Black Lives Matter - is it justified?

American race relations has sunken to its lowest level since the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King Jr and, undeservedly obscured by time, great civil rights activists like Bayard Rustin and A Philip Randolph. Recent polls show that 69% of Americans think race relations are bad, a massive jump from 38% in 2015. About 60% polled say race relations have deteriorated under the Obama administration. More than 50 years after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were signed by Lyndon B Johnson, and after America having its first black President in power for 8 years, not to mention 2 black Secretary of States, the deteriorating situation might leave your casual observer scratching his or her head with perplexity.

One notable observation which separate the current mis en scene with that of the peaceful protests and marches on Washington, when racist laws were actually in place, is this: as demonstrated with the recent riots in Milwaukee, Charlotte and deliberate killings of police officers in Dallas, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and their surrogates readily and even eagerly resort to violence.

While the vast majority of people would agree that violence of this sort is morally, let alone economically deleterious, that the justification of looting and targeting of random white people, not to mention the advocacy and actual murders of police officers, are unconscionable, some might have at least a sneaking sympathy with the BLM as a rightful reaction to grievances, their grievance being that black people are being unfairly targeted by the police in fatal incidents. But is this true? Are their claims of racist killings of blacks by police sustained by facts? And if not, what does that make the BLM? And what does it make the media and public figures who tolerate their actions and endorse their claims?

There are a handful of cases that have been the catalysts for BLM and the protests. Undoubtedly they are merely the tinder which set aflame the log-pile of social and economical problems stemming largely from bad policy (which I won’t concentrate on here). But since the movement pivots on the supposition of a racially biased police force deliberately killing blacks, I will try to assess them below.

While I want to focus on cases that involve perceived racist police shootings, I feel the Trayvon Martin case needed to be examined as it instigated the BLM movement. In 2013, on February the 26^th, a 17 year old black teenager Trayvon Martin was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Florida. Investigations found that after Zimmerman saw Martin late one night in his neighbourhood, which has suffered a spate of recent criminal activities, Zimmerman called the police reporting a suspicious person. When Martin ran, Zimmerman followed. According to witnesses, the two got into a scuffle whereby Martin was on top of Zimmerman, punching him and hitting his head on the pavement. Zimmerman then shot Martin in self-defence. Zimmerman was charged with murder but was acquitted by a jury after a month of trials.

While in my opinion Zimmerman shouldn’t have engaged Martin in the first place, after having reported it to the police (who arrived 2min after the fatal incident), thereby avoiding the whole sad affair, what was very alarming was the misreporting by the media to make this a racial incident. For example, Zimmerman was continuously reported as ‘white’ even though he is half Hispanic with some black ancestry on his mother’s side, identifies as Hispanic with both his driver’s licence and voter registration form stating that he is Hispanic. NBC misleadingly edited his call to 911 to suggest that he volunteered Martin’s race rather than replying to the dispatcher question asking about race. There was further inaccurate reporting by multiple media outlets suggesting that juror B29, known as ‘Maddy’, the only non-white juror, said she was bullied into acquitting Zimmerman, and that she ‘thinks Zimmerman got away with murder’. Slate ran an article which disproved this narrative, which was duplicitously edited together by ABC. Zimmerman’s father, a former magistrate, stated pointedly and poignantly, that racism was "flourishing at the insistence of some in the African American Community". Keep this in mind as it is a theme running through the following incidents.

