We Want Equality

by C Douglas Love Love

  Starting with Trayvon Martin, continuing to Michael Brown, and ramping up with the death of Freddie Gray, it has become the standard operating procedure of many blacks, with support from whites on the left, to take to the streets every time a black man is shot by a police officer, facts be damned. Conversely, shootings not involving police officers garner much less attention.

  On June 17th, a week before the scheduled gay pride parade, Chicago’s local ABC affiliate opened their broadcast with a five-minute segment on a historic event: Aurora, IL, celebrating its first gay pride parade. This was followed by weather and a shooting in the downtown area. Finally, they covered the weekend violence. The weekend shooting totals? 10 dead, 55 wounded. I guess 65 people being shot doesn’t trump an inaugural gay pride parade. My point here is that when conservatives bring up black on black crime, they know it has nothing to do with police shootings; they are asking that you address the roof rather than the door.

  If we want a true assessment, we must get beyond this ‘cops are hunting us down’ mentality. We have over one million officers nationwide who have dozens of interactions with the public every day, most without incident. This amounts to over one billion interactions per year. While life is precious and every police shooting needs to be investigated thoroughly, if the cops are hunting us down, they’re really bad at it.

  However, looking at numbers independent of context is not enough. We hear that 987 people were killed by police in 2017 and an alarm goes off. But this number alone tells us nothing. When thinking of the billion interactions police collectively have with citizens, I don’t think 987 people, while tragic, is an epidemic. However, what the headlines neglect to tell us is that of this total number, less than 70 were unarmed. This means that over 93% of the victims were carrying a weapon. I don’t think these shootings should be considered when examining police brutality.

  We also make the mistake of assuming that most of these people were just lying down, posing no threat. Some of the police involved shootings were during shootouts, while others are accompanied by video showing the suspect was the cause. This means that only in a small percentage of the already small number of shootings, is there evidence of potential wrongdoing on the part of the officer. More importantly, because it speaks to the claim of racial intent, only 17 of the 66 unarmed victims were black. This, unfortunately, goes unmentioned.

  For some perspective, let’s look at medical error. “A recent Johns Hopkins study found that medical errors are now the third leading cause of death in the US. Analyzing medical death rate data over an eight-year period, Johns Hopkins patient safety experts have calculated that more than 250,000 deaths per year are due to medical error in the US.”115 By contrast, police killings in the same time frame is roughly 7,000, or less than 3% of the deaths by medical error. Why are there no marches against hospitals and doctors? They endure more training, deal with more vulnerable people and encounter far fewer attacks than police officers do.

  There are, however, many situations that don’t involve a shooting. Harassment, unwarranted stops and overaggressive policing are also common complaints. These are complicated scenarios because it deals with basic human nature. They often boil down to the old adage, ‘two wrongs don’t make a right.’ Say an officer notices a man he thinks is acting suspiciously and decides to engage. That man has done nothing wrong and is bothered by the unnecessary harassment. He addresses the officer rudely. The officer tenses up and there is an escalation of aggressive behavior on both sides. The officer was wrong in this case. He has been trained on how to proceed in these situations, but one cannot always suppress his nature. For the man who was questioned, he was technically right but didn’t act in a manner that diffused the situation.

  I know many people who will say it’s wasn’t the man’s job to diffuse the situation. The officer is the one who should temper his emotions; the man had a right to be upset. I would agree except for one crucial thing; reality vs utopia. In an ideal situation, they would be right, but in an ideal situation the officer would not have approached the man. Reality says being right isn’t always enough.

  I liken it to a man waiting to cross the street. He waits for the walk sign, then proceeds. As he starts to walk, a car approaches. It looks as though it’s going to speed through the light. The man clearly has the right of way. Should he continue to walk? If he does, and subsequently gets hit, he was clearly right. The driver, if caught, will likely go to jail. But is death or permanent damage worth proving a point?

  In the previous scenario, the man was innocent. But contrary to the reports in the news, police do encounter criminals. These encounters make up much of the previous experience used in the first type of profiling we discussed. I am willing to give a little on police conduct, but I don’t believe the SJWs will do the same when it comes to suspects. They act as if every person stopped by the police is innocent. Not only are they innocent of whatever conduct that may have lead up to their altercation with police, it’s wrong to even mention their past.

  Mention that Michael Brown had just stolen from a convenience store in Ferguson; it doesn’t matter. Bring up Eric Garner’s multiple arrests and felony conviction; you’re deflecting. These things are important not only because all facts should be considered when conducting an investigation, but also because cops don’t just appear from nowhere. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, they were called. Contrary to the image the Left paints of white officers driving around looking for blacks and hanging out of their windows shooting at them, they were there because someone called them for that specific situation, usually a local citizen or business owner.

