George Floyd and the riots - rebels without a cause

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.

-      Martin Luther King Jr.

 

 

The death of George Floyd at the hands of ex-police officer Derek Chauvin, in a most confronting way, has sparked global protests, riots and renewed debates about racism and police brutality among other things.

 

No one of even the most average moral integrity would not have reacted in anger and disgust at the conduct of Chauvin, who knelt on the neck of Floyd for a total of eight minutes and forty-six seconds – an eternity for a man’s weight to be pressed down on one’s neck.

 

The distain for Chauvin’s actions are universal. It came from across the political spectrum, across the world and loudly from other police officers. Chauvin is now faced with second-degree and third-degree murder charges.

 

While it is understandable for everyone to be angered and aggrieved, it is vitally important, especially at such emotional times, not to think with the blood. It is also imprudent to immediately leap to the lowest of motives – that of racism, before all the evidence is in.

 

This tendency has happened so often in recent years, such as the Covington school children case, or Jussie Smollett’s fake ‘racist attack’, much to the embarrassment let alone rightful financial penalty to the media, celebrities and keyboard warriors across the world, all clambering over each other to peacock their morality and ending up looking like fools.

 

And what is certainly unwise is some of the ‘solutions’ that are posed by a loud minority, riding on a wave of euphoric righteousness, unknowingly heading towards craggy rocky shores, and determined to drag everyone with them.

 

Is racism the cause?

Chauvin’s actions in the video shows him to be a sadistic, callous and barbaric man. But is he also racist? In his 19 years as a police officer, Chauvin has had 18 complaints. One characteristic behind these seems to be an inclination to resort to force.

 

Chauvin and Floyd had in fact been co-workers – both men worked at El Nuevo Rodeo, a Latin night club, as part-time security guards. The former owner also said of Chauvin that he “was nice but he would overreact and lash out quickly.”

 

These testimonies all suggest that Chauvin had a habit of callously using excess force. And it seems that the men did have beef - with testament from another security guard emerging that the two didn’t get along, precisely due to Chauvin being overly aggressive towards some patrons.

 

So far the evidence would suggest that Chauvin, a belligerent man and a badly trained or ill-disciplined cop, took the opportunity to brutally and sadistically get one over Floyd, resulting in his death. While racism is still possible, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of it. There is in fact a counterfactual – Chauvin’s wife of 10 years Kellie is a Hmong minority and a refugee from Laos, suggesting he is at least not a white supremacist.

 

But even if it can be proved beyond a doubt that Chauvin is not only sadistic, sociopathic and callous but also a rampant racist who wanted to and did kill Floyd, does the assertion that there is systematic racism in the US police force stand?

 

 

Statistics on systemic racism in the US police

 

Racists undoubtedly exist – prejudice is as human as any other emotions, and race is simply one of the many ways people from all over can exercise their prejudices. There will be racists in the 800,000 strong police force in the US. But to say that the US is systemically racist is a whole other kettle of fish. And too many people are unwilling or unable to make this distinction. Or indeed, propagating a narrative that deliberately blurs the difference.

 

It might also be worthwhile to point out for example that the Minneapolis Chief of Police, Medaria Arradondo, is black, a fact that might argue that the Minneapolis Police is unlikely to be systematically racist.

 

In a previous essay on the BLM protests and riots that occurred in the mid 2010’s, I referred to several studies on police shootings and race. The studies, from Harvard, Washington State University and the City University of New York, all suggested that in fact police in the US do not shoot blacks more than whites.

 

More recent studies bear out these findings. A 2019 study by researchers from Michigan State University, published in the prestigious journal PNAS, drawing on data compiled by the Washington Post and the Guardian, two very left-leaning institutions, also found no evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities in fatal police shootings.

 

There are often reports that point to higher rates of blacks being shot by police when corrected by their proportion of the US population. However, as I wrote in the previous essay:

 

In 2015, the police in the US killed twice as many whites 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.

 

The Washington Post, have compiled data to show that since 2015, 5,400 people have been shot and killed by police, of which 6% were unarmed. The trend has also been declining, from 94 deaths in 2015 to 55 in 2019. Of the 55, 15 were unarmed black men and 25 whites.

 

From the Washington Post

Bear in mind that this in the most armed country in the world, which has the size and population of the entire continent of Europe, with 800,000 police officers and millions of daily police interactions. Also note that in 2019 48 police officers were killed by shooting or other criminal means, of which 40 were white, 7 were black and 1 Asian.

 

Besides deaths, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data that includes almost a third of all reported crimes across over 6,000 law enforcement agencies saw almost exactly equal number of black suspects arrested compared to the number of criminals that the victims reported to be black.

And while it is difficult to estimate, it is undoubted that every year tens of thousands of lives are saved by the police and more lives bettered in numerous ways. These numbers and the multiple studies by largely liberal scholars do not suggest a rampantly racist police force operating in America.

