Fox New host Tucker Carlson is pushing back hard against the false narrative of systemic racial bias among the police in the United States, making him one of only a few broadcast journalists willing to do so.

“Is our nation being ripped apart by a total and complete lie?” the Fox News host  asked during his opening monologue on “Tucker Carlson Tonight, Wednesday.  “A provable lie used by cynical media manipulators and unscrupulous politicians who understand that racial strife — race hatred — is their path to power, even if it destroys the country.”

Citing facts and figures highlighted by Manhattan Institute writer and commentator Heather MacDonald in the Wall Street Journal this week, Carlson laid to waste the notion that blacks are victims of racial genocide.

“Since 2015, The Washington Post has maintained a comprehensive database of fatal police shootings in this country. Last year, The Post logged a total of 1,004 killings,” he said.

“Of the 802 shootings in which the race of the police officer and the suspect was noted, 371 of those killed were white, 236 were black. The vast majority of those killed were not, in fact, unarmed; the vast majority were armed. And African-American suspects were significantly more likely to have a deadly weapon than white suspects, yet more white suspects were killed.”

In her WSJ article, MacDonald argued that “the share of black shooting victims was less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects.”

In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

According to the Washington Post’s numbers, there were only ten cases in the United States in which unarmed blacks were fatally shot by the police, nine men and one woman. And there were nineteen unarmed whites fatally shot by police in 2019.

Because so much is at stake, Carlson went into specific detail into what led police to shoot the ten unarmed black people.   In five of the 10 shootings, he found that an officer was attacked just before the shooting occurred. One allegedly was an accident, and four were shot during a pursuit or in a standoff. In two out of the four questionable cases, the officer was criminally charged.

As MacDonald pointed out in her WSJ article that given the large number of black homicide victims per year (there were 7,407 in 2018), the number of unarmed black victims of police shootings represent a very small number of all blacks killed.

“By 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,” she wrote.

Indeed, just last night in Brooklyn New York, two police officers were shot after another officer was stabbed in an unprovoked ambush while they were on an anti-looting post. All three officers are expected to survive.

Attorney General William Barr said in a press conference Thursday that 114 federal law-enforcement officers have been injured in protests in Washington DC since Saturday and 22 have been hospitalized with serious head injuries.

“This is a narrative that is both false and dangerous,” MacDonald told Carlson, Wednesday night. She pointed out that in 2015 and 2016, we went through “a minimal amount of civil unrest and riots throughout the country” compared to what we’re seeing today, and there were “2,000 additional black males were killed because cops backed off of policing.”

“Right now, we’re already seeing crime going through the roof, we’ve already seen the assassinations of cops, I fear we’re going to see more, and who are the people who are going to be hurt when the cops back off, if we defund the cops, she added.

MacDonald noted that the left doesn’t even have to succeed in defunding the police because they have already succeeded in delegitimizing them in the eyes of many Americans.

“The hatred that is directed toward them when they arrest gangbangers, gun-toters, people who have just shot at children in the city … the hatred that is directed at them is extraordinary,” she explained. “Who’s going to be hurt? The thousands of law abiding residents of inner city neighborhoods who beg for more police protection.”

She cited a cancer amputee in the Bronx who told her “please Jesus, send more police” because her building lobby is “colonized by trespassing youths selling drugs and smoking weed.”

Another elderly woman in the south Bronx stood up in the middle of a community meeting and said, “how lovely it is when we see the police. They are my friends.

“These are the voices that the media deliberately silences because they completely undermine their phony narrative about systemic police racism and white supremacy in this country.

“We’re being told by demagogues on television, demagogue office holders—people who run the country!—they’re telling us genocide is occurring. There is a never-ending wave of racist attacks on African Americans by police officers in which many are dying,” Carlson said.

“How can they say something like that when there are no facts to support it?” he asked MacDonald.

She  replied: “The irony is that it’s the Washington Post’s own database that collects the unarmed statistics—unarmed being defined extraordinarily broadly—but the Washington Post doesn’t write that.”

“We should not racially profile blacks for any crime rates, we should also not racially profile cops for one absolutely horrific arrest. The cops desperately want more tactical training, they want more training in deescalating and controlling stress, but they are not systemically biased,” MacDonald concluded.

 

via American Greatness

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