1 00:00:02,100 --> 00:00:04,040 Does the truth matter? 2 00:00:04,040 --> 00:00:06,900 Not to groups like Black Lives Matter. 3 00:00:06,900 --> 00:00:11,460 That’s tragic for many reasons, not the least of which is that black lives are 4 00:00:11,460 --> 00:00:13,460 being lost as a result. 5 00:00:13,460 --> 00:00:18,600 When it comes to the subject of American police, blacks, and the deadly use of force, 6 00:00:18,600 --> 00:00:20,640 here is what we know: 7 00:00:20,650 --> 00:00:25,630 A recent “deadly force” study by Washington State University researcher Lois James 8 00:00:25,630 --> 00:00:31,100 found that police officers were LESS likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white 9 00:00:31,109 --> 00:00:34,189 or Hispanic ones in simulated threat scenarios. 10 00:00:34,189 --> 00:00:39,300 Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer analyzed more than 1,000 officer-involved shootings 11 00:00:39,300 --> 00:00:41,079 across the country. 12 00:00:41,079 --> 00:00:47,809 He concluded that there is ZERO evidence of racial bias in police shootings. 13 00:00:47,809 --> 00:00:54,559 In Houston, he found that blacks were 24% LESS likely than whites to be shot by officers 14 00:00:54,559 --> 00:00:57,799 even though the suspects were armed or violent. 15 00:00:57,799 --> 00:00:59,739 Does the truth matter? 16 00:00:59,740 --> 00:01:05,800 An analysis of the Washington Post’s Police Shooting Database and of Federal Crime Statistics 17 00:01:05,810 --> 00:01:12,500 reveals that fully twelve percent of all whites and Hispanics who die of homicide are killed by cops. 18 00:01:12,500 --> 00:01:19,060 By contrast, only four percent of black homicide victims are killed by cops. 19 00:01:19,060 --> 00:01:25,160 But isn’t it a sign of bias that blacks make up 26% of police-shooting victims, 20 00:01:25,160 --> 00:01:28,960 but only 13% of the national population? 21 00:01:28,960 --> 00:01:33,040 It is not, and common sense suggests why. 22 00:01:33,040 --> 00:01:37,240 Police shootings occur more frequently where officers confront armed 23 00:01:37,240 --> 00:01:39,580 or violently resisting suspects. 24 00:01:39,580 --> 00:01:43,080 Those suspects are disproportionately black. 25 00:01:43,080 --> 00:01:47,420 According to the most recent study by the Department of Justice, although blacks were 26 00:01:47,430 --> 00:01:53,780 only about 15% of the population in the 75 largest counties in the US, they were charged 27 00:01:53,780 --> 00:02:01,700 with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults. 28 00:02:01,700 --> 00:02:07,720 In New York City, blacks commit over three-quarters of all shootings, though they are only 29 00:02:07,720 --> 00:02:10,640 23% of the city’s population. 30 00:02:10,650 --> 00:02:16,770 Whites, by contrast, commit under 2% of all shootings in the city, though they are 31 00:02:16,770 --> 00:02:19,920 34% of the population. 32 00:02:19,930 --> 00:02:26,560 New York’s crime disparities are repeated in virtually every racially diverse city in America. 33 00:02:26,560 --> 00:02:33,220 The real problem facing inner-city black communities today is not the police but criminals. 34 00:02:33,220 --> 00:02:39,200 In 2014, over 6,000 blacks were murdered, more than all white and Hispanic homicide 35 00:02:39,209 --> 00:02:40,969 victims combined. 36 00:02:40,969 --> 00:02:42,689 Who is killing them? 37 00:02:42,689 --> 00:02:47,500 Not the police, and not white civilians, but other blacks. 38 00:02:47,500 --> 00:02:53,560 In fact, a police officer is eighteen and a half times more likely to be killed by a 39 00:02:53,560 --> 00:02:58,959 black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer. 40 00:02:58,959 --> 00:03:06,420 If the police ended all use of lethal force tomorrow, it would have a negligible impact 41 00:03:06,420 --> 00:03:09,060 on the black death-by-homicide rate. 42 00:03:09,060 --> 00:03:17,660 In Chicago, through just the first six-and-a-half months of 2016, over 2,300 people were shot. 43 00:03:17,660 --> 00:03:21,720 That’s a shooting an hour during some weekends. 44 00:03:21,720 --> 00:03:24,980 The vast majority of the victims were black. 45 00:03:24,980 --> 00:03:31,540 During this same period, the Chicago police shot 12 people, all armed and dangerous. 46 00:03:31,540 --> 00:03:35,980 That’s one half of one percent of all shootings. 47 00:03:35,980 --> 00:03:38,250 Does the truth matter? 48 00:03:38,250 --> 00:03:41,350 If it does, here’s a truth worth pondering: 49 00:03:41,350 --> 00:03:47,460 There is no government agency more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter 50 00:03:47,460 --> 00:03:49,439 than the police. 51 00:03:49,439 --> 00:03:54,559 The proactive policing revolution that began in the mid-1990s has dramatically 52 00:03:54,560 --> 00:04:00,480 brought down the inner-city murder rate and saved tens of thousands of black lives. 53 00:04:00,480 --> 00:04:04,540 Unfortunately, that crime decline is now in jeopardy. 54 00:04:04,540 --> 00:04:10,360 As I write in my book, The War on Cops, police officers are backing off of proactive policing 55 00:04:10,360 --> 00:04:15,769 in black neighborhoods thanks to the false narrative that police officers are infected 56 00:04:15,769 --> 00:04:17,729 with homicidal bias. 57 00:04:17,729 --> 00:04:24,180 As a result, violent crime is going up, in cities with large black populations, homicides 58 00:04:24,180 --> 00:04:32,060 in 2015 rose anywhere from 54% in Washington DC to 90% in Cleveland. 59 00:04:32,060 --> 00:04:38,500 Overall, in the nation’s 56 largest cities, homicides in 2015 rose 17%, 60 00:04:38,500 --> 00:04:42,000 a nearly unprecedented one-year spike. 61 00:04:42,000 --> 00:04:49,540 Many law-abiding residents of high-crime areas beg the police to maintain order — precisely 62 00:04:49,540 --> 00:04:55,660 the type of policing that the ACLU, progressive politicians, and the Obama Justice Department 63 00:04:55,660 --> 00:04:58,560 denounce as racist. 64 00:04:58,560 --> 00:05:05,380 This is tragic because when the police refrain from proactive policing, black lives are lost. 65 00:05:05,400 --> 00:05:08,420 Lost because of a myth. 66 00:05:08,420 --> 00:05:14,380 The best research and data reach this conclusion: there is no evidence that police are killing 67 00:05:14,380 --> 00:05:16,720 blacks just because they are black. 68 00:05:16,720 --> 00:05:18,760 You now have the truth. 69 00:05:18,760 --> 00:05:20,680 Does it matter? 70 00:05:20,680 --> 00:05:25,580 I’m Heather MacDonald of the Manhattan Institute for Prager University.