That's the question the stumped Bill O'Reilly the other day.
As reported by Media Matters via
Raw Story:
“Every time there is a controversy about an officer shooting a black person, they’re out there stirring the pot,” O’Reilly told Peter Moskos, a former officer currently teaching at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “You don’t feel that disturbed individuals watch this and then act out?”
“There are fewer cops shot this year than last year,” Moskos replied. “Are you willing to give Black Lives Matter credit for that? Cop shootings are down.”
I know they’re down slightly,” the Factor host said.
“They’re down 17 percent,” Moskos continued.
“In August, they’re up,” O’Reilly said.
“The month before, there were none,” Moskos countered. “Overall, they’re down. So I don’t see an epidemic there.”
Continued over the orange flip.
O'Reilly also tried to claim—using Centers for Disease Control numbers that are based on a survey that only covers 32 states—that force is used during arrests less than 0.1 percent of the time. However, the Bureau of Justice Statistics Survey from 2008 indicates use of force during an arrest occurs about 1.4 percent of the time and that it happens three times more often to blacks (3.4 percent) than to whites (1.2 percent), unfortunately Moskos didn't mention that.
What Moskos also didn't mention was that, according to The Guardian, U.S. police have killed 784 people this year.
Of those killed, 161 (20 percent) were unarmed. Of those unarmed 61 (37.8 percent) were black, while 66 (40.9 percent) were white. Two hundred and two black people have been killed so far this year, meaning that 30 percent of black people killed were unarmed, contrasted with 384 whites among whom just 17 percent were unarmed.
This is all in contrast to O'Reilly's claim that only 268 whites and 148 blacks were killed by police in 2013—which I have to assume is based on the FBI Justifiable Homicide Data, which is grossly incomplete and completely ignores any police killings that were labeled as not justified, which is the point. What O'Reilly is doing by not looking at the circumstances of how and why each person was killed is saying #BlackLivesMatter doesn't matter because more whites than blacks were killed.
The point is that it's more but it's not five times more which is what it would be based on the overall population. So odd isn't it that when black's are about 35% of those stopped and arrested by police people like O'Reilly are the first to claim the percentage is too high [because blacks are "too criminal"?] since it's not 1/5th the number of whites arrested, even though far more whites actually do get arrested every year. Billo never considers the possibility both of these numbers are proportionally high because Cops are generally more afraid of black people and target them for arrest and death accordingly.
Another O'Reilly guest tried to argue that when the murder rate goes up, it's more likely to go up more for black people, which is a fact based on nothing but hot air. The truth is that the murder rate has been going down for decades.
In 1990, at the height of a decade-long crime wave that swept the nation, 2,245 people were murdered in New York City. In 2014, police investigated just 328 homicides in the five boroughs— a precipitous drop of 85 percent that’s being duplicated in major cities across the country.
Preliminary figures suggest 2014 will continue a decade-long trend of falling crime rates, especially in major cities once plagued by violent crime.
So the rate police are being killed is going down, the rate of overall murders is down but the percentages for an unarmed black person to be killed by police versus and unarmed white person is nearly
two times greater.
