Donald Trump spoke at the National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service, and delivered the usual platitudes in support of police. However, Trump also delivered a harangue aimed at anyone who dared protest police violence.
... parts of the speech emphasized a common theme in his campaign for President and young administration — that those who protest police brutality are responsible for violence against law enforcement and declines in public safety.
Trump repeated the same praise that politicians of both parties routinely hand out, then patted himself on the back for saying what everyone else says … extra bravely.
“You are the thin blue line between civilization and chaos,” Trump said. “Because you don't hear it nearly enough, I want you to know that patriotic Americans of all backgrounds truly support and love our police. The very sad thing is that today many politicians don't want to say that, they don't want to talk about that, because it's not politically correct, and they think it might hurt them with voters. I will say it, and I will talk about it proudly.”
What else does Donald Trump do proudly? Create statistics to make America seem like a violent hell hole.
“We are living through an era in which our police have been subject to unfair defamation and vilification,” he said, adding: “Even worse, hostility and violence. More officers were slain last year in ambushes than in any year more than two decades.”
Throughout the campaign and after, Trump has produced sets of statistics, ranging from the extremely selective to the downright fictional, designed to make America seem as if we’re in the throws of violence. That includes making statements such as "The murder rate in our country is the highest it’s been in 47 years” when in fact it’s dropped dramatically, and pumping out tweets filled with wildly inaccurate values heavily tainted by racism.
A day after a black activist was kicked and punched by voters at a Donald Trump rally in Alabama, Trump tweeted an image packed with racially loaded and incorrect murder statistics.
The image shows a masked, dark-skinned man with a handgun and a set of points, ostensibly about deaths in 2015:
"Blacks killed by whites -- 2%" …
"Whites killed by blacks -- 81%"
"Blacks killed by blacks -- 97%”
That fake image from a fake “crime statistics” bureau told the story that Trump and his voters were ready to believe—violence is a black thing, and white people have nothing to do with it. It was also an absolute lie.
So is Trump’s statistic about police deaths. Approximately 143 officers died on duty in 2016. That is slightly up from 2015, when the number was 137, but it’s sharply down from 2010 or 2011 or most years right back through all those decades Trump swept in. Of course, Trump swept in the word “ambush,” and by narrowly defining that term, he can make the numbers say anything he wants.
On the other hand, there was one set of numbers that has been showing a real increase over the last few years.
By the end of 2015, the Washington Post counted 990 people shot dead by police; the Guardian counted 1,146 people killed; Fatal Encounters recorded 1,357 killed.
In 2016, there was a slight decrease, but the number of people killed by police still exceeded three a day.
Fatal Encounters’ data from earlier years is admittedly incomplete, but they have so far collected more than 14,000 records of people killed in interactions with police from January 2000 through June 2016. From 2000-2014, FE records at least 12,137 people killed by police, compared to just 5,830 reported to the FBI by police over the same period — and they estimate their records are only about 60 percent complete so far.
Note that those 12,137 people were killed by police before Michael Brown, before Black Lives Matter, before Donald Trump decided that complaining about being killed … was the cause of being killed. But don’t worry. Trump will, like most Republicans, continue to fight on the side of people who already have power against those who don’t.