We’re living Barack Obama’s legacy in real time.

Barack Obama’s legacy here started early.  Not quite in office for six months Obama showed his hand with his characterization that “The police acted stupidly” in reference to the arrest of Henry Louis Gates a professor at Harvard who, locked out of his house, broke in.  A neighbor, not recognizing Gates, called 911.  The police arrived and things didn’t go well and Gates was arrested. 

When asked about race and the incident a week later, Obama responded:  "I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home, and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there's a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately."

Without the facts Obama stated the police acted stupidly and implied that racism might have played a role. Nothing however about Gates’ reported “loud and tumultuous behavior” just racism and police misbehavior. 

But this was just the beginning.  After George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin, Obama said:  “You know, when Trayvon Martin was first shot, I said that this could have been my son...Another way of saying that is Trayvon Martin could have been me, 35 years ago. And when you think about why, in the African-American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn’t go away.”

Again.  All race, no facts.

But there’s more. 

About the killing of Michael Brown Obama said: “In too many communities around the country, a gulf of mistrust exists between local residents and law enforcement… Too many young men of color feel targeted by law enforcement — guilty of walking while black or driving while black, judged by stereotypes that fuel fear and resentment and hopelessness.”

About the jury not indicting the NYPD officer involved in the killing of Eric Garner Obama said: “that we are going to take specific steps to improve the training and the work with state and local governments when it comes to policing in communities of color; that we are going to be scrupulous in investigating cases where we are concerned about the impartiality and accountability that’s taking place.”

In these instances and more Obama made the killing of a black man by police about race. It’s no surprise that the BLM movement began under Obama nor that the fiction of “systemic racism” took hold or that the black victimization ideology became omnipresent.

That’s unfortunate.

Like Rod Serling might have said, imagine if you will if Obama had handled those differently. 

What if he had said about Gates:  He should probably have remembered that the police were simply trying to protect his neighborhood after neighbors called them. Misunderstandings happen.

Or this about Brown:  Michael Brown was killed after stealing from a store, attacking the proprietor and attacking a policeman.  Had Mr. Brown not done these things he’d likely be alive.

What if he had responded to the riots in Ferguson, Missouri after the death of Brown by taking to the airwaves and told black Americans that the problem in their communities is not racist police, but criminal activity and fighting with police? 

What if he had nationalized national guard troops to restore peace in Baltimore or Ferguson rather than standing by and later coercing police forces around the country into “consent decrees” which invariably increase crime.

But he didn’t do any of those things.  Instead Barack Obama reinforced the notion that blacks are victims of systemic racism, that they cannot win on an even playing field and that in any negative outcome racism must be the cause.

It is that victimization that leads us to where we are today.  The Internet is simply bulging with videos of blacks behaving badly. Flash mobs robbing stores. Punching random people on the street. Pushing people in front of trains.  Running over bicyclists. Attacking bus drivers.  Destroying merchandise in stores. Rioting on cruise ships. Attacking airline workers. And more.  Sure, we have to state the obligatory reality that other people commit crimes too, but the fact of the matter is, blacks do so at far higher rates.

Race relations is reaching a boiling point. To put this in perspective, in 2007 75% of whites and 71% of blacks thought race relations in America were either good or very good.  By 2021 those numbers were down to 43% and 42% respectively, and no doubt they’re lower today. 

The reality of that dichotomy can be seen in two events from last month.   

In April Karmel Anthony, a 17 year old black high school student knifed and killed fellow 17 year old Austin Metcalf at a track meet in Frisco, Texas.  The family, claiming self-defense, has raised over $600,000 in support, with many of his supporters posting explicitly anti-white racist comments. 

Later that same month Shiloh Hendrix a white woman in Rochester, New York was captured on video calling a black child a nigger – vile word for certain, but one frequently used by blacks but arbitrarily off limits to whites.  After claims of death threats and pleas for security she raised over $700,000, with many of her supporters posting explicitly anti-black racist comments. 

Combine all of that with the growing phenomena called “Black fatigue” and cities, states and members of Congress calling for reparations and you get an idea of where America’s  temperature is on the scale of race relations.

And that’s where we are today. Obama had the opportunity to go down in history as one of America’s greatest presidents. He not only didn’t take it, but he made it worse. 

