POSTED ON SEPTEMBER 28, 2017 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN BLACK LIVES MATTER, FOOTBALL, POLICING

HOLLOW NFL PROTESTS IGNORE INCONVENIENT TRUTH

While poorly educated athletes, egged on by leftist commentators, indulge in Black Lives Matter based protests against their country, evidence pours in that black-on-black crime is the real threat to black lives and that attacks on policing are causing an increase in such crime. Heather Mac Donald has the details.

She points out that nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. That’s 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

Who is killing these blacks? Not whites. According to Mac Donald, among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243.

Not the police. Mac Donald writes:

In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest.

Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males.

What accounts for the pronounced increase in the killing of blacks? Mac Donald cites the Ferguson effect:

Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened. Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 AM, many officers are instead just driving by.

Such stops are discretionary; cops don’t have to make them. And when political elites demonize the police for just such proactive policing, we shouldn’t be surprised when cops get the message and do less of it.

Seventy-two percent of the nation’s officers say that they and their colleagues are now less willing to stop and question suspicious persons, according to a Pew Research poll released in January. The reason is the persistent anti-cop climate.

We discussed the Ferguson effect here and here, for example. FiveThirtyEight, hardly a conservative outfit, has found support for the existence of this phenomenon.

These truths are inconvenient for black activists and their mindless followers. Too inconvenient to be spoken.

Earlier this year, Mac Donald’s ability to speak them on campus was restricted. And earlier this month, a speech at Howard University by James Comey, who acknowledged the Ferguson effect when he was President Obama’s FBI Director, was disrupted throughout by student protesters.

NFL players have the right to ignore, or be ignorant of, the facts, and I don’t believe they should be punished for taking a knee or otherwise disrespecting America when the National Anthem is played. But it is fair to observe that, in addition to disrespecting the country that has been so good to them, they are boosting the Ferguson effect and thus likely adding to the toll on thousands of law-abiding people in the inner cities who need more police protection.