Did you see the ESPY awards [Wednesday] night on ESPN? I was so impressed by that tribute to the men and women who serve and protect us. When they lit the stage in blue in honor of our police… Oh, wait, that didn’t happen.

Instead, four athletes came out and offered a few remarks about the state of race relations in America. One recited the following names: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Laquan McDonald, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile as examples of “our reality.” Really? Seven people are representative of all of black America?

I couldn’t help but notice that in that list of victims, not one was a Dallas police officer. Meanwhile, Trayvon Martin was not a victim of police violence. He got into a confrontation with a volunteer security guard that ended tragically.

The Obama Justice Department ruled that Michael Brown died while fighting with a police officer, trying to grab the officer’s gun. “Hands up, don’t shoot” was a lie. And we don’t know yet all the details in the Sterling and Castile cases.

But the five Dallas officers who died protecting a demonstration led by a group that despises law enforcement, well, the most they got was a brief mention from Dwayne Wade, who said, “The endless gun violence in places like Chicago, Dallas, not to mention Orlando, it has to stop.”

Here we go again. Orlando was not “gun violence.” It was an attack by a radical Islamist. Dallas was not “gun violence.” It was an attack by a racist who admitted he wanted to kill white cops.

Wade also said, “The racial profiling has to stop. The shoot-to-kill mentality has to stop. Not seeing the value of black and brown bodies has to stop.”

If Wade was referring to police, as I suspect many in his audience assumed, he should apologize. The men and women in law enforcement do not have a “shoot-to-kill” mentality. They risk their lives to protect us from criminals who do have a “shoot-to-kill” mentality.

Yes, there are evil people who do not place any value on black and brown bodies, but it’s not the police. It’s the gang banging criminals who are responsible for so much inner city crime.

Just The Facts

I understand that different people can have different perceptions of the same events, perceptions often shaded by the color of our skin. But it behooves everyone, no matter your skin color, to speak the truth. For example:

• A recent Harvard study found that police officers were no more likely to use deadly force against blacks than against whites. Consider this excerpt from the Washington Times:

“‘On the most extreme use of force — officer-involved shootings — we find no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account,’ said Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr. in the abstract of the July 2016 paper. Mr. Fryer, who is black, told the New York Times that the finding of no racial discrimination in police shootings was ‘the most surprising result of my career.’”

• According to data from the Department of Justice, and confirmed by a study conducted by a University of Pennsylvania criminologist, black police officers were 3.3 times more likely to use deadly force at a crime scene than were other officers.

• According to Heather Mac Donald, a research fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black criminal than a police officer killing an unarmed black person.