For longer than I can remember we’ve been told that America needs to have a Conversation about Race™.  We did, for generations, but it was always about whites abusing or keeping blacks down. That is, or at least is now, the wrong conversation. The conversation America needs to have today is pretty much the opposite. Far too many blacks see the system, the police, whites and society at large as racist, see themselves as victims and feel like they can do anything without consequences. That’s a recipe for disaster. Both for blacks and for America.  And that’s Barack Obama’s legacy. 

There may be a tiny sliver of hope, however. There are a growing number of black personalities and potential leaders who are pushing back on that victimization narrative.  Guys like Jason Whitlock, Byron Donalds, Charles Payne, Jason Riley and others are regularly telling their millions of followers how to succeed in life sans the victimization narrative, sort of a wider version of what Chris Rock did with his spectacular video How not to get your ass kicked by the police!

With Donald Trump at the helm Barack Obama’s legacy has the potential to be reversed as more Americans of all hues decide that the everything is racist shibboleth and more broadly the cancer of DEI get the derision they so badly deserve.

The Real Tragedy of the George Floyd and Daunte Wright Stories

America is on the verge of anarchy. Every time a black man is killed by police the community finds itself on the edge and the nation wonders if an inferno is about to erupt. This reality dovetailed with a meme I saw a few days ago: “The Biggest Change Since Rodney King is the Video Quality”. While video quality has improved, one thing that hasn’t changed is negative outcomes from resisting arrest. Some of the names Americans know that demonstrate that include: George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Rayshard Brooks and Michael Brown. If the media were being honest they would characterize these encounters as what they were, black men killed while resisting arrest.

In every one of these cases and many others, the men who ended up dead resisted arrest, sometimes violently. According to policeviolencereport.org there were 268 black males killed by police in the United States in 2019 (the last normal year prior to Covid). Of that number, 212 or 79% were armed (allegedly) while 182 or 68% were attacking the police (allegedly). Of the 32% who were not actively attacking the police, most were carrying on other actions such as resisting arrest, holding weapons they wouldn’t drop or attacking other people. For comparison, during that same year the numbers for white males was 415 killed with 298 or 68% armed and 281 or 68% attacking the police. An interesting note about that comparison is the percentage of black males killed who were “unarmed”, 21%, is actually significantly lower than that for white males, 32%.

It’s difficult to get a complete picture of what’s going on in America by simply looking at numbers. Luckily we also have videos, including many of the death of George Floyd. While there is much going on in those videos, one thing that is clear from them is that Floyd was resisting arrest. One can make the argument that the police were too physical for too long, but the fact is, he was on the ground as a direct result of his actions. Similarly, Dauante Wright lunged back into his car.  

Many people say that Floyd was subdued or that Wright wasn’t a threat, but the fact is no one knows. As the case of Rayshard Brooks demonstrates, things can go from calm, even collegial to confrontational in a split second. Just last week in New Mexico a suspect was conversing with a cop one moment and killing him the next.

The circumstance that America finds itself in today is the result of a purposeful manipulation of American citizens. The facts are that while black men are killed by police at a higher rate than their proportion of the population, they are killed by police at a lower rate than their proportion of perpetrators of violent crime.

The truth is, 700,000 police officers interact with Americans approximately 75 million times a year. Of those 75 million interactions, typically about 1,000 citizens are killed by police. That is a death rate below 0.002% per encounter, which means that 99.998% of police encounters pass without a death. Put another way, out of 1,000,000 Americans, 3 will die each year at the hands of the police. Compare that to 18 from texting while driving, 121 from suicide, 757 medical mistakes, and 2,000 from heart disease. At the hands of police: 3, and most of those were armed and attacking the police!

One of the things that gets lost in all of this propaganda is the job that the police do. They interact with citizens 75 million times a year. Someone stealing from a store, passing counterfeit bills or assaulting someone. There are domestic disturbances, auto accidents, speed stops, bar fights etc. In all of those circumstances and myriad others, police willingly walk into a situation with the goal of everyone exiting the encounter alive. They put their lives at risk every day for people who in most cases they don’t even know. Of course that’s the job they signed up for so it’s not a surprise, but that doesn’t make it any less courageous.

They of course don’t always get everything right. Police are human and make mistakes and there are bad cops and racists too. We've probably seen videos of cops behaving badly, but the fact is, overall, cops do an outstanding job. If they didn’t, 99.998% of encounters wouldn’t end with everyone emerging alive. There’s almost nothing in human existence that’s that successful, and that number is made that much more extraordinary because a significant number of those encounters include citizens who are armed, violent, callous and perhaps on drugs.

