RUTHFULLY YOURS

Editor’s Note: Originally published Feb. 11, 2016

A television ad for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign now airing in South Carolina shows the candidate declaring that “too many encounters with law enforcement end tragically.” She later adds: “We have to face up to the hard truth of injustice and systemic racism.”

Her Democratic presidential rival, Bernie Sanders, met with the Rev. Al Sharpton on Wednesday. Mr. Sanders then tweeted that “As President, let me be very clear that no one will fight harder to end racism and reform our broken criminal justice system than I will.” And he appeared on the TV talk show “The View” saying, “It is not acceptable to see unarmed people being shot by police officers.”

Apparently the Black Lives Matter movement has convinced Democrats and progressives that there is an epidemic of racist white police officers killing young black men. Such rhetoric is going to heat up as Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders court minority voters before the Feb. 27 South Carolina primary.

But what if the Black Lives Matter movement is based on fiction? Not just the fictional account of the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., but the utter misrepresentation of police shootings generally.

To judge from Black Lives Matter protesters and their media and political allies, you would think that killer cops pose the biggest threat to young black men today. But this perception, like almost everything else that many people think they know about fatal police shootings, is wrong.

The Washington Post has been gathering data on fatal police shootings over the past year and a half to correct acknowledged deficiencies in federal tallies. The emerging data should open many eyes.

For starters, fatal police shootings make up a much larger proportion of white and Hispanic homicide deaths than black homicide deaths. According to the Post database, in 2015 officers killed 662 whites and Hispanics, and 258 blacks. (The overwhelming majority of all those police-shooting victims were attacking the officer, often with a gun.) Using the 2014 homicide numbers as an approximation of 2015’s, those 662 white and Hispanic victims of police shootings would make up 12% of all white and Hispanic homicide deaths. That is three times the proportion of black deaths that result from police shootings.

The lower proportion of black deaths due to police shootings can be attributed to the lamentable black-on-black homicide rate. There were 6,095 black homicide deaths in 2014—the most recent year for which such data are available—compared with 5,397 homicide deaths for whites and Hispanics combined. Almost all of those black homicide victims had black killers.

Police officers—of all races—are also disproportionately endangered by black assailants. Over the past decade, according to FBI data, 40% of cop killers have been black. Officers are killed by blacks at a rate 2.5 times higher than the rate at which blacks are killed by police.

Some may find evidence of police bias in the fact that blacks make up 26% of the police-shooting victims, compared with their 13% representation in the national population. But as residents of poor black neighborhoods know too well, violent crimes are disproportionately committed by blacks. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, blacks were charged with 62% of all robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults in the 75 largest U.S. counties in 2009, though they made up roughly 15% of the population there. CONTINUE AT SITE

Lyndon Johnson did his best to block the Freedom of Information Act, but public opinion forced him to make government records available. The question now is how FOIA, which LBJ signed 50 years ago this month, survives the precedent Hillary Clinton set with her basement server intended to keep her emails hidden from public view.

Bill Moyers, LBJ’s press secretary at the time, recalled in a 2003 broadcast how FOIA nearly didn’t become law: The president “hated the very idea of a Freedom of Information Act, hated the idea of journalists rummaging in government closets, hated them challenging the official view of reality.”

LBJ relented and signed what he called “the damned thing” on July 4, 1966, but insisted on no fanfare. In the decades that followed, FOIA became an essential tool for government accountability.

No public official since LBJ has gone as far as Hillary Clinton to evade public-disclosure laws. In 2010 her adviser Huma Abedin recommended that she use a government email account, as the State Department required. “I don’t want any risk of the personal being accessible,” Mrs. Clinton responded in an email that has since come to light. She used a private email server for all her communications because this kept both official and personal communications off government servers, where they would have been subject to disclosure under FOIA.

FBI Director James Comey concluded that Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information in her emails didn’t meet the legal test for a crime because he couldn’t prove that she intended to disclose national secrets. But Mr. Comey testified to Congress last week that the FBI determined that Mrs. Clinton did violate the Federal Records Act, which makes his legal analysis of her intent incomplete. Her most relevant intention was to defy disclosure laws. Her actions had the incidental effect of mishandling confidential communications.

Mrs. Clinton stonewalled FOIA requests for years with her keep-no-records, produce-no-records strategy. In a deposition last month in a civil lawsuit challenging her personal email server, the State Department said its staffers in charge of records didn’t realize until 2014 that its former boss had used private email.

Appropriately enough, Mrs. Clinton’s explanation that she used a private email server to keep her records secret only became public in a lawsuit challenging the State Department’s insistence that it couldn’t respond to FOIA requests because it couldn’t locate her emails on its .gov server.

The State Department’s inspector general in May ruled that Mrs. Clinton broke record-keeping laws such as those requiring compliance with FOIA requests, never got permission for her home server and ignored numerous security warnings. CONTINUE AT SITE

Statistics don’t lie and those for black crime in the US are damning. When agitators and promoters of racial animosity note that African-Americans are hugely over-represented in prison populations, what they never acknowledge is that they also commit far more crimes. No wonder police are nervous.
The police shootings of two black men (Philando Castile in Flacon Heights, Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana) look problematic to say the least, judging by the video recordings that I have seen on TV. But all of the facts aren’t in so it is wise to suspend judgement. Clearly more evidence will emerge to throw greater light on the incidents.

I don’t want to comment directly on these cases nor on the demonstration in Dallas which they prompted; during which five police officers were shot and killed and seven others and two bystanders wounded. It now appears that the shooter acted alone. Micah Johnston was a 25-year-old army veteran turned ‘black terrorist’ (for want of a better description) intent, as he said, on shooting white police officers. My comment primarily goes to public safety in America but it has application to Australia and to all societies living under the rule of secular law.

The reaction of the Black Lives Matter demonstrators in Dallas when they became aware that shots were being fired is instructive. They scattered in all directions crying out in fear and panic. The police ran towards the danger. There are two lessons to draw I think.

The first is that untrained unarmed people are no match for a trained gunman. This is so obvious why say it? It’s worth saying because we civilians, but particularly progressives and those intent on feminising society, have to realise that power does come out of the barrel of a gun. A few ruthless bad guys with guns can subjugate and enslave many unarmed people (otherwise called ‘sheep’) without any difficulty at all.

Our safety (the safety of us sheep) in Australia is totally dependent on the police and defence forces. In America it is a little different because many millions of citizens have the capacity to defend themselves. I like the American model better because the resurgence of militant Islam is making the world a more threatening place, but that is by the way.

The second lesson is that delegating our safety to police officers, as we must in the course of ordinary life whether we are personally armed or not, carries risks. One risk is that some police officers will at times act outside their authority; and sometimes brutally. But a second risk is likely to be realised much more often. That is that police officers may ‘overreact’ to perceived danger. Like us civilians, they don’t want to be harmed and have the same adrenalin reaction to danger as do we all. They are not a race apart.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent. He discussed The Hillary-FBI Fix, revealing the catastrophic damage to American national security interests.

Don’t miss it!

And make sure to watch The Brigitte Gabriel Moment with Brigitte Gabriel, the founder of ACT for America, in which Brigitte discussesWhat is Really Driving the Terrorists, unveiling what is really inspiring jihadists — and why Obama and the media don’t want you to know it.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/07/10/the-hillary-fbi-fix-on-the-glazov-gang/