The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Proof Cops Don't Discriminate Against Blacks
Racism and law enforcement are frequent topics in the news, so we’ll cut right to the chase. Power Line’s John Hinderaker reviews a detailed study showing, once again, that cops are not racist.
In May 2020, the world was turned upside down when a massively-overdosed George Floyd died on a Minneapolis street while waiting for an ambulance that could have saved his life. The narrative that Minnesota’s criminal justice system was biased against blacks immediately took hold, encouraged by Minnesota’s own state and local officials.
In response to that narrative, states and local jurisdictions across America, and even around the world, enacted “reforms” that handcuffed law enforcement and favored criminals. “Defund the police” became a mantra, and Black Lives Matter, the source of many claims of law enforcement’s discrimination against blacks, raked in tens of millions from corporate donors.
But was the narrative of racial discrimination true?
In a word, nope. Hinderaker notes that “blacks are over-represented as criminal defendants and prison inmates precisely because they are over-represented as perpetrators of serious crimes.” In another word, duh. There are many cultural reasons for this, but Hinderaker gets to the study in question.
Enter David Zimmer. David is a veteran of 33 years in the Hennepin County Sheriff’s office, from which he retired as a Captain. He now works for American Experiment as a Policy Fellow in Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. David went through the painstaking work of analyzing the BCA’s offender data and comparing it with arrest, prosecution, conviction, sentencing and incarceration data, which come from various sources. What he found should put to rest forever the theory that law enforcement in states like Minnesota is biased against blacks.
The BCA offender data show that blacks commit serious crimes at a per capita rate ten times that of whites. That proportion is followed from arrests through incarceration, except that David’s analysis finds that Minnesota’s criminal justice system discriminates–in a statistical sense–against whites, as compared with blacks.
The report is here.
In short, Hinderaker concludes:
We issued a press release on David’s report, but shockingly, neither the Minneapolis Star Tribune nor any other liberal news outlet took us up on the opportunity to interview Zimmer, or published any reference to the report. That’s OK. We know whose side those outlets are on. They are on the side of the perpetrators of serious crimes, not the victims. David’s report concludes with the fact that the victims of serious crime line up the same as the perpetrators — on a per capita basis, victims are ten times as likely to be black. So the liberals are hurting those they pretend to care about.