In the face of this widespread assault on them, the police are still expected to do their jobs, and do them perfectly. In going into situations where tensions are already elevated, where bystanders may be distracting or even interfering and where everyone seems to be filming, police are expected to comport themselves flawlessly despite elevated adrenaline and likely experiencing some combination of anger, confusion, fear, disorientation, exhaustion and more. All of this while a subject may be striking them, pointing a weapon at them, reaching into car or simply resisting arrest. Yet they are still supposed to respond perfectly every time. They don’t of course, but overall they do a pretty good job. How many of us when faced with citizens calling us “Pigs” spitting on us or striking us, or even shooting at us would be able to rein in all those emotions and perform perfectly in every instance? My guess is that most of us would fall far short of the performance most police demonstrate.

And the rarely mentioned secret (but easily observed common sense fact) is that the very communities where leftists are calling for the defunding, reimagining or disbanding the police are the very communities who benefit most from their presence. The police pullback has a cost. Murders are up in Portland 255% over the last year in Portland. Chicago 65%, New York 58%, Louisville 87%, Minneapolis 64% and LA 51%. And who exactly have been the victims of that increased murder rate? Black Americans, the very people BLM, Antifa, Democrats and the media ostensibly are seeking to protect.

The truth of the matter is that Floyd, Wright, and Brown would likely be alive today had they not resisted arrest. But that’s not the story that Democrats want to tell. Because telling young black men, or anyone, that respecting the police and not resisting arrest doesn’t make news headlines, doesn’t galvanize citizens and most importantly, doesn’t drive voters to pull the levers for Democrats.

And that’s the key. The reality is, Democrats don’t care about black Americans. They seek power and are willing to sacrifice black Americans to get it. By creating the fiction that black Americans are in the crosshairs of the police they have done an extraordinary disservice to America. The real lesson to be learned by the Floyd and Brown incidents is not that police are shooting black men with abandon but rather resisting arrest or engaging in a violent confrontation with police leads to bad outcomes. The challenges of urban America are legion, from terrible schools, limited job opportunities, and violent crime, and the fiction proffered by the left addresses none of those. What’s worse, it takes any energy that might be available to address those real problems and focuses it on addressing a fictional issue. And that’s the real tragedy here.

The Black Lives Matter Movement: The Preening of Petulant Millennials vs. Actually Accomplishing Anything

I remember once hearing a question posed by some would be philosopher: “If you could do something that cured all of the ills of the world, but only if someone you despised would get the credit, would you do it?” It’s an interesting question with a number of elements to it. Are you really a humanitarian or do you just want to be seen as such? What’s more important, your legacy or the lives of others? Are you able to overcome petty jealousy for the “greater good”? Of course as it’s a hypothetical question you can answer and gain all of the approval without actually having to do anything.

I couldn’t help but think about that question when I read about a group of Black Lives Matter protesters shutting down Chicago’s Magnificent Mile shopping district on Black Friday. The protests were in response to the killing of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. Shouting “No Justice, No Shopping” the protesters were demanding the resignation of the mayor, the police commissioner and the prosecutor. Their crimes? Not releasing the dashcam video earlier and taking too long to charge Van Dyke. He had been charged earlier in the week. Whether there was obstruction somewhere, we will see. Justice may be moving slowly, but the system is working.

But of course that doesn’t matter to the BLM protesters. The goal of the BLM movement is not to save black lives but rather to give protesters a feeling of making a difference while actually doing nothing. If the goal of the BLM movement was to save black lives, they would be protesting the murder of 9 year old Tyshawn Lee by a black gang member who targeted him because his father was in a rival gang. If the goal of the BLM was to save black lives they would be protesting the murder of another 9 year old, Jamyla Bolden, who was doing her homework at home when she was killed by a black man with a history of violence. If the goal of the BLM was to save black lives they would be protesting the drive by shooting of 10 year old Marlon Eason by two black gang members. But of course they’re not. We don’t see attempts to close down highways in Washington or restaurants in Atlanta to protest those killings.

