New Study Busts Narrative of Police 'Systemic Racism'
America’s cops are racist bigots who prey on young black men and shoot them without cause — at least that’s what many anti-police voices and media narratives claim.
Shockingly, that sentence isn’t far off from what countless people on the far left seem to believe.
“Black Lives Matter” activist Shaun King, for instance, frequently uses inflammatory rhetoric that treats all police officers as the enemy, and phrases like “systemic racism” imply that anyone with a badge is biased toward assaulting and even killing Americans of color.
But is it true? A detailed new study says “no,” and it confirms other research showing that systemic police racism is a dangerous myth.
Researchers from two major universities set emotion aside to look at the data and found no racial disparity in the use of force by American police toward suspects.
“When adjusting for crime, we find no systematic evidence of anti-Black disparities in fatal shootings, fatal shootings of unarmed citizens, or fatal shootings involving misidentification of harmless objects,” the study explained.
The research was conducted by two Michigan State University psychology professors in conjunction with William Terrill, an Arizona State University professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice and noted police behavior expert.
According to The Daily Wire, the joint research project pored over two years of shooting data from 2015 and 2016. The professors discovered that when officer-involved shootings appeared to be higher than normal, it was almost always tied to a higher crime rate.
In simple terms, areas of high crime may tend to have more police use of force, but there was no evidence of that force being disproportionate or targeted toward one race.
“Multiverse analyses showed only one significant anti-Black disparity of 144 possible tests. Exposure to police given crime rate differences likely accounts for the higher per capita rate of fatal police shootings for Blacks, at least when analyzing all shootings,” the study explained.
That conclusion isn’t all that surprising. Previous studies have found similar facts, essentially dismantling the liberal narrative of widespread racism within America’s police departments.
Contrary to the picture painted by the Black Lives Matter movement and other radical groups, there is evidence that police are actually less likely to use force on black suspects than they are against white perpetrators.
“Officers’ use of lethal force following an arrest for a violent felony is more than twice the rate for white as for black arrestees, according to one study,” reported The Wall Street Journal.
“Another study showed that officers were three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed whites,” The Journal continued.
Remember that unarmed suspects may still warrant legally justified lethal force if officers have a reasonable belief that they or the public are in danger. “Unarmed” does not always mean “not a threat.”
Even more evidence confirms that the anti-police narrative is complete bunk.
“A new study of over a thousand police-involved shootings found what researcher Harvard Prof. Roland G. Fryer Jr. calls ‘the most surprising result of my career’: There is no racial bias in police-involved shootings,” Daily Wire reported about a Harvard University study in 2016.
“Not only are blacks not more likely to be fired upon by police than whites in tense moments, the study found that, if anything, they are less likely to be shot at,” the report continued.
It’s worth noting that the lead researcher in that study, Professor Fryer Jr., is himself an African-American who dug into the evidence after being upset by the Michael Brown and Freddie Gray cases, but ended up having his mind changed by the actual facts.
Once again, a liberal narrative falls apart. The truth is that America’s law enforcement officers are by and large a non-biased force for good — and it’s time they got the appreciation they deserve for doing a difficult job under dangerous circumstances.
Truth and Accuracy
We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.
Advertise with The Western Journal and reach millions of highly engaged readers, while supporting our work. Advertise Today.
