We’re told by the mainstream media that white cops are regularly killing black citizens, while shootings of white or Hispanic citizens are quietly disregarded. Now, a study begs to differ with that media mantra.
By Donald Jeffries
A recent study from Michigan State University and the University of Maryland flatly contradicts the popularly held, mainstream media-driven notion that white police officers are targeting black citizens. The research, in fact, demonstrates that white police officers are not more likely to shoot minorities than nonwhite officers are.
“Until now, there’s never been a systematic, nationwide study to determine the characteristics of police involved in fatal officer-involved shootings,” Michigan State University professor and study co-author Joseph Cesario declared. “There are so many examples of people saying that when black citizens are shot by police, it’s white officers shooting them. In fact, our findings show no support that black citizens are more likely to be shot by white officers.”
Cesario went on to say: “We found that the race of the officer doesn’t matter when it comes to predicting whether black or white citizens are shot. If anything, black citizens are more likely to have been shot by black officers, but this is because black officers are drawn from the same population that they police. So, the more black citizens there are in a community, the more black police officers there are.”
Cesario bluntly maintained: “Many people ask whether black or white citizens are more likely to be shot and why. We found that violent crime rates are the driving force behind fatal shootings. Our data show that the rate of crime by each racial group correlates with the likelihood of citizens from that racial group being shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of white people committing crimes, white people are more likely to be shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of black people committing crimes, black people are more likely to be shot. It is the best predictor we have of fatal police shootings.”
The response from the academic world to Cesario’s findings was predictable. He was criticized for a decision to “sidestep the benchmark” of using population as a determining factor in calculating racial disparity. Princeton professor Jonathan Mummolo, for example, argued that flawed methodology assumes that black and white officers encounter black civilians in equal numbers, or in even temperaments. University of Nebraska professor Justin Nix, in a 2017 study, found that police had killed nearly twice as many whites as blacks that year.
An independent study of all the numerous cases of egregious police behavior, documented in videos by victims, onlookers, and the police cameras of law enforcement itself, shows a great diversity in those harassed, tasered, and shot. There is just as much diversity in terms of law enforcement officers who act inappropriately.
In one of the more horrendous miscarriages of justice imaginable, homeless man Kelly Thomas was viciously beaten to death by a group of police officers in July 2011. One of the two officers actually charged in the case, and the one who precipitated the violence, was Manuel Ramos, who is Hispanic. The victim here, Thomas, was white. The entire crime was caught on videotape, as Thomas repeatedly pled for his life and called out for his father. Despite this documented evidence, a brain-dead jury found the officers not guilty.
As in seemingly all cases of police brutality, the “brotherhood” comes together, and in this instance, the officers’ superior, Stephen Rubio, ludicrously maintained that the only “slight” violation of department policy he witnessed while watching the entire 33-minute video was the officers’ use of profanity.
Other notable examples of law enforcement abusing their authority include the female officer—who’d already been transferred from another police force after shooting a woman reaching into her purse—who shot and killed a young white male who answered her knock at his front door with a video game controller in his hand. In 2017, Australian-born white woman Justine Damond was shot and killed by Somali-born Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor as she leaned into the driver’s side window of the squad car. Damond had called the police to report a loud altercation in the neighborhood, and was calmly talking to Noor’s partner at the time.
In a typically underreported 2014 incident, unarmed 20-year-old white Dillon Taylor was shot and killed outside a Utah convenience store by a black police officer. White, black, and Hispanic officers have been caught on film shooting deaf people who naturally didn’t respond to their verbal commands, in the back, shooting jaywalkers, slamming skateboarder kids to the pavement, and throwing people of all races and genders out of wheelchairs.
The only constants in these tragic cases is the failure of either law enforcement oversight or the legal system to hold bad police officers accountable for their behavior and the inconsistent press coverage, of course, which all depends upon the races of the victims and officers, but generally portrays all white police officers as dangerous.
Donald Jeffries is a highly respected author and researcher whose work on the JFK, RFK and MLK assassinations and other high crimes of the Deep State has been read by millions of people across the world. Jeffries is also the author of three books currently being sold by the AFP Online Store.