Why? Because focusing on those kinds of things would take courage, would require more than facile sloganeering. The thing that distinguishes the BLM movement from real civil rights heroes of the last century is that men and women like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, John Lewis and thousands of others did what they did in the face of real racism and threats of real violence… when police were spraying them with fire hoses, siccing 100 lb dogs on them and beating them with clubs. And those were just the government officials in front of the cameras. With the killings of Medgar Evans, Wharlest Jackson, four little girls in a Birmingham Baptist church and many others it became clear that it wasn’t only racist police that had to be feared but Klansmen and others seeking to stop the march of civil rights at any cost. Despite all of that, there were tens of thousands of people across the country who marched and sat in and sued for equal rights. That was courage. And it made a difference.

What we see today from the BLM movement and much of the left is not only not courageous, it’s nonsensical… in addition to being a disgrace to the memory and history of real civil rights heroes. It’s easy to picket a store where people are just trying to do their Christmas shopping and few are going to bother trying to cross your lines when they can simply choose Amazon. It’s easy to sit down in a bucolic Ivy League library and spew epithets until the targets simply go away. It’s easy to go on strike if your football team is so bad it doesn’t have anything to play for in the first place. While these are all courageous “civil rights” actions in the eyes of the lefties, most importantly, they can get activists seen on TV, pretending to make a difference. But make no mistake… They’re not making a difference. They’re not fighting for the right to vote. They’re not fighting for equal access to schools and universities. They’re not fighting to remove Jim Crow laws. No, these “civil rights” activists are fighting for “safe spaces” where they won’t get their feelings hurt. They’re fighting for “justice” for Michael Brown, an 19 year old black man who was killed while attacking a police officer after he had committed a robbery. They’re fighting to take names off buildings of men whose lives did not comport to modern values.  They're fighting to remove flags they find offensive.

Which brings us back to the initial question… Do BLM protesters truly want to do things of consequence that might actually help improve the lives of black Americans or do they simply seek glory? Count one for vanity. Picket gangs who are killing hundreds of young black men and women and children each year? Nope. Organize voters to dump leftist Democrats whose progressive policies have victimized urban communities across the country and saddled them with failing schools, high taxes, staggering crime and stultifying unemployment? Nope. Fight to repair black families where 72% of all children are born to single mothers? Of course not.

We don’t hear much of that, if any, because the BLM movement isn’t about finding solutions to the challenges that many blacks face in America. No, the BLM movement is an attempt by petulant millennials and other SJWs to find their inner Kim Kardasian so that people will pay attention to them and they can pretend that they are making a difference. They are making a difference, but it’s not the one they think it is. Take a look at Baltimore, Ferguson, Chicago and New York and see what’s happening with crime in general and murder in particular after the movement demonized police. The majority of the victims of those crimes are black men and women and children, many of whom are just trying to make their way through their daily lives of work or school or raising a family. They are doing so do so in crime riddled Democrat communities enabled by “activists” like those from BLM who focus attention on easy targets where they know they will encounter little resistance, but in the end accomplish less than nothing.

They do have one thing right however. There are problems in black communities across the country. The problem is not police however. The problem is not white racism or institutional racism. While those problems will crop up now and again, the real problems of black communities have much more to do with family breakdown, failing schools, black on black crime and individual responsibility – problems shared by the larger population but which seem to disproportionately cripple black communities. And of course government strangulation of freedom and opportunity.  But those are tough issues which don't lend themselves to empty headed sloganeering like "Hands Up!  Don't Shoot!".

Fittingly, the patron saint of the BLM movement is Barack Obama, the king of obfuscation, misdirection and failure. Perhaps when he is a “retired statesman” the country will finally have had enough of the tyranny of “community organizers” and “activists” who seek not to make real change, but rather to wrap themselves in the cloak and glory of “civil rights” as they seek to loot the public treasury and silence opposition. Something good from Barack Obama... finally!

On the Anniversary of Michael Brown's Death The Washington Post Does its Best to Raise Tensions and Help the Democrat Cause

The Washington Post does its part to continue the collapse in race relations in the United States… and in the process diverts attention from the real issues facing Americans of all stripes such as an anemic economy, a disastrous Iran deal and a feckless administration that can’t seem to do anything right.

On Sunday the paper ran a piece with the following title: A year after Michael Brown’s fatal shooting, unarmed black men are seven times more likely than whites to die by police gunfire. It then proceeds to discuss the deaths of a number of unarmed black men who were killed by police since the Michael Brown case one year ago. The paper helpfully notes:

“Black men accounted for 40 percent of the 60 unarmed deaths, even though they make up just 6 percent of the U.S. population.”