In 2014, on August the 9^th, Michael Brown, an 18 year old black youth, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a 28 year old white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. According to the US Department of Justice examinations, shortly before the shooting, Brown and a friend stole cigarillos from a corner shop and was videoed to have shoved the clerk who tried to stop him. Wilson was notified of the reported robbery and saw Brown and his friend, who fit the description. He blocked them with his car and a scuffle ensued while Wilson was still in his car where Brown tried to grab Wilson’s gun. The gun went off and shot Brown in the hand, making him flee. Wilson chased Brown and Brown stopped, turned and advanced towards Wilson (aggressively according to Wilson). Wilson then fired multiple shots, killing Brown. It might be worth noting that Brown is 6’5 (~196cm) and over 280lb (130kg). Some witnesses said that Brown had his hands up (hence the ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ narrative), but the FBI investigation, looking into possible civil rights violations with attorneys from the Civil Rights Division and from the United States Attorney’s Office deemed these witness reports unreliable and indeed, in some cases, admitted lies. This was corroborated by ballistics tests, forensic tests and witness accounts. The grand jury decided not to indict Wilson.

The media portrayed him as a ‘gentle giant’ and initial report suggested that Wilson shot Brown from behind for walking in the middle of the street before killing him by shooting him in the front, while he had his hands up pleading “Don’t shoot”. This false narrative was allowed to run and picked up by politicians and certainly fanned the unrest and riots which involved looting, property damage and other criminal behaviours, costing an estimated $4 million dollars. But the alarming thing is that even with the release of all the detailed evidence which strongly opposed to the narrative of a racist killer cop wantonly killing a young black man, the tension did not dissolve. While Brown certainly did not deserve to die, it is not unjust to say that his actions do bear in his own demise. To twist the evidence and martyr him as a symbol of black oppression, when none of the evidence give credence to this idea, is disingenuous and disquieting. In fact, it is asinine and dangerous. A good summary can be seen in this short video.

On April 19^th, 2015 in Baltimore, Freddie Gray died, from spinal injuries sustained a week earlier when arrested for being in possession of an illegally sized switchblade and being transported to the police station in the back of a police van. The autopsy reports show that Gray had drugs in his system (opiates and cannabinoid) and was violently active in the back of the van, resulting in the officers putting him in ankle cuffs and placing him prone in the back of the van. The investigation suggested that while not secured as he should have been, the injuries sustained is likely caused by his trying to get up and falling as the van turned or braked. The 6 officers involved (3 of whom are black), were charged with misconduct, criminal negligence, manslaughter or second-degree murder charges.

It is certainly egregious and lamentable that a 25 year old young man should die in such a manner and any misconduct of the police should be punished. However, before the investigation barely started, the riots began. This ended with around 300 businesses damaged, 150 vehicle fires, 60 structural fires and 27 drug stores looted. Racism is automatically placarded as the central heart of darkness plaguing the Baltimore police and the cause of the tragic death of Gray. So here is the crux, in a majority non-white city of about 45% blacks, with the city council majority blacks (9/15), 100% democrat, with the then-police chief Anthony Batts being black, the majority of command staff being black, the Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake being black, the Attorney General Marilyn Mosby being black, with 3 out of 6 cops involved in Gray’s arrest being black, is this really the picture of a systematically racist place? Larry Elder has a great piece that analyses the reasons why the BLM community is so fast to jump to the lowest common denominator. Also, as Ben Shapiro asks here, what are the protestors trying to achieve, who are they helping and are they not hurting their own community by setting it alight?

In 2016, August 13^th, in Milwaukee, Sylville Smith was shot and killed by police officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown, after he and another man was pulled over in their car by two officers for suspicious behaviour. Smith was armed with a semi-automatic handgun and according to body camera footage from Heaggan-Brown, Smith was pointing the weapon at the officer. The gun and 500 rounds of ammunition was later identified as having been stolen during a robbery in March. Hours after the shooting, riots broke out with cars set alight and a BP gas station looted and lit up. Investigation found that social media messages from protestors encouraged congregation of people near the scene. The riot caused an estimated $5.8 million worth of damage to neighbourhood businesses.

