The Patriot Post® · No Epidemic of Racist Cops

Democrat presidential candidates aim to placate the “social justice” crowd by regurgitating the false “cops are racist” narrative, as well as advance their plans to bring about “real” criminal-justice reform. (Because, evidently, the reform President Donald Trump spearheaded won’t do.) Joe Biden claims that blacks will finally be able to “walk the streets of America” without fear of being harassed — or even worse, shot — by the police. Pete Buttigieg once noted the equitable idea that all lives matter only to later walk it back by asserting that the country needed to “move policing out from the shadow of systemic racism.” Beto O'Rourke has also parroted the anti-police talking point, arguing that the reason cops shoot blacks is “solely based on the color of their skin.”

The Left’s narrative is as devoid of logic as it is of facts. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides yet more evidence that contradicts the popular smear that white police officers are more likely to shoot black suspects than white suspects. In fact, the data makes a case for just the reverse. We must’ve missed the White Lives Matter protesters.

This latest study comports with earlier studies that have also found no evidence of rampant systematic racism against blacks within law enforcement. But facts aren’t likely to deter the Democrat presidential hopefuls. They insist on promoting racial identity-based policing reforms based on the false idea that matching the composition of police departments to the racial diversity of their communities will produce “better” police.

In fact, it has proven detrimental. As the Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald explains, “This effort to increase minority representation will not reduce racial disparities in shootings, concludes the PNAS study, since white officers are not responsible for those disparities; black crime rates are. Moreover, lowered hiring standards risk bad police work and corruption. A 2015 Justice Department study of the Philadelphia Police Department found that black officers were 67 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect; Hispanic officers were 145 percent more likely than white officers to mistakenly shoot an unarmed black suspect. Whether lowered hiring standards are responsible for those disparities was not addressed.”

The irony, of course, is that the more Democrats promote this law-enforcement smear, the more they end up hurting the very communities most plagued by violent crime. Just look at Baltimore.