Are Black Men Really Being Hunted?

Of all the stupidities dished out to us by the media in the last week, surely among the most fatuous was a comment by MSNBC's Joy Reid that black men are "being hunted" in America. Is that true? What's the evidence for such an otherwise irresponsible and inflammatory remark?

According to former federal prosecutor Andrew Mccarthy at National Review there's no evidence at all. He points out that, contrary to the impression given by the media, about twice as many white people as black people are killed by police. In fact, in about 75 percent of police shootings, the decedent is not black.

He writes:

Take the website statista.com, specifically its breathless focus on “Hate crime in the United States” — counterfactually insinuating that any shooting involving a black victim must be a “hate crime.” 

Here’s their big headline from Tuesday: “Black Americans 2.5X More Likely Than Whites to Be Killed By Police.” It is fiction. It is sheer demagoguery, peddled as American cities are besieged by rioters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. 

The falsity of the claim is demonstrated even by statista.com itself. Just three days ago, the site posted another series of bar graphs, showing that, in fact, whites are nearly twice as likely as blacks to be shot to death by police. Here are the numbers:

Year                White  Black

2017                457      223

2018                399      209

2019                370      235

2020 (so far)      42       31

But what about the objection that although blacks make up only a quarter of the total number of people killed in police shootings annually, African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population so the killings are disproportionate to the size of the African American population?

McCarthy points out that black men are more likely to be the victims of police killings because violent confrontations with police occur most often in areas where violent crime is high.

While African Americans are involved in two times more police shootings than their percentage of the population would seem to warrant, they commit 53 percent of murders and 60 percent of robberies — well over four times their percentage of the population. 

Moreover, if violence by one race against another is evidence of racism, or "hunting," then violent interracial crime should be an indicator of where the racism lies. Between 2012 and 2015, blacks committed 85.5 percent of all black-white interracial violent victimizations, excluding interracial homicide. As for interracial homicide,

Seventy percent of black-white interracial homicides are committed by blacks, according to the FBI crime statistics for 2016. They show that, of 776 black–white homicides, blacks committed 533 and whites 243.

Parenthetically, these numbers are dwarfed by the number of blacks killed by other blacks in 2018 (7407).

McCarthy concludes that, "The false narrative of racist police, which pressures law enforcement to back off from the communities most victimized by crime, is now destroying entire cities."

But even if there was justification for shooting many of those armed and violent offenders, George Floyd and others were unarmed. Do police kill unarmed blacks at a higher rate than unarmed whites? Here's McCarthy:

Let’s consider unarmed people killed in such encounters. Such unarmed decedents, too, were twice as likely to be white as black in 2019 — i.e., 19 unarmed whites, nine unarmed blacks.

The number of unarmed black men killed by police is vanishingly small....there were 7,407 black homicide victims in the United States in 2018, the last year for which final numbers are available. Assuming a comparable number in 2019, the nine unarmed men killed in police shootings would represent just 0.1 percent of black homicides.

In stark contrast ...a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

Television talk host Tucker Carlson adds a bit more perspective to those nine unarmed blacks (eight men, one woman) killed by police in 2019. After discussing the circumstances surrounding the deaths of each one he summarizes them by noting that in five of the cases the unarmed man attacked the officer, with one of those killings being accidental, and in two of the remaining four cases the officer was criminally charged.

Carlson concludes:

Is it possible that more of these officers should have been charged? Of course it’s possible. Justice is not always served, that’s for sure. But either way, this is a very small number in a country of 325 million people. This is not genocide. It’s not even close to genocide. It is laughable to suggest it is.

In fact last year was the safest year for unarmed suspects since The Washington Post began tracking police shootings. It was the safest year for both white and black suspects.

Meanwhile, he comments, the U.S. “remains a dangerous place for police officers,” with forty-eight “murdered in 2019,” more than all “unarmed suspects killed, of all races.”

Finally, Carlson ended by citing the 7,407 black Americans who were murdered in the U.S. in 2018. If those numbers continue “on a similar trajectory,” it would mean that “for every unarmed black person shot to death by police, more than 700 were murdered by someone else.”

Most often another black man. The idea that blacks are being hunted by whites or white cops, or that there's a racial genocide taking place, is a media fantasy embraced by those too lazy or too mentally incompetent to objectively examine the evidence.

A proper response of all honest people of good will, black and white, would be to ignore whoever tries - while either omitting or skewing the data - to perpetuate that pernicious lie.