A City Mourns a Fallen Police Officer. We Also Should Mourn the Lack of Critical Thinking on the Left that’s Cost Thousands of Black Lives.
By: David Shuey
Tags: Statistics, BlackLivesMatter, Chicago, Police, Criminal Justice Reform

A City Mourns a Fallen Police Officer. We Also Should Mourn the Lack of Critical Thinking on the Left that’s Cost Thousands of Black Lives.

Ella French is the 11th officer shot this year, and the first person to die in the line of duty since 2018.

There’s a reason why Chicago police literally turned their back on Mayor Lori Lightfoot as they mourned the loss of one officer and prayed for another clinging to life. It’s not pettiness. It’s legitimate anger.

Anyone taking an honest look at the police and crime data can see an ongoing case of political malfeasance. The Chicago Police Department is being reformed in Chicago despite the fact that for at least a decade CPD data indicate they don’t use force higher than the national average, and the past five years have shot citizens at even a lower rate. When benchmarked to arrests, racial disparities drop to nil.

Yes, the entire argument against Chicago police has been built on B.S. for almost 10 years, and possibly even longer. Police have reformed on their own, and come a long way by reducing their use of fatal force by more than half since 2014.

At the same time, crime is skyrocketing with Chicago’s murder rate standing at five times higher than the national average. And the job of policing is as dangerous as its been in years, with line of duty deaths nationally increasing 10% since last year.

That’s Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s mayor. And that’s the backs turned of Chicago police. Police typically loathe the political establishment, but tensions are being called an “all-time low” right now.

In a story that’s gaining global attention, a 29-year-old cop, Ella French, was killed during a traffic stop in the South Side of Chicago on Saturday night, August 7. That same weekend 75 people were shot in the city, but only one by police. The shooters of the two officers have been apprehended thanks to heroic and fast-thinking civilian and law enforcement action.

Mayor Lightfoot before she held public office, and currently as mayor, has thrown cops under the bus for performing a job that could turn deadly in split seconds. Importantly, they do it without being racist (systemically or otherwise) according to all available evidence. Of course, an uncritical media said the task force she led somehow proved the Chicago police were systemically racist, as the New York Times echoed in its 2016 headline: Chicago Police Dept. Plagued by Systemic Racism, Task Force Finds.

Some of us actually looked closely, and didn’t find it. We saw statistical meddling to fit prefabricated agenda.

When 80% of your city’s shooters (and victims) and 73% of your overall suspects are black, how can you call it “systemic racism” when police engage with them at that level? That’s what Lori Lightfoot and the Democratic machine in Chicago signed off on in 2016 and cemented into policy and calls for reform. Additionally, those percentages most often originate from third party crime reports, not from Chicago police officers. SOURCE: https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Final_Report_Executive_Summary_4_13_16-1.pdf

Lightfoot’s report stated, “C.P.D.’s own data gives validity to the widely held belief the police have no regard for the sanctity of life when it comes to people of color.” But that’s complete bunk, and always has been.

95–96% of the time police don’t use force for both blacks and whites, but hardly anyone knows that. Full math here. For Chicago, I divided the average annual instances of use of force over a 5-year period (3,693 for blacks, 383 for whites) with the arrests for the same period (92,328 for blacks, 11,541 for whites). The arrest percentage in 2009 and 2010 for blacks and whites are the same, 9% and 72% respectively. With those computations, the rate of all force (lethal and non-lethal) per arrest in Chicago is 3.3 per 100 (white) vs. 4.0 per 100 (black).

She manipulated data to argue police have a pattern of excessive force against minorities when they do not — or have not for at least the past two decades. This I know from six years-plus reading everything I could on race, policing, and criminal justice. I have written on the subject (often, very often), noting police in Chicago and nationally shoot and kill black folks many times less than the mid-1970s while the rates against whites and other races have remained constant. Her report, like so many others, did not benchmark police behavior to actual citizen behavior.