  When John Crawford III was shot in Walmart, the 911 operator told the officers he had a gun; when Quintonio LaGrier was shot in his home, his father had called 911 saying his life was being threatened; and when Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times by a Chicago cop, he had been vandalizing cars and slashed an officer’s tires when confronted.116 In all of these cases, and many of the other high-profile police shootings, the narrative portrayed in the press simply doesn’t hold water.

  Telling an officer that a violent crime is in progress, changes the manner in which he will approach the suspect. Note what the officers encountered when they arrived on the scene in each of the above cases. LaGrier wouldn’t put down the bat, McDonald was walking in the middle of the street carrying a knife, and Crawford was holding a rifle (a toy but they didn’t know it at the time). Even Eric Garner told the officers, “It stops today!” and “Don’t touch me.” Most people with negative opinions of police officers believe racial bias is the explanation for all of the problems. No one wants to look at the stats. That is until Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. did an empirical analysis of racial differences in police use of force; with surprising results.117

  His comprehensive study examined over 1,300 shootings spanning 15 years in 10 cities. It took into account the age of the suspect, the race of both the suspect and officers on scene, the time of day, the reason for the interaction, and several other factors. What Mr. Fryer found was that, “In shootings in these 10 cities involving officers, officers were more likely to fire their weapons without having first been attacked when the suspects were white.” His study didn’t stop there.

  He went on to examine situations where the officers had sufficient reason to use lethal force but did not. He determined this by looking at arrest reports and examining where suspects shot at the officers, resisted arrest or tried to physically attack the officers. “Mr. Fryer found that in such situations, officers in Houston were about 20 percent less likely to shoot if the suspects were black.”

  The marchers and protesters all claim that police officers killing unarmed black men is an epidemic, this despite all evidence showing that claim is a fallacy. You can look at an individual shooting and determine that officer was wrong, but even if every shooting was wrong, it still wouldn’t make the case for an epidemic. In the 16 years of Mr. Fryer’s study, 1.6 million total
arrests were made and officers fired their weapons only 507 times. This is consistent all over the country. Yet emotion takes over, so the protests continue.

  Fryer did find that blacks were more susceptible to other forms of force from police officers. While officers were less likely to shoot a black suspect, they were 18% more likely, on average, to push a black suspect against the wall, throw him to the ground, pull a gun or use other forms of non-lethal force. He suggests this may be because there is a cost associated to shooting someone, but no cost for using non-lethal force. This may be true, but is only speculative, as the study doesn’t provide any evidence. Fear of repercussions is definitely a factor. That is what’s behind the so-called ‘Ferguson Effect.’118 I would argue that there is an additional cause for this behavior.

  As difficult as it is to get blacks to take an objective look at police behavior and arrest stats, it’s exponentially more difficult to get them to be introspective. Police have a huge stake in the direction a stop will take, but the person being stopped also has some responsibility. Yet many blacks refuse to see that their own actions contribute to the officer’s escalation as well as the existence of racial profiling.

  If a disproportionate amount of crimes are committed by blacks and much of the crime in a given city happens in predominately black neighborhoods, how can we expect cops to do that job for 10 or 20 years and not develop a profile? Perhaps we need to come to terms with the fact that store clerks don’t follow us around because we’re black, they follow us around because the last ten people who stole from them were black males between the ages of 13–20. Refusing to take a look at our own actions does our community a disservice and exacerbates the problem.

  It is illogical to believe that Muslim Americans, the group that owns many of the stores in black neighborhoods, leave the suburbs to open stores in black neighborhoods because they hate blacks. The same goes for white cops ‘policing’ blacks. Most officers are assigned to a given area and would prefer to avoid confrontation. Many would prefer to work in safer neighborhoods, while others volunteer to work in the most dangerous neighborhoods because they want to give back and they think keeping the innocent people in those neighborhoods, the vast majority of the residents, safe is the honorable thing to do.

  Whatever your view of police, I believe focusing on them as the problem in the black community is too broad and lacks focus. The police, in most cases, are simply enforcing laws. If you want to focus on police action, perhaps it would be better to address areas where their power is too great. For instance, in a free society, why should the police be able to stop you for any reason?

  They have so much leeway for traffic stops, for example. I don’t believe you can train the racist out of someone, but allowing officers to stop people for almost any reason affords a racist cop the opportunity to stop any black driver. You have to follow a lawful command given by an officer. Refusing to do so puts you and the officer in danger. Perhaps we should force our legislators to stop police from focusing on small infractions like seatbelt violations. Minimizing the interactions law abiding citizens have with law enforcement would help, but without the small infractions, municipalities would lose much needed revenue.

  There are things we can do to make the system better but there is no magic fix, and equality won’t work. Unless there is an equal distribution of crimes committed, there will never be equality in incarceration numbers or how certain segments of the population are perceived. Perception is reality, and blacks are going to have to change their reality to change the perception.

