Time to End the Demonizing of Police Two years of corrosive rhetoric about racist cops, based on falsehoods—with disastrous effects. Heather Mac Donald
http://www.wsj.com/articles/time-to-end-the-demonizing-of-police-1468363042
For two years American police departments have endured relentless attacks from the Obama administration, its media allies and the Black Lives Matter movement alleging that U.S. law enforcement is a racist, deadly threat to African-Americans. A handful of disturbing videos depicting police shootings helped galvanize widespread hostility to law-enforcement officers, and cops began backing away from the proactive policing that stops crime but has been repeatedly denounced as racial oppression.
The result, especially in the first half of this year, has been an appalling increase in shootings and murders in many cities across America. Most of the victims, in this poisonous era spawned by Black Lives Matter, have been black. Now the consequences of this stream of falsehoods about police may be spinning out of control, with the assassination of five police officers in Dallas last week and the attacks on cops in other cities since then.
Make no mistake: Assertions about systemic, deadly police racism are false. That has been true throughout the period following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014; recall that the cop involved was ultimately exonerated by the Justice Department. But no number of studies debunking this fiction has penetrated the conventional story line.
A “deadly force” lab study at Washington State University by researcher Lois James found that participants were biased in favor of black suspects, over white or Hispanic ones, in simulated threat scenarios. The research, published in 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, confirmed what Ms. James had found previously in studying active police officers, military personnel and the general public.
In 2015 a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. And this month “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” by Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr., analyzing more than 1,000 officer-involved shootings across the country, reports that there is zero evidence of racial bias in police shootings.CONTINUE AT SITE
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