While those figures might be startling, out of context they mean nothing. Certainly the fact that black men accounted for 40% of the 60 unarmed deaths is astonishing given their 6% of the population. But it doesn’t seem quite so startling when one notes that, according to the FBI, in 2012 black men were charged with 38.5% of violent crime; “even though they make up just 6% of the U.S. population.” In addition, of those under the age of 18 charged with violent crimes, 51.5% of them are black males. (Note, in both these cases the FBI stats don’t break down by sex, but according to their statistics men are 10X more likely than women to commit violent crimes such as murder.)

And the word unarmed does not mean someone is not dangerous. Of the six main men profiled in the piece, one of was high on Cocaine and attacking an officer, another led police on a high speed chase and was shot when police thought he was reaching for a weapon after his vehicle was immobilized, while another, according to police, was shot while trying to run arresting officers over.

None of this is to suggest that there are not bad police out there or that black men are never wrongly killed by police. We know it happens, as the killing of Walter Scott show. But thankfully, that is the exception rather than the rule. But that’s not the message the Washington Post is seeking to communicate. As troubling as even one wrongful death is, in a nation of 320 million people, with almost a million police and over a million violent crimes each year, context is everything.

The Washington Post could have used the same data to make the following headline: “Black men, who were charged with almost 40% of violent crime in America, accounted for 40 percent of the 60 unarmed deaths at the hands of police.” But that wouldn’t have moved forward their narrative that the police are racists. They also could have used the total number of people killed by police, 585, to begin a discussion about excessive force, but that too would have missed the mark of their police are racists mark as well, particularly as the number of citizens killed by police is extraordinarily low by historic standards. (In 1971 NYC police killed 91 people vs. 8 in 2013)  Finally, they could have used that same 585 number of people killed by police to begin a discussion on the number of lives saved by the actions of the police. But that too would have been completely incongruent with their narrative.

The point here isn’t that shootings by police are not an important issue. On the contrary, they are and it’s a very important issue as the government, usually in the form of police, is the only entity legally empowered to take your liberty. The point is the value of picking up a copy of  the Washington Post or clicking on one of its links.  Is the supposed leading national paper on politics a source of news or is it a shill for the Democrat party with the objective of helping to get Democrats elected?

While there is no mention of politics in the story one way or another, it's obviously biased with the goal of inflaming racial tensions across the country… at a time where they are already at the lowest point in decades. That of course helps Democrats who built their modern party on identity politics.

Sadly, if the Washington Post were to do some real reporting on violence and murder in black America and the policies that propagate it, the impact would likely send black Americans running from the Democrat party like the plague.  But as 2016 will be a make or break election between the continuation of the march of progressivism or a sharp turn to a conservative reversal, don’t expect the Washington Post to do any actual reporting. Just look for the Democrat label. You won’t see it on the masthead, but you can be sure it’s there nonetheless.

Do Black Lives Matter? No, Apparently, Not Unless They're Good For The Race Pimp Business.

For the last two years the phrase “Black Lives Matter” has been a rallying cry for those who suggest black lives don’t in fact matter to whites or to the police. In seeking to make sure that no one misses the point, across the nation citizens just trying to go through their everyday lives have been subjected to restaurant sit ins, manufactured traffic jams and various other protests. As annoying as those activities are, the movement has become entwined with a more sinister trend, delegitimization of police.

From Barack Obama’s “The police acted stupidly” to Bill de Blasio’s suggestion that the NYPD’s “stop and frisk” program was racist to Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby’s invoking the thug mantra “No Justice, No Peace” as she indicted six police officers for the death of Freddy Gray, black Americans have been endlessly warned that the police are the enemy. They have been told that the police are racist and that the criminal justice system will provide them with no justice at all.

The consequences of this indictment of the police and the criminal justice system are exactly what you would expect. Police have been targeted, literally and lethally, across the country. From getting shot while sitting in their patrol cars, to getting attacked with axes as they stand on the street, to being swarmed as they try and make arrests, police today have targets on their backs like never before. Such is the obvious outcome from government officials and race pimps telling blacks that the police are the enemy.

