Crime researcher Heather Mac Donald has written at considerable length about police, race, use of force, and so on. When she weighs in on a topic, such as the death of Tyre Nichols, it’s best to pay attention.

Racism has become an unfalsifiable proposition. Such is the central take-away from the race industry's tortured reaction to a brutal police beating in Memphis, Tennessee.

Five Memphis officers responded to what was initially reported as a car driving the wrong way down a street. The officers’ tactics during the stop of driver Tyre Nichols, captured on video, were an abomination: while shouting contradictory commands, the officers immediately escalated their use of force without apparent cause.

It was Nichols who tried to deescalate the chaos — a responsibility usually put on officers, not on suspects. The cops struggled without coordination to cuff him, while delivering gratuitous kicks, punches to the face and baton strikes. None of the officers’ actions conform to police training; virtually everything on view in the videos violates sound stop and arrest techniques. Nichols repeatedly collapsed and received only belated and listless medical attention at the scene. Three days later he died in hospital.

Mac Donald goes on to note the media coverage in which outlets went to great length initially to downplay the race of the police while playing up Nichols’s race. That would have been different, of course, if the officers were white. Nevertheless, commentators quickly took up the thesis that “systemic racism” can infect black cops too. “CNN commentator and Obama White House veteran Van Jones initiated that new protocol,” she said before quoting him and then responding:

In other words: anything bad that happens to blacks is a function of racism, determined solely by the race of the victim, not by the intentions or identity of the perpetrator.

Only cops are subject to this new “the victim alone determines the reality of racism” rule, however.  Those black teenagers who shoot at their gang rivals on a near daily basis and who regularly take out young black children as collateral damage are not deemed “anti-black" by the mainstream media and its academic sources.

Much of the rest of the media quickly followed Jones’s lead, as did even President Joe Biden.

The beating was "yet another painful reminder of the profound fear and trauma, the pain, and the exhaustion that black and brown Americans experience every single day,” Biden said in a statement after the video release.  …

The conceit would be true if it referred to black-on-black crime. Dozens of blacks are murdered every day, more than all white and Hispanic murder victims combined, even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. Blacks between the ages of ten and twenty-four die of gun homicides at twenty-five times the rate of whites between those same ages. Their assailants are not the police, not other whites, but other blacks.

Ending all fatal police shootings — a desirable goal, but an unlikely one, given the amount of gun violence in America’s inner cities — would have a negligible effect on the black death by homicide rate. In fact, it would have a greater effect on the white death by homicide rate, since it turns out, contrary to the racism narrative, that the proportion of white and Hispanic homicide victims killed by police officers is over four times higher than the proportion of black homicide victims killed by a police officer: 9 percent versus 2 percent.

That disparity exists because the number of black homicide victims — killed almost exclusively by black criminals, not by the police or by whites — is so high. In 2020, there were about 10,000 black homicide victims, 3,000 more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined. By comparison, there are about 1,000 victims of fatal police shootings each year, a little over 50 percent white, on average, and about 25 percent are black.

Never mind the statistics, she adds, “racial demagogues still claim that police shooting data show police bias.”

She expounds further on crime and policing statistics to prove her point, though one in particular stands out: “Comparing the unarmed black victims of fatal police shootings to the police victims of lethal criminal shootings, a police officer in 2021 was 400 times as likely to be fatally shot by a black male as an unarmed black was to be fatally shot by a police officer.”

After working her way through more about the racial demagogues, the deficiencies of police training (in large part due to leftist interference), and the troubling drive to “diversify” officer ranks sometimes at the expense of quality or effectiveness, Mac Donald concludes:

The country will take the wrong lessons from the Nichols death. All of policing will be condemned as a blight upon black men. Already calls for the abolition of the police are on the rise. Expect proactive policing to drop further in the renewed climate of anti-cop rhetoric. The current recruitment and retention crisis will worsen.  Diversity hiring will accelerate, despite the current idea that black cops are white supremacists, too. Indeed, the Baltimore County police department just made clear that its next chief will be black. “If we could have an Afro-American chief, it would just do wonders to turn the ship in the right direction,” the first vice president of the Baltimore County NAACP told the Baltimore Sun this week. More black lives will be lost to criminal violence. The police will try to stop that bloodshed, while the activists look the other way.

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