A protest was launched today by Black Lives Matter near the White House, where demonstrators said they were “fed up” with reports over the killings of blacks by police. Members of the black caucus of the House of Representatives are to meet with FBI Director James Comey to discuss the deaths of two black men — Philandro Castile and Alton Sterling — at the hands of police in Minnesota and Louisiana, respectively.
However, the deaths of whites at the hands of police receive much less attention, even in cases where the circumstances of the deaths are controversial. Examples include the death of Gilbert Collar (18), a white student at the University of South Alabama. Collar was naked and under the influence of drugs when he was shot to death by Trevis Austin, a black police officer.
Austin was cleared of the deed in 2012 by a Mobile County grand jury. Little attention was focused on the case outside of Alabama. Collar’s family filed a federal lawsuit against the police that is ongoing.
A study published last week by The Washington Post offers significant details about police shootings:
White officers shooting unarmed black men amounted to less than 4 percent of fatal police shootings.
In about 75 percent of those incidents, police were under defending themselves or civilians.
Most of those killed were wielding weapons, suicidal or mentally disturbed, or ran when ordered to stop.
Nearly a third of police shootings involved car chases that began with a minor traffic stop.
Writing in the New York Post today, Michael Walsh wrote “The Myth of the Killer Cop Epidemic,” and disputed what he called the widespread narrative of “homicidal goon” cops run amok in black neighborhoods. This narrative, Walsh wrote, “ignores the fact that black violent-crime rates are far higher than those of whites. According to the Department of Justice, blacks committed 52.5 percent of the murders in America from 1980 to 2008, when they represented 12.6 percent of the population.”
Regarding a December 2015 study by the Washington Post on police shootings, he noted that of the 965 person killed by police that year, only 90 were unarmed, and the majority of those were white. He also noted the shocking reality of murder in President Barack Obama’s hometown. Walsh wrote: “The worst neighborhoods in Chicago — say, West Garfield Park, where gangs run rampant — have a higher murder rate (116.7 per 100,000) than world murder capitals like Honduras (90.4). But no, best not to mention. That only distracts from the real problem — the cops trying to stop it.”