Lightfoot and the Democratic establishment, under political pressure, also pushed through a 2018 policy that upset rank-and-file police who said the consent decree reform would cause police to hesitate to draw their firearms. Lightfoot said, “It is a very serious thing to pull your gun on someone,” which is true. However, there’s also evidence police already took the act seriously. Metrics like the low number of Chicagoans shot by cops indicate restraint.

You know the term: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

The policy forces police to document every time they point their weapon at someone. This might sound reasonable to some, but in practice it will only make police more hesitant to trust their instincts and pull out their weapon, for example if they see a bulge in someone’s pocket. Ironically, this arguably leads to a drop in public safety as police disengage. Police don’t want paperwork to file that could later be held over their heads come promotion time. The problem again is there was no evidence that police in Chicago were pulling out their guns more often than the national average since 2015, and this is despite being one of the top American cities in gun crime. (I’ll get to specific numbers in a minute, but know that every year CPD manages to get thousands of guns confiscated — 6,100 guns by the midpoint of 2021 — while only shooting around 10–20 people annually on average.)

Chicago cops already showed restraint, so what’s the problem? This was unnecessary and merely a virtue signal to the anti-police activists, and because Officer French and her partner were shot without their weapons unholstered, it’s possible this Lightfoot-endorsed policy cost French her life. Since 2018, shootings against police officers have significantly increased.

I have no doubt many police had these issues at the forefront of their mind when they turned their back on the mayor, or when the critically wounded officer’s father yelled at the mayor and blamed her for the incident.

Why Speak Now? Because Facts Matter

I’ve risked relationships and my reputation for doing one thing: Not shutting up when I know the world is pushing an absolute bullshit narrative.

Of course, I’m not the only one angry. But when you repeat the same data over and over to blank or numb faces, you ask, “Why do this again?” Maybe because of the chance the tide will finally turn. So hear me out. I know it’s a lot to take in.

First of all: Trust me, if 50% of the people cops killed in the U.S. were black, I’d be on the street protesting alongside Black Lives Matter. But it’s 25% black year-after-year and that stat matters. The rate of force by police matches actual crime interactions — and most importantly, police do not interact with Black Americans in excess of crime occurrences — and that’s why there’s no evidence of systemic racism. I found that data and research nationally, and in Chicago.

Basically, in Chicago you’ll find a little more than 90% of crime suspects are black or Hispanic, and you’ll also find around 90% of arrests are black and Hispanic, and so are 90% of the use of force occurrences. This is entirely predictable and proves there’s no racial bias by police officers. Yet what’s happening globally is police are tagged as institutionally racist for doing their job. Nothing more. I believe most politicians secretly know this but choose to remain silent because of, well, politics.

I want to give them the tools to do better.

Again, the rate of force by Chicago police of black citizens is 40 out of 1000 arrests, and nationally it’s around 46 out of 1000. For whites it’s 33 out of 1000 arrests in Chicago, and 36 out of 1000 nationwide, according to the most solid data I can find by the Center of Policing Equity (CPE). This makes 95–96% of arrests for both blacks and whites completely absent of physical force. Note: This is before benchmarking to violent arrests, which even CPE admits “reverses” the bias disfavoring white Americans. Still, ideologues at CPE, including executive director Phillip Goff, twist the data to make it sound like blacks are treated 3.6 times worse in sum totals and their lives are under constant threat by law enforcement, which I’ve covered many spaces as audaciously misleading, including here.

Some very intelligent folks have the temerity to say, “Well, you can’t trust the data. It comes from police. It’s really hard to pull together complete sets.” Well, it’s this same damn data that is being used to vilify the police in these reports, research papers, and articles. How stupid do you think we are? It’s so condescending. This is how it plays out so often:

God, the police are so racist. They keep getting away with abusing citizens.

How do you know that?

The data.

Well, here’s some data saying they’re not.

Oh, you can’t trust that, it came from police.

And again: Case reports originate from victims and third parties, NOT the police. Do they actually believe police are shredding reams of reports of white offenders so the ratios match their stop, arrest, and use-of-force rates? This is QAnon-level crazy, but it passes as credible liberal pushback on any narrative that tries to defend policing.