  Even if you were able to make the necessary changes to improve race relations, it wouldn’t happen. With the call going out to ‘resist,’ most people comply. It’s easier to complain and post memes on social media than it is to do the real work. Many are not willing to civilly engage those in leadership positions if they disagree with them. When they do speak up, it’s not about the things I mentioned.

  If we had the same number of people talking about respecting authority, learning a trade, conflict resolution, the impact of absent fathers, and the role of God in our lives as we do the history of slavery, old white men, reparations, and the percentage of blacks at a given company, things could be different. But as it stands blacks are more concerned about placing blame than they are about finding solutions.

  There are some issues that truly work to the detriment of blacks. Some were specifically designed to do so while others are the result of unintended consequences. Either way, challenging them is important and would be beneficial for society. But how do they play into the fight for equality and what is being done to rectify them? I’d like to take a look at three issues commonly viewed as targeting blacks: Redlining, drug sentencing and mandatory minimums.

  REDLINING

  Redlining is a practice specifically designed to use a geographic area, which generally represents a particular minority group, to deny that group services. This was primarily used to prevent blacks from getting mortgage loans. Otherwise qualified applicants were turned down for loans simply because they lived within the targeted area. While housing discrimination had been going on for years, Roosevelt’s Federal Housing Authority created structured standards for the practice. For the next 30 years, it continued to be the method banks used to make lending decisions. In 1968, the Fair Housing Act was passed; it made redlining illegal, but it continued in different forms.

  Many black customers were given higher interest rates than they deserved. In other cases, whites were cajoled into selling their property under its market value using fear tactics, only to sell those same homes to blacks at inflated prices. A form of these practices we still see going on today is intentionally limiting services to certain communities. We’ve often heard how hard it is to get a cab in certain areas. The same is true for other services. The term ‘food desert’ was coined to describe areas in the inner city where there is a lack of grocery stores and fresh produce.

  My wife and I have had many situations where we needed repairs on our home. We called companies to get estimates only to have them tell us they do not service our area. This, in spite of the fact that we live in the city of Chicago and their business was also in the city. They weren’t even subtle about it. In several cases, the companies put a list of zip codes they service on their website. Ours was often left off the list.

  The solution to this problem is not as easy as it may seem. Redlining has been against the law for nearly 50 years, yet many claim it’s still going on. It’s difficult to believe that with government regulations, university surveys, social media, and many minority employees, a major institution would still be able to get away with those practices without anyone noticing. Two recent studies argue they found evidence of lenders using the practice, one by Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting, and the other by the local Fair Housing Center for Rights & Research in Cleveland. Their examples show obvious disparities but lack evidence of a racist origin. Here is what they found.

  In the Philadelphia study, whites received 10 times as many conventional loans as blacks even though they represent a similar share of the population. In the article supporting the study, they illustrated the argument with the example of a woman who was turned down though she had a good credit score and made $60,000 per year. She was told her income wasn’t consistent enough so she got a full-time job ‘managing a million-dollar grant’. When this didn’t work, she later found that an unpaid $284 electric bill tanked her credit score. Finally, she got the loan; when her partner, who is half white and half Japanese signed onto her application. This, in spite of the fact that her partner was a part-time grocery store employee whose bi-weekly income was $144.65.119 This screams of racism, right?

  There are a lot of assumptions used to make this point. It is safe to assume that of the 31 million records the researchers went through, they picked one of the stronger examples to make their point. If this is the case, their argument is pretty weak. The initial claim was that Ms. Faroul had a go
od credit score. If this is true, a $284 electric bill should not have ‘tanked’ it. Next, they list her salary while downplaying the fact that it was a contract position. If she had a short work history and no permanent job, the salary wouldn’t make much difference. A fair report would have also listed the loan amount she was attempting to get. Perhaps it was greater than her $60,000 salary could afford.

  When she found full-time work, they listed her duties instead of her salary. One could infer that it was less than her $60,000 contract salary. Finally, they implied that someone who makes 72 dollars a week can easily get a mortgage if they are white. This ignores the fact that she ‘signed onto’ Faroul’s loan, meaning both incomes were considered. Perhaps Franz’s higher credit and a second person to go after in case of default was the reason the loan got approved. Not a strong case.

  The second study reviewing Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County made similar assumptions. Look at the data they compiled on application denials by race:

  HOWARD HANNA MORTGAGE SERVICES

  Percent of applications denied in white tracts: 2.1%

  Percent of applications denied in nonwhite tracts: 4.2%

  FIRST FEDERAL OF LAKEWOOD

  Percent of applications denied in white tracts: 4.6%

  Percent of applications denied in nonwhite tracts: 9.5%

  CROSSCOUNTRY MORTGAGE INC.