 

 

Black lives that don’t seem to matter to the BLM

 

In comparison, in Chicago alone over the Father’s Day weekend 2020, 102 were shot and 14 killed, including five children, in a crime spree. On May the 31^st, 18 people were murdered. In 2019, there were around 500 homicides in Chicago. As of mid-June 2020 there have been over 250 murders, mostly of young black men, killed by other young black men. This number is pretty average for Chicago, which is not even in the top 10 most dangerous cities in America.  Amazingly, Chicago police solve under 30% of these murders.

 

In one of the largest cities in the US that’s almost exactly a third black, a third white and a third Hispanic, a city that has been governed exclusively by Democrats since before the Second World War, with a black female City Mayor Lori Lightfoot, a black female District Attorney Kim Foxx, a black Superintendent of Police David Brown (whose predecessor was also a black man), it seems churlish to say systemic racism in the police force is killing black people.

 

The facts outlined above would suggest that if saving black lives is your chief priority, more policing and better policies, rather than less policing and simply more leaders who happen to be black, is required.

 

But why is it that BLM never has protests about the thousands of black people murdered each year but will incite riots and lootings about the few killed by white police officers? And why is it that many refuse to acknowledge the fact that crime is a problem overrepresented in the black community? Or that simply pointing the fact out is somehow racist?

 

The answer seems to be that for the Progressives like the BLM and Al Sharpton and Jessie Jackson, the chief concern is not black lives, but to instill the narrative that the US is a racist place. Unfortunately, as Yeats wrote, The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.

 

This is why many black commentators, scholars and politicians who advocate proven remedies such as personal responsibility, reducing single-parent family rates and introduction of school-vouchers, instead of shouting racism, are called Uncle Tom’s, sell-outs and worse.

 

For the democrats in particular, who has sown the soil with the neo-Marxist idea of race inequality and using the platform to gain political power, the harvest of resentment artificially inculcated into the young, are coming back to haunt chiefly the Democrat-run cities – 17 of the top 20 most violent cities in the US are Democrat-run. When corrected for population, 19 of the top 20 are Democrat. Yet these are precisely the places where defunding the police is being floated as a ‘solution’.

 

One experiment of this has been run in CHAZ, the 'autonomous zone' in Seattle taken over by BLM activists, radical leftist anarchists and the like. The solution these revolutionaries poseurs came up with to solve supposed racism is to create a place that has racially segregated areas, no police allowed but random armed militia to keep the non-existent peace. A place where multiple fatal shootings have already happened. In short, a place a lot worse than what they are protesting about. 

The Seattle leadership, including the Mayor Jenny Durkan and Police chief Carmen Best, are so pliant to the demands of the mob that the residence in the region cannot expect the police to respond to escalating numbers of rapes, robberies and other crimes. 

The ‘collateral’ damage – what the BLM and proxies have achieved

 

Like the cases in the mid-2010’s that led to multiple riots and shooting of police officers, what seems important to note is how quickly racism was assumed to be the reason and how much the anger is fanned on by the media, so called community leaders and politicians, all before any of the evidence was properly examined.

 

But evidence doesn’t seem to matter to some of the emotionally charged protesters and cynical politicians. As Mark Twain said, a lie can travel around the world before the truth has even tied its shoe laces.

 

For example, the story that Michael Brown, a young black man shot by police in 2014, had his hands up and pled to the police officer not to shoot him was proven to be a lie. Yet BLM protesters in 2020 still had signs with “Hands up, don’t shoot”.

 

This is also true in 2020. While the behaviour of Chauvin is disgusting and criminal, it is not necessarily racist. Even if it is, it doesn’t (as the data shows) prove that there is systemic racism in the US police. But even if the police is flagrantly racist, how does destroying your own neighbourhoods and livelihoods of innocent people, many of whom are black, make any difference other than for the worse?

 

Many shops, already crippled by the coronavirus and shutdown, were further damaged or ruined by looters and arsonists. Others are so terrified they are putting up pro-BLM signs to ‘ward off’ the looters like Passover. This young black woman’s impassioned speech in NYC didn’t make the mainstream media but has 4 million views of YouTube. She makes a lot of sense. While it is not covered very much in mainstream media, the level of destruction of, for example, the Bronx, which is majority non-white, is shocking.

 

Retired St Louis police captain David Dorn was another ‘collateral’. The 77 year old black grandfather went to check on a friend’s pawn store when their alarm went off in the early morning of June the 2^nd and was shot and killed by a young black man looting the shop. The same night, more than 50 businesses were burgled and damaged in St Louis.

 

Unlike David Dorn who, despite his age, still felt it his duty to help preserve his friend’s business from criminals, the unwillingness of the authorities and much of the media to separate the lawful protesters from the looters and rioters and to do something about the latter is alarming.