That, however, is not the only outcome that was predictable as the false narrative behind the Black Lives Matter movement took hold. There is another, even more sinister tragedy that gives lie to the words themselves: skyrocketing crime and the flowing of black blood in the streets in places like Ferguson, New York and Baltimore. And, most of that blood is shed neither at the hands of whites or the police, but usually at the hands of other blacks.

As police have their authority and legitimacy challenged, the citizens of the neighborhoods they police have become targets and victims. Murder rates have jumped in NYC under de Blasio as police feel neutered. In Baltimore, as police have become fearful of doing their jobs, black citizens are paying the price as shootings and murders skyrocket and anarchy reigns.

Conservatives don’t typically suggest that every cop is a Boy Scout. The killings of Walter Scott and Akai Gurley are certainly troubling and rightly raise flags. And there are still many questions that remain about the circumstances of Freddie Gray’s death. But, thankfully, those deaths are news because they are so rare. Of the tens of millions interactions police have with black Americans each year, only a tiny fraction of them result in wrongful bloodshed or inappropriate behavior. Indeed, most of those interactions are with blacks who have been victims of crime or who are citizens seeking help from police.

But when police become the enemy, they cease to be able to provide the basic service they are intended for… fighting crime and preserving the peace. As crime victims are disproportionately black, when police become less effective, blacks disproportionately pay the price. To put that in perspective, following the April riots in Baltimore, where Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told police to stand down so that rioters could have space to “destroy”, May saw an unprecedented jump in violent crime, with shootings up 72% from the previous year and murders reaching 43, more than any month since August, 1972. And most of those victims were black... and the hands of other blacks… but those lives don’t seem to matter to the liberals and the race pimps who are using the extraordinarily rare deaths of black men at the hands of police to decimate the entire criminal justice system.

While we’re told that “Black Lives Matter” what apparently is really the case is that only some black lives matter… those who give liberals and race pimps a platform upon which to enrich themselves or increase their power. The black lives of men, women and children who die at the hands of black criminals emboldened by the neutering of the police… not so much. And unfortunately, the latter outnumber the former exponentially.

The tragic irony of turning Michael Brown and Eric Garner into martyrs

It seems like it’s almost impossible to get through a day without reading or hearing something having to do with the killing of black men by cops. Whether it’s endless Facebook posts or NFL players running out on the field with their “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” gestures or protests blocking rush hour traffic, it seems to be everywhere. From what you see one would think that black men in America are being killed like dogs in the street across the country. While they might be, it’s not by racist white cops, but rather, by other black men.

One example was a video a friend posted on Facebook of a man named McKenzie Cochran, a black man who died at the hands of three white mall security personnel in Detroit last January. Like the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases, a grand jury decided not to indict the security officers.

According to the Huffington Post, Cochran had returned to the mall after being requested to leave, threatened to kill someone, refused when asked by security to leave once again and then continued to struggle with officers after being pepper sprayed.

Brown, Garner and Cochran were indeed black, and all three ended up dead at the hands of white police officers or security personnel. But this is far from a war on black men that Al Sharpton, Mayor De Blasio and Eric Holder seem to suggest exists.

The reality is, there were numerous opportunities for Brown, Garner and Cochran to change the outcomes of their interactions with police. Does anyone imagine that had Brown simply moved out of the street when told that he would have been shot? Does anyone imagine that had Garner simply allowed the police to arrest him that he would have suffocated? Does anyone who reads the story about Cochran imagine that he would have ended up dead at the hands of security officers had he simply left the mall when asked?

As painful as these situations are for the families, one wonders what might have happened had the police been more differential? Might Michael Brown have robbed another store – and maybe this time pushed someone so that they fell and struck their head on the floor – or might McKenzie Cochran have actually carried out his threat to kill innocents? Eric Garner is slightly different in that his crime was selling untaxed “loosies” or loose cigarettes, a viable pursuit because of New York’s $6.00 a pack taxes. Doing so is illegal. You can complain about the law being stupid, but it was the law and Garner was breaking it. The cops could have let him go, but just days before Garner died the city’s highest-ranking uniformed cop, Philip Banks, issued an order to crack down on loosie sales.