The media and academia when highlighting disparities of police force almost universally avoid specific disparities in the commission of violent crime. Countless times smart, sincere liberals tell me they don’t think there’s any racial differences in crimes being committed, just police and criminal justice racism hyper-focused on controlling the black population. Usually, they muddle the topic and refuse to acknowledge the data that can’t be named.

This has led to results that are further devastating black and brown communities. It’s hurting the exact people they think they’re helping.

Voldemort = crime disparities = “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”

Again, if the data said 70% of crime suspects were black or brown, but they were 90% of the people shot — and hypothetically at rates four or five times higher than the national average — then I would totally agree that Chicago police have no regard for “the sanctity of life” of people of color, which Lightfoot’s task force concluded. But nationally and hyperlocal, I’ve only seen data where police interactions match behavior. I can’t think of a single police department that’s wildly out of whack, not Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, or New York City.

Even police themselves fail to highlight this when defending themselves. Obviously, it’s even taboo for them. I personally think they often do a terrible job standing up for their profession with evidence-based specifics. From my direct experience, police leaders, union reps, and rank-and-file just don’t have the knowledge of their own macro datasets.

Maybe folks just don’t like numbers, and that’s why maybe 10 pairs of eyeballs made it this far. (Sorry, I’m not thinking reader metrics.)

And the real tragedy of all this: The anti-policing rhetoric and sentiment is cementing into a massive, multi-year murder spike. I myself have estimated 17,250 excess murders in just six years. That’s 17,000 lives that would otherwise be loving, laughing, and dancing if murders leveled off before the rise of Black Lives Matter in 2014. Some researchers have noted the direct connection of increased murders in spaces where BLM protests took shape. Vox reported on this preprint research:

“From 2014 to 2019, there were somewhere between 1,000 and 6,000 more homicides than would have been expected if places with protests were on the same trend as places that did not have protests.”

The media outside conservative outlets are only beginning to catch on.

Black Lives Matter & Lori Lightfoot: Peas in a Pod

BLM holds a libelous narrative with deadly consequences. And I’m not talking about this one cop, or even all 250 cops shot annually. I’m talking about our society falling apart at the seams, as violent crime is spiking as a direct result of millions of “the U.S. is institutionally racist” vocal and mainstreamed arguments. This drives culture. This puts police back on their heals, or “fetal” as Lightfoot’s predecessor Rahm Emanuel once said to much political blowback. This drives anti-social, violent behavior. In 2014 we had just more than 14,000 murders the year of Michael Brown’s killing, which was ruled fully justified by the Obama Department of Justice ran by Eric Holder, who happened to be black. After Ferguson, Baltimore, and Chicago blew up in protests after high-profile deaths, we increased to more than 17,000 murders in 2016. In 2020 the United States will have topped 20,000 murders with the largest single year increase on record, and it appears national totals will go higher in 2021.

50% of those murdered are black, and close to 55% of the murderers themselves are black, according to FBI data.

In 2019, 12 of the 54 people killed by cops unarmed were black. That’s less than 25% of the total unarmed killings by police. But you wouldn’t know that if you’re watching the news or reading social media, would you?

80% of media stories are about black lives taken at hands of the police, according to black researcher and professor Wilfred Reilly. That means a black person killed by police is 12 times more likely to get a news story than someone non-black. I’ll add that a vast majority of them are justified, too.

But despite unarmed killings by police representing 0.1% of all homicides, that’s the dominant threat to “black skin” that protestors on the left keep focusing on, and corporations keep echoing in social justice advertising. The “anti-black violence” by police that permeates our country, leading to the blocking of highways and burning of police departments, is really just 1 out of 1,000 of U.S. homicides. Interracial violence is also one-sided, favoring blacks and disfavoring whites. Yes, actual white supremacist racists get it wrong, but media blunders to explain.

You know that’s insane. You know that’s 100% obfuscation and projection.