Whose Lives Matter?

In our prior article we exposed that a murdered Black had a 90% chance of being killed by another Black (8x the rate of Whites being killed by another White).  And a murdered Black had a 10% chance of being killed by police (usually Black police, and anyway it is at a high 2.5x the rate of Whites).  We integrated recent popular academic research (some of which I peer-reviewed), and lastly we noted that for every 10 Blacks killed by police, 1 police was killed by a Black.  We intend to explore these trends further, since after that article we saw more shooting deaths of police in Baton Rouge (and less covered by the media were deaths in Kansas City and Austin and just now in San Diego, plus this week near-deaths of multiple officers in both Indianapolis and Jefferson Parish). The debate about the 'killings' statistics between predominantly Blacks and police has brought up in the recent political conventions.  It’s also worth noting from the onset that this all appears to be a system that has gotten out of control. 

Police are ubiquitous in low income neighborhoods, and in these neighborhoods Blacks are killing disproportionately.  This summer in particular is going to set records going back more than a decade (even if you remove mass terrorist shootings from the time series). There is a lack of social service safety nets for these multitude of decent Americans, and instead the government's Lottery is ironically a disgraceful sponge drawing away from these communities that need assistance most.  I helped some of their neighborhoods rebuild, with economic assistance provided during the TARP bailout program.  But now attaining lethal weapons is simply too easy.  Blacks should know better, and the killings of these courageous public servants needs to stop.  Innocent Americans are needlessly becoming victims with the idea that police lives don’t matter.  They don’t matter to the point that the Black Lives Matter (BLM) -per the words of one of their three leaders- is now pushing to defund the police altogether.  And White people certainly shouldn’t feel somehow guilty because a small fraction of them are crowded into the Top 1%.  The rest of the White communities are going through as difficult a time as well, but just not as violently.  Given our last article gained 90k reads, and >275 social media engagements, this follow-up seemed necessary to present a broader case (taking in comments from both sides) than merely the grim murder statistics that provide bad optics for Blacks.  It is my hope that we learn from these most violent statistics, since this is also where data (difficult to come by) is just a tad easier to manually assimilate.

Such a spike in police being killed is enough discourage otherwise good, decent Americans from taking up this noble public service.  We all rely on the police at some point in our lives.  We ask them to work in our most dangerous cities, and they are mostly good officers (of course a few bad ones well).  The anecdotal shootings of Blacks that are edited and glorified on social media are still terrible tragedies and bad optics for communities that feel the police are intervening in their progress to live a healthy and productive life.  I do agree that black lives matter.  Most Americans should agree with that as well.  There are many, many extraordinary ones among our colleagues, friends, and -in my case- my students.  But they also agree that over time so too matters the lives of everyone else, including children, vulnerable women, police and everyday Whites in the same tender socio-economic status.  

We live in a country where there is too much overall homicide (nearly 6 thousand annually).  And at the racial intersection we also have Black officers more likely to shoot Whites than White officers are to shoot Blacks.  But behind all of these statistics we all must work together and have a clear sense of responsibility to each another.  We share this country, and rise and fall together.  With hope, we will spend more time brightly raising each other up as fellow countrymen, rather than finding it easy to speak hateful words of one another (which then slides into killing one another).