The point is, none of these cases, nor most of the cases the left throws up to demonstrate the institutional racism rampant in America, hold up to scrutiny. They simply demonstrate a confluence of events where people who chose to act badly had outcomes that resulted in their deaths. But such are the odds when someone chooses to act badly, regardless of the activity. Most drunk drivers don’t die behind the wheel, but some do. Most recreational drug use doesn’t result in an overdose, but some does. And the truth is, while police encounters sometimes turn out bad for black men – just as they sometimes do for whites, Hispanics, Jews, etc. – they also sometimes turn out badly for cops. This can be seen by the fact that fifty officers were shot and killed in the line of duty in 2014, a jump of 56% from 2013. The difference is, unlike Brown or Garner or Cochran, these officers were killed while seeking to serve and protect their communities rather than resisting arrest or threatening innocent civilians.

The tragic irony about the rioting and demonstrations and accusations seeking to turn Michael Brown et. al into martyrs for a false cause is the fact that it diverts attention from where it should be. There are no doubt bad cops out there. In any group numbering in the hundreds of thousands you will find some number who have betrayed their oaths. But when the left characterizes all cops as racist killers it makes it impossible to find and focus on the real bad actors. That’s the irony of the whole thing… by wrongly accusing the entire police establishment of being bad, protesters actually empower the cops who are to continue doing business as usual because their actions are lost in a sea of fictional claims of racism and oppression. It’s called hiding in plain sight… by ignoring the difference between bad actors and bad outcomes – admittedly, sometimes tragic outcomes – activists make it that much more difficult to truly weed out the bad cops that really exist. By making everyone a racist, then no one is a racist and real racism has no fear of detection. The result is that activists actually increase the odds of the exact outcomes they are seeking to eliminate by giving them camouflage with a sea of false accusations. But then this is liberalism… where rhetoric is more important than results.

Man Bites Dog, Ferguson Riots & Privileged White Kids Who Can't Get Jobs...

I’ve been told by a black friend that I, as a white person, can’t know the fear that permeates the mind of a black man when they are stopped by a cop, knowing that they can be harassed, arrested or killed simply for the crime of being black. That’s true. I can’t.

The truth is, it does happen that innocent black men are sometimes harassed, arrested and even killed by white cops. According to USA today, there were an average of 96 instances of white cops killing black men per year between 2005 & 2012. Author Jim Fisher states that 95% of all officer involved shootings are labeled “Justifiable Homicide” as when the victim had a gun, knife or some other weapon. Fisher believes that number is artificially high. Let’s assume that instead of 95% of those cases being justified, only 75% are and lets apply that to the USA Today stats. That would mean that there are 24 black men unjustly killed by police each year. That number is no doubt inflated, but let’s use it for discussion purposes.

Let’s put that number in perspective. In 2011, according to the FBI, approximately 2,200 black men were murdered in the United States by other black men. If you take that number and compare it to the inflated number from above, 24, the ratio of black men killed by other black men vs. black men killed by white cops would be approximately 95 to 1. That means for every black man murdered by the police, another 95 are murdered by other black men.

But we don’t see 95 Ferguson, Missouris burning around the country, do we? No. Indeed, the reason why Ferguson is so newsworthy is that it is an example of a Man bites Dog story rather than Dog bites Man.

Now, as another friend mentioned, getting shot by the police is not the same as getting shot by a guy in your neighborhood:

You can't compare the two! If you run into trouble with anyone else, you can fight, you can run, you can pull out a gun and defend yourself, your friends can help you.... when you are facing a cop, you can't do any of those things. Almost anything you do or say can be justification for them to use extreme force against you.

Most of that may indeed be true, but unlike the guy trying to take your lunch money or worse, cops are in the business of trying to protect people and the community. Every society needs a police force. In addition, there are community boards, inspectors general, internal affairs divisions – and sometimes even the US Justice Department – that look into every police shooting in this country. And beyond the institutional checks in place there are ubiquitous camera phone videos as well as plaintiff’s attorneys who represent the families of the dead.

As a result of all of this, cops often find themselves under a microscope like no other time in American history. But the truth is, none of what cops do is done in a vacuum, and what is seen on tape is often the final throes of a situation that has been playing out (and maybe escalating) over many seconds or minutes or even hours – The Rodney King video being a perfect example. Cops often are called upon to make life or death decisions in the blink of an eye. Every time they stop a car for a burnt tail light or are called to a domestic disturbance or see someone who seems to be acting strangely, they don’t know for sure what the outcome is going to be. But that’s their job.

