meanwhile, .00946% of the LEO population has been shot. That means police officers are almost 30 times more likely to be shot than black folks, by percentage of the population. Imagine if I could get on CNN with this shocking factoid, could get people to hear that and understand that police are almost 30 times more likely to be shot than even black folk. Would it fuel a disastrous and misguided Blue Lives Matter movement? Or would people of good reason and common sense say to themselves, "well, they are cops, that means they interact with criminals at a much higher rate, because of their job, it makes sense that they would have a much higher probability to be shot."
The latter would be correct. And this is the issue the black community is struggling with. People who I will assume had the best of intentions, got fed a number. Without understanding the construct or probabilities associated with the numbers, they began to base an incredibly publicized and electric movement around them. "Black people are killed at twice the rate of whites, by the police!" With only that, and no understanding or conception of the probabilities and structure around that ratio, they were horrified. I would be too. And, they set out to do something about it.
I applaud the Black Lives Movement for that. It is certainly something that needs to be addressed. But, I think that the approach of trying to change the police is incorrect. We must address the probabilities and construct of the population that drive these numbers.
The numbers for black folk look unbelievably high. But, I think that there is a reason the distribution looks like this. It is an important point to understand. The police interact much more frequently with people in areas of high crime. These areas are disproportionately the home of black citizens in this country. A police officer is human. Human reactions are guided by experience. Areas of high crime means areas of intense effort to avoid, elude and obstruct the police. This leads police to a very different profile and expectation in reactions in areas disproportionately populated with black citizens.
I am not saying that is correct, or what should happen, I am just pointing out that humans are informed by experience. We have given them more powerful weapons. We have decided to attempt to control drug usage by impacting the street level users and sellers. We put police, in a heightened state of preparedness, in the position of dealing with people at the most desperate level, at a much higher frequency than the rest of the population (that is predominately white.)
These are the facts. So, in areas of greater criminality (driven by poverty and opportunity, not by race), the task of the police is to be at the street level and focused on the lowest rung of the ladder to the pit of despair. The decisions made by both parties in that situation are poor, and result in the worst outcome much more often.
I refuse to believe that we have somehow sifted the American population, in every major community and turned only the racists into cops. I do not believe this discussion is about racism. It is about probabilities, and the things that drive those probabilities. Honestly, whoever you are reading this, if you found yourself driving through these areas the police patrol most frequently, and you saw four or five young men, regardless of color, standing on the corner, what would you assume they are doing? You know, right after you lock all your car doors, and decide you are going through that intersection whether the light is red or green.
Assumptions suck, but they are fact of human nature. It is what informs the flight or fight instinct, and regardless of training, regardless of how fair it is, assumptions are always made. And, just as I think the Black Lives Matter group has been horrible deluded by numbers, so too have the police. You see, the police and most of the government, trot out these huge numbers of black on black crime. There is no reliable source of data, NONE. All of the numbers you see sited all over the place are estimates, and concoctions based on guesses and models. That means wrong, some more than others.
Yes, more blacks kill blacks than whites. Shockingly, more whites kill whites than blacks. What is most troubling is that we continue to focus this prism on race. It is an incorrect approach that is going to always result in what we see, ineffective actions, continued anger and frustration and no real change or progress in the actual problem. Most murder victims are killed by someone they know, and that usually means someone of the same racial makeup. That is just the fact.
What is wrong in this nation is that poverty is the most disabling and horrific genetic disease in the nation. And, as of today, it has no cure. But, poverty, the economic disadvantage that come with poor education, poor opportunity and poor training, is endemic in the same communities for generations. As the rate of poverty goes up, the crime rate goes up. As the crime rate goes up, the murder rate goes up, because it is a component of the crime rate. This excites everyone, and vows are made and elections decided on cleaning up the issue, almost always related to policing and law enforcement. That is like addressing poor car safety by ticketing the folks who have been in an accident. Doesn't even sound right, does it?
The key to real reform, is not in making the police more sensitive, or aware. The answer is not in the ethnic diversity or make up of the police. The answer is not in addressing incarceration rates. The answer is not in judicial oversight because minorities are more likely to get longer sentences. It is already way too late in the process for any of that to work. It is all needed, but not today, and not now. Those will not impact the bad brakes rolling off the assembly line. It is just a ticket for causing an accident because your brakes failed.
The issues is in creating a break in the poverty and disadvantage faced by most of the intensely urban centers of population in this country. If we could come together around Impoverished Lives Matter, and work on making education important to parents, stability important in the family, opportunity an engine that provides a real living wage, we can almost eliminate the racial disparities in all of these statistics that we interpret so badly.
Imagine that instead of programs and things based on something like race, we make it based on economic factors in the community. No one deserves a scholarship because they are black, or greater admission rates because they are black, they need a scholarship because they are poor, and they need admission guidelines based on the poor ass job the public schools are doing.
Imagine programs that create real, valuable work in areas of generational unemployment. I don't mean a recession, you know where most of us lost a bunch of money in our 401K (that has come back now) and value out of our homes (that has mostly come back now). I mean places where the unemployment rate has been 30% and above for multiples of the 20 year generational period. If we did that, and had to put that work somewhere, like in getting rid of lead pipes in the public water distribution system, fixing the power grid that is 40 years older than the nuclear power plants that are 50 years old, fixing the roads so that there are enough of them and they are of a good enough quality to represent America, fixing the bridges that are, in the majority, structurally unsound and at risk, across the country, what would we have?
Imagine the return on that investment. Not only to the infrastructure of America, but to the crime rate, to breaking the cycle of poverty that impacts all races and drives the statistics most often used by our politicians to lie to us. It would eliminate the need to have this continued debate about gun control. Employed people, worried most about their families, their jobs and their future, rarely get in trouble with their guns, they are busy doing other things. It would eliminate this continued stupid debate about illegal immigration. If you have to have government papers to get the jobs, and we are smart enough to create a path to get those papers, we get taxable income, we get rid of an entrenched portion of the criminal activity, we get rid of a stain on our nation, treating people like they don't count.
Yeah, I know. That means we have to spend money. We have to invest in our nation, through our citizens. Of course, that could not possibly work. When FDR did it in the Great Depression, the economy did not recover, nor did we build the cornerstones of the infrastructure we utilize still today, 85 years later. That is all imagination and a vast left wing conspiracy to get your tax dollars.
It is actually the only thing that has been effective, ever, in this great experiment that is America. Only when we turned on the spigot of government spending, have we seen real, indelible improvement to the lot of life for the entire spectrum of the country. What do those 5 slain officers in Dallas, and those two black men slain the days before, and the hundreds across the nation of all races mean? It might just mean that we should solve the root cause of the issue, and stop talking about race.
I agree with Morgan Freeman, want to stop racism? Stop talking about it. And then get to work on real issues with real solutions, that make impact. That is just what I get out of the numbers, when they lie to me, and interpret to me, and bark at me in anger, and just plain don't understand what it all means. Time to get to work. The only cure for anything we have ever had in this country is to get to work. We should try taking a dose or two of that medicine and real soon.
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