In an interview with CNN on Wednesday, Attorney General William Barr said what few are willing to admit these days: Namely, that the underlying premise driving protests, riots, and endless hours of cable news programming is completely wrong. There is not, in fact, some massive problem in America with police officers hunting down and killing innocent, unarmed black men. And the sooner we can all look at the facts, the statistics, and even the subtler points of each individual case, that truth will set us free.
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“I think the narrative that the police are on some epidemic of shooting unarmed black men is simply a false narrative,” Barr said. “The fact is that it’s very rare for an unarmed African American to be shot by a white police officer.”
Critics will come back and note that 32% of those shot by police officers are black – a number that seems wildly out of proportion to the 13% of the population that black people comprise. When you note that the vast majority of those shot are black men, the proportionality seems even more extraordinary. However, it’s important to drill down on those statistics. First of all, 83% of those shot are armed, thus having nothing to do with the BLM narrative. By the way, this figure includes Jacob Blake of Kenosha and Rayshard Brooks of Atlanta, in case you’re keeping track.
Furthermore, the raw numbers don’t address the context. Namely, why were these black men shot and killed? Did police drag them out of their homes and execute them in the street? Not hardly. We’re not saying that police never get it wrong – they are only human, after all – but even in the videos that cause so much strife and controversy, the scenarios are remarkably similar. They all share one thing in common: The suspect is trying to either flee, attack police, or otherwise resist arrest. THIS is what ought to be the national narrative: Don’t resist arrest. Don’t fight the police. You’re only going to get hurt.
We know there’s this big stigma against so-called “victim blaming” in our society these days, but here’s the fact: If that message – don’t resist arrest – were to take the place of “black lives matter,” we would see a much more significant drop in the police shootings of black men. And so, if the goal of this movement is truly to save black lives and not something quite a bit more nefarious, why isn’t that the message?
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Of course, that’s a big “if.”
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