Nonetheless, they do those jobs understanding the danger and the landscape they are working in. And that landscape sometimes breeds heightened caution. Black men make up 6% of the US population, but, according to the FBI are responsible for more than 50% of the murders. Black men make up 6% of the US population but according to the Census bureau are arrested for 38% of all violent crimes. Those facts exist, whether people want to acknowledge them or not. And that is the reality of the world police operate in, one that sees an average of 65 cops murdered each year and an additional 60 who die in the course of doing their jobs. Together those numbers can sometimes make for volatile, deadly circumstances, particularly in largely black communities like Ferguson, MO.

Years ago comedian Chris Rock did a great bit called “How not to get your ass kicked by the police!” It included such suggestions as “Obey the law”, “Be polite” and “Get a white friend”. As funny as the comedy piece was, there was a great truth about it. It reminded me of when I used to work as a manager at a restaurant and I would sometimes overhear young patrons complain that they didn’t get this job or that job because they were being discriminated against because of the way they looked. Occasionally I would need to interview high school or college students for a job as hostess or waiter. These applicants, largely privileged white kids, might come in with tattoos, wrinkled clothes, orange hair and with an overall unkempt look about them. And invariably they wouldn’t get the job. Usually it had much to do with how they looked. Here was the problem. I had one hour to interview X number of kids. Now, had I had the opportunity to spend an hour with each, getting to know their life story, by the time I got to know the real him or her I might have realized they were the greatest kid in the world and hired them. But that wasn’t reality. I had less than 10 minutes with each and I didn’t have the luxury of getting to know the “real them”. So I took in what I could, a big part of which was recognizing how they presented and comported themselves when they were applying for a job. I’m sure that I missed out on hiring some great kids, and that if I’d have only gotten to know their “real me” I would have recognized them for the superstar they were… but that wasn’t life in our restaurant and it’s not life on the street.

Cops have limited resources, information, time and sometimes have to make life and death decisions in split seconds, often amidst chaos. The reality is however that while being black is not a crime, crime statistics suggest that blacks will come into contact with law enforcement officers more often than others. And, again, while being black is not a crime, getting into a scuffle with police is not necessarily a good choice in most situations. Being belligerent to police is rarely a good choice in most situations, even if you’re in the right. Being uncooperative with police is rarely a good choice in most situations even if you suspect that you were stopped for DWB or Driving While Black. Cops often have limited time to figure out very complicated, chaotic and sometimes dangerous situations, both for themselves and others. They don’t always have the luxury of spending enough time with a young man to discover that “He was a good boy, he just fell in with the wrong crowd”. In dangerous situations, and those which can escalate to that point quickly, it’s probably always a good idea to do what one can to reduce the level of uncertainty and volatility and report any irregularities or abuse later. We don’t yet know the exact circumstances surrounding the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO. But we’ve been told Brown and his friend were walking in the middle of the street amidst traffic. We’ve been told there was a scuffle and a gunshot may have been fired. And we can infer that Brown was likely concerned about getting arrested for a crime he had just committed. Finally we know that Michael Brown, a young black man is dead from the gun of Darren Wilson, a white police officer. That is all we know. None of those facts tell us what went on a week ago. After everything is known perhaps there will be grounds for taking action against Daren Wilson, and perhaps not. Today however, just as every day of the last week, the rioting that has occurred has done nothing to change any of the facts and has only succeeded in destroying the property of people who provide services in the community and in the long run making matters worse by for the people who live in Michael Brown’s neighborhood.

None of this suggests that rouge cops with chips on their shoulders and a bad attitude don’t exist. They do. Nor should any of it suggest that there are not truly innocent black victims of police brutality… There are, and more and more we’re seeing it on video. But like the Man bites Dog story, thankfully they are the exception rather than the rule. Most officers don’t sign up to be thugs. Most are trying to provide a service to a community, most do so heroically, often in extraordinarily chaotic and dangerous situations. Sometimes those situations turn deadly for either the cop or the perpetrator or, sometimes, an innocent person. But that is the nature of life, anywhere and everywhere. Police work is imperfect, being carried out by imperfect people in what are by definition trying circumstances. But if the concern is the save innocent black lives, to make the lives of black Americans better, the place to focus attention is not on the police with Michael Brown as the poster child, but rather on the communities and environments that have been the source of half of America’s murderers and murder victims every year for decades.