Charlotte, North Carolina endured a second night of rioting after a crowd turned violent while protesting the police shooting of a black man on Tuesday. Rioting has become all too common when news of police shooting a black man hits the headlines. The interesting thing in Charlotte is that seemingly everyone involved in this current situation is black — from the officer who shot to the chief of police — and yet the excuse for justifying the rioting is still the same: “cops are racists.” According to Charlotte-Mecklenberg Police Chief Kerr Putney, “It’s time to change the narrative, because I can tell you from the facts that the story is a little bit different as to how it’s been portrayed so far, especially through social media. … [The deceased] exited his vehicle armed with a handgun as officers continued to yell at him to drop it. He stepped out, posing a threat to the officers.”

So how do so many people come to view those who commit crimes and resist police, or who riot and loot, as the victims, while declaring the villains to be those who pledge to enforce the law often at great personal risk? The answer lies in the fact that the Left has long peddled the narrative that law enforcement is inherently racist. Misleading statistics that depict a significant discrepancy in the percentage of whites versus blacks convicted of crime or in prison are provided as evidence to bolster the case that blacks are being unfairly targeted by law enforcement. The latest example of this was yesterday’s Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling which concluded that black men have a legitimate reason to run from the police — fear of racism. The court cited a 2014 ACLU study that found 63% of those stopped by Boston’s stop and frisk law were blacks, even though the black population in Boston sits at 24%. The charge was that the Boston police were “over policing” black neighborhoods. Boston Police Commissioner Bill Evans said that the ACLU study was “heavily tainted against the police department” and “didn’t take into context who was stopped and why. That report clearly shows that we were targeting the individuals that were driving violence in the city and the hot spots.”

The court’s ruling only serves to perpetuate the false narrative. The fact that blacks commit crimes at a higher rate is not due to the police. The idea that blaming the police for the poverty and high crime experienced within many poor, inner-city black neighborhoods is baseless. These rioters in Charlotte have been drinking the “cops are racists and I’m a victim” Kool-aid for their entire lives. Their race-hustling leaders have birthed a movement in Black Lives Matter that cares little for the truth and advocates outright racism as despicable as anything perpetrated by the KKK. Their message isn’t reconciliation or responsibility or self-reliance but a message of victimhood, accusation and revenge. If the truth is not honestly confronted, preached and responded to, then this cycle of rioting and violence will only continue.