RUTHFULLY YOURS

If Clinton is elected president, we will probably continue to “ignore” the one “very serious problem” that we do have with regard to policing, crime, and race — and that is black crime. The magnitude of black crime dwarfs the fatal shootings by police officers that, according to the Black Lives Matter movement, so oppress the black community. In fact, if we are going to have a “Lives Matter” crusade, it would more appropriately be labeled “White and Hispanic Lives Matter.” Twelve percent of white and Hispanic homicide victims are killed by the police, compared with 4 percent of black homicide victims, as newly revealed in a Manhattan Institute Reality Check. You would never know that truth from the Black Lives Matter movement, however, which makes out the police to be a full-time black-killing machine.

That threefold disparity in the rate of officer-involved victimizations is the result of black crime: The number of blacks killed by other blacks is so massive that it overshadows all other homicides. In 2014, 6,095 blacks were killed nationwide, according to the FBI, 93 percent of them by other blacks. That is a sum greater than the number of white and Hispanic homicide victims combined (5,397 in 2014, according to the FBI), even though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. In 2015, 258 blacks were killed by the police, according to the Washington Post’s open-source database of police killings — representing 4 percent of all black homicide deaths. Officers killed 493 whites and 169 Hispanics — representing 12 percent of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths in 2014. The vast majority of all victims of fatal police shootings — white, black, and Hispanic — were armed or threatening the officer with other forms of potentially lethal force. But the black dominance in violence shows up in cop-killings as well: Forty percent of all police officers murdered from 2005 to 2014 were killed by blacks.

The Black Lives Matter movement has done a stupendous job over the last year and a half of changing the subject from urban violence to policing. The country’s media and political elites have decried phantom police racism ad nauseam while persistently looking the other way when it comes to the ongoing blood bath in the inner cities. In his State of the Union address last week, President Barack Obama gave the Black Lives Matter movement a shout-out, lauding the “protester determined to prove that justice matters.” Not a word, of course, about the 120 Chicagoans shot in the first ten days of 2016, 19 of them fatally, or the dozens of black children mowed down in drive-by shootings last year, from Baltimore to Cincinnati to Cleveland.

President Obama has repeatedly voiced the poisonous lie adopted by Hillary Clinton last Sunday: that the criminal-justice system is racist and that the police treat blacks and whites differently. That lie increases the likelihood that black suspects will resist arrest, which in turn increases the chance that an officer will have to use force against them. The biggest predictor of officer use of force is resistance to arrest. If the Black Lives Matter movement were serious about decreasing the number of blacks killed by the police each year, it would launch a campaign to persuade people to comply with officers’ lawful authority. And it would call for a revival of the two-parent black family, whose dissolution is the ultimate source of elevated rates of black criminality. But such causes would not get you attention from the White House, at least under the current regime and or that of any Democratic successor.

In the absence of such truth-telling, it will fall to the police to protect black lives — a task that law enforcement has done magnificently over the last two decades. That protection is now in jeopardy thanks to the anti-cop movement enthusiastically embraced by the White House, the press, and Mrs. Clinton.

— Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of Are Cops Racist?