In keeping with the right-wing theme that anyone who complains about the far too frequent killing of innocent and unarmed black youth by police is simply "crazy," "exaggerating," "paranoid" or the victim of "race hustlers" such as Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, Bill O'Reilly decided to come on the air the other day to set everyone—uh—"straight."
O'Reilly slammed Dyson's claim and laid out data refuting the volatile assertion:
Police killings of blacks down 70% in last 50 years
In 2012, 123 blacks were killed by police with a gun
In 2012, 326 whites were killed with a gun
(Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, CDC)
In 2013, blacks committed 5,375 murders
In 2013, whites committed 4,396 murders
Whites are 63% of the population blacks are 13%
(FBI, Census Bureau)
O'Reilly took these statistics to mean that “anyone thinking clearly can see that the homicide rate among blacks is way out of proportion." O'Reilly asserted that the disparity of homicide rates explained the "police intrusion into black precincts.” Since in a whopping 90 percent of black homicides the the offender is black.
But as you can bet, there's more to these stats than O'Reilly lets on, as I will discuss below the fold.
The first interesting thing is that when O'Reilly wants to talk about population proportions, he only does it in relation to the number of supposed "murders committed" by blacks against blacks, as if this was some kind of correlation or justification for when police kill blacks.
It's not.
Are we arguing every person killed by police in the U.S. is only dead because he or she is a murderer? Look at some instances when they're not. Oscar Grant was unarmed and killed while handcuffed. Kendrec McDade was unarmed and killed because of false 911 report. Jonathan Ferrell was unarmed and killed because of a false burglary report,. Darrien Hunt was supposedly "brandishing a sword" when police shot him in the back, except it was only an unsharpened decorative item from his house. Tamir Rice was only carrying a pellet gun in Utah Cleveland, which is supposed to be an open carry state. John Crawford was only carrying an unloaded BB rifle he picked off a shelf in Walmart, in an open carry state, when he was gunned down by police without warning. One would think the presumption that all these guys were only killed because police had "no choice but to protect their own lives" is more than a bit thin.
This is in addition to non-police killings of unarmed people such as Trayvon Martin, Renisha McBride and Jordan Davis because—"Fear." It's not just they're being killed, it's also that they're being killed when unarmed, that they're being presumed a threat without valid evidence, that they're being killed without just cause.
As I've written before, claiming that 90 percent of black people kill black people (and actually it's 92 percent) is completely and totally invalid since that number is only drawn from cases with a single victim and a single offender. And even it were right, it would mean the 83 percent of white people are killed by other white people, so it's not even something to be all that proud about for someone like O'Reilly.
The most accurate numbers I've been able to find so far are probably still incomplete because they're arranged in a Supplemental Homicide Report based on the race, first, of the victim and then the race of oldest offender. Instead of 92 percent of blacks being killed by blacks, the data we have for all homicides, including those with multiple victims and multiple offenders, who may be of various races, indicate that only 55 percent of the time is the first victim black when the oldest offender is also black. Forty percent of the time authorities don't know who the offenders are. In the case of white victims, 64 percent of the time the oldest offender is white and 24 percent of the time authorities just don't know.
The fact is O'Reilly's claim that blacks murders are committed by black killers 90 percent of the time and therefore police are somehow justified in targeting and killing blocs is just. plain. flat. out. bunk!
You can't really say that "blacks are out of proportion for being killers" because the Homicide Clearance (Arrest Rate) is really only about 62 percent. So we don't know who the actual perpetrators are in nearly half these cases. But we certainly do know who the victims are. What so many people who cite the statistics continually ignore is that black people are much more likely to get Killed IN GENERAL, and not just by other black people.
Now, when I look at the same exact source that O'Reilly is quoting for his numbers, surprise, surprise, I get a completely different result and interpretation. As do many sites who conduct research of this nature, this one provided charts.
This first chart shows specifically what O'Reilly doesn't want to talk about. If you look at the population proportion of the victims of police killings, the results are even more skewed than the rate of victims for other types of murders.
It shows that the likelihood of being killed by law enforcement by an African-American aged 20-to-24 is
7.1 per million residents compared to all other races and age groups who average
1.2 per million.
Site keepers further explain that, if you ignore age groups, the group actually at the highest risk of being killed by police are actually Native Americans, mostly because the number is killings is so high in comparison to how small their total population is, while African-Americans come in second with a rate of being killed by cops that is twice their proportion in the population.
The racial group most likely to be killed by law enforcement is Native Americans, followed by African Americans, Latinos, Whites, and Asian Americans.
Native Americans, 0.8 percent of the population, comprise 1.9 percent of police killings. African Americans, 13 percent of the population, are victims in 26 percent of police shootings. Law enforcement kills African Americans at 2.8 times the rate of white non-Latinos, and 4.3 times the rate of Asians.
Latinos are victimized by police killings at a level 30 percent above average and 1.9 times the rate of White, non-Latinos.
So I would say that this isn't the just black problem. It seems that nearly all minority groups are being killed by police at rates far higher than their proportions of the overall population. The site then breaks this down further with this chart:
It is fair to point out the rate of police killing of African-Americans has significantly dropped since the 1960s. It's also fair to note that it seems to have reached a floor that is still far above the ceiling for any other single group except, as noted above, Native Americans.
One would think that African-Americans being at far higher risk for being killed generally would lead law enforcement to take pains to protect them fully and completely—not use this as a lame and non-factual excuse to justify having police do the killing instead of someone else.
Apparently not in O'Reilly's, or for that matter Rudy Giuliani's, version of the world.
In the remainder of the video O'Reilly talks to Attorney Benjamin Crump and tries to make a new argument, having dispensed with the "police kill blacks more frequently" argument by pretending proportions only matter when he says they matter.
He also says any protesters who fail to disband and disperse as soon as violence erupts are implicitly responsible as "aiders and abettors" of the violence. That is patently ridiculous, particularly for a so-called "personal responsibility" guy like O'Reilly. How exactly does the majority of protesters become responsible for the small minority within their groups as if their leaving would stop those people doing what they're going to do in anyway?
When exactly has that ever worked?
But that's just par for the course in Wingnuttia, where they want to wave the flag of personal responsibility right after they're done telling black people, who are largely the targets of violence and murder, that they are somehow responsible for those other people killing them, whether those others are cops or other black people.
Black people and protesters don't all have an all-encompassing, binding agreement with each other that states if any single person violates the by-laws they get booted out of the club. Or if too many of them do so, the club gets disbanded.
But police do.