 

This is perhaps epitomised in the response of Chicago Mayor Lori Lighfoot to pleas for help from Chicago aldermen (district representatives). Her complete dismissal and rudeness to their pleas for help is shocking. One alderman, Raymond Lopez of the 15^th Ward, taped part of their conversation and it is worth a listen.

 

Whether from fear of the mob or political convenience, the lack of leadership and condemnation for what is clear criminal behaviour has resulted in a lot of damage, grief and more than a dozen deaths.  Businesses in Seattle, in the so-called CHAZ or CHOP zone, taken over by a mob, are now suing the Mayor and the Governor for failing to protect them. Undoubtedly many more lawsuits will come.

 

Besides the clearly criminal behaviour, the behaviour of some of the black activists is shocking. Examples of activists gloating while white people kiss their shoes and wash their feet is appalling. This humiliation of people of one race by another would have caused outrage if the roles are switched, but as it is, in the moral atmosphere engendered where not one critical thing can be said to any individual black person lest you incur the brand of racism, things like these go unremarked upon by the majority of media and the activist leadership.

 

 

Disingenuous narratives

 

The evidence simply does not support the idea propagated by the likes of the BLM, and some of the more extreme Democrats that there is systemic racism in the police, a narrative that has since metastasised to include the country, its institutions and its white population as a whole.

 

While you’ll find virtually no Americans who doesn’t think slavery is a giant blight on their country’s history, a context-less analysis of history and indeed the present is dishonest and harmful. Here are a few points to consider:

 

One hundred and fifty five years have passed since the formal end of slavery in America, after a war was fought, in which more than 600,000 mostly white people died, to end a disgusting but unfortunately universal practise that still goes on in Africa, the Middle East and Asia today. The latest estimates suggest 40 million people around the world currently live in slavery and America is one of the few places with the least number of enslaved people.

 

So why do these protesters deface even statues of Jefferson, Lincoln and Ulysses S Grant? These are the people who pioneered and executed the end to slavery in the US. In the UK they deface the statue of Churchill, the man who was vital in the defeat of the most racist regimes in recent history, that had debased and killed many black and mixed background Germans. These same people venerate Floyd, who has been convicted of crimes 9 time, including a robbery where he pressed a gun against the stomach of a pregnant woman.

 

The US has had a black President for two terms, 15 African American Cabinet Secretaries, a half Native American Vice-President in Charles Curtis as early as 1929, and 40 African American candidates that ran for the Presidency as their Party’s nominee since 1904. Frederick Douglass ran as early as 1848 as a candidate for the Liberty Party, and 4 African Americans ran in the Democratic Primaries for the 2020 election, this in addition to Tulsi Gabbard, an American Samoan, and Andrew Yang, who is ethnically Chinese. Try to name another country with this level of ethnic representation in its political candidates.

 

There are 36 Mayors of cities with 40,000+ residents in the US that are black, with 16 of these in cities where blacks are a minority, including Chicago, Dallas and the capital Washington DC.

 

Of the nine Supreme Court Justices, Clarence Thomas is black, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is Jewish, Samuel Alito is a second generation Italian, and Sonia Sotomayor is Hispanic American.

 

Black people dominate the lucrative sports, music and entertainment industries, astronomically over representing their 13% in the country’s population.

 

In any list of great Americans, names like Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, Booker T Washington, Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Jessie Owen, Dave Chappelle will come up.

 

Two of the most venerated books of American literature and indeed world literature are The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, both books with overt anti-racism messages.

 

There is so little actual racism that Jussie Smollett had to hire two Nigerians to fake a racial incident. And the latest racial incident to take hold of the press is Nazcar driver Bubba Wallace's 'noose' incident, which turned out to be another non-incident driven by the hypersensitized Wallace determined to interpret a rope used to close the door of the garage that had been there months before he used it, as a noose. The FBI was involved in investigating this. And Wallace is half white.

But that's what's going to happen more and more. As there are actually little racism, the people indoctrinated to the idea that the US is racist will be determined to interpret unkindly anything that can be construed to be racism. 

ABC radio in Australia, a public funded station, thought it was fit to ask if chess was racist because the white piece goes first. 

L'Oreal felt it necessary to remove words like 'white' and 'fair' from their products, obviously terrified of potential accusations of racism. This is how to give a society a heart attack. And is possibly the fastest way to engender resentment towards black people. 

In a debate on Reparations, the late Christopher Hitchens said that “It matters not what you think – anyone can have thoughts, many content themselves with feelings – it matters how you think.”

 

The disingenuous narrative of blacks in the US being held down and oppressed is a mind-forged manacle, an invisible cage to hold back otherwise free men and women who could otherwise pursue their happiness like so many other immigrants. A country so egalitarian that by ethnicity, whites are only the third on the list of average household income behind Indian and East Asian Americans. 

The latest round of anti-racist movement shows how much damage can be done by even well-meaning people who follow narratives rather than facts, and who treasure feelings over truths. The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.