In this fairly straightforward case of a rightful shooting of a criminal who was aiming at an officer with a stolen gun, a black officer no less, the riots went ahead regardless. A leftist BLM sympathising, half-Korean journalist by the name of Tim Pool, who has covered stories in war-ridden countries, had to run from Milwaukee, fearing for his life. What, one might ask them, were they protesting about? Indeed, one might question, like the Milwaukee Chief of Police Edward Flynn did here, in an impassioned video that has gone viral, what the motives of people who pick up these stories and add spices to try cook up a polarising dish, are. Sherriff David Clarke gives a very succinct summary of what really causes the tensions and riots which the media, who are always quick to sink their teeth into any stories they can spin into racist killings, never touch. An example of media spin: CNN blatantly edited a video of Smith’s sister to suggest that she was asking for peace rather than inflaming rioting. Sherriff Clarke wrote a scathing piece on the pandering of the political classes and the media that have allowed, fuelled and incentivised the unjustified rioting.

So it seems that the cases forming the core crutches on which the ‘white cops are preying on blacks’ narrative sits are unfounded. But let us not only look at individual cases but also look at statistics. In 2015, the police in the US killed twice as many white people as blacks, according to data compiled by the left-leaning Washington Post. While this still seems skewed, as blacks make up only 13% of the population to 62% whites, statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that blacks were charged with 62% of robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in 75 of the largest counties in the US, despite making up only 15% of the population in those counties. This would suggest that police are actually shooting blacks less than they would whites. In fact a study from Harvard, examining 1,332 police shootings, found that police were 20% less likely to shoot blacks than whites. This is corroborated by a study by professor Peter Moskos, who found that whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police, after adjusting for racial disparity for crime. A Washington State University study found that even with white officers who do have racial biases, officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than white suspects. Fear of the racist label no doubt plays a part in this.

On the flip side, the biggest perpetrators of crimes on the black community are other blacks. Data show that 93% of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks. In Baltimore, in 2015, 344 homicides were committed, of which 320 were blacks. These deaths include 10 children under the age of 10. While everyone knows the names of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, no one knows the name of a single one of these kids. Like Tyshawn Lee, the 9-year-old who was lured into an alley in Chicago and killed by a black man seeking gang-related vengeance on his father. To put it in proportion, University of Toledo criminologist Dr Richard Johnson, using FBI’s latest crime data, found that between January of 2009 and December of 2012, 4,472 black men were killed by other black men. Compared to this, 120 black men died from both justified and unjustified police shootings annually during this same period.

If the political classes and BLM were serious about saving black lives, it would seem to me that targeting black-on-black crime would be the primary objective. Politicians would concentrate on ways to lower crime rates by toughening policing in troubled neighbourhoods instead of encouraging the feeling of victimhood and putting the police force out as the sacrificial goat. For great analyses of reasons why the black population in the US is experiencing high rates of unemployment and poverty, in essence, as a reflection of the cocktail of bad culture incentivised by bad policies, is adumbrated by the great Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman here, the commendable economist and commentator Thomas Sowell here and here and lawyer and radio commentator Larry Elder here. Instead of tackling these pressing problems, BLM and an oleaginous media manufacture narratives and ignore facts to incite racial tension where none existed.

The politicians, especially of the hard left, encourage the racial angle due to ideological or political reasons (given the election is up upon us). The BLM (or sections of them) react by castigating white people as the oppressors and applying frankly racist tactics such as insisting white supporter of BLM to go to the back of the march, beating white people, shouting ‘what do we want, dead cops!’ and all sorts of nasty, cruel activities. If there are any legitimate grievances against actual racist acts, by all means point them out and demand justice. But to try and paint a whole swathe of your fellow countrymen and women as racist with no evidence of any racist laws to support the phantom theory of 'institutionalised racism', and to set fire to your own neighbourhood, looting from shops and smashing up cars in the name of a righteous political insurgency is simply shameful and nauseating. For those who encourage what D. H. Lawrence termed 'thinking with the blood', all it will sow is unrest, tension, segregation and distrust. People who encourage this type of herd-thinking, like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and indeed Obama and Clinton, should be challenged instead of fawned upon and it is about time the political leaders grew a spine or some sense and put a stop to this dangerous race-baiting.