John R. Lott, Jr, "
How Selective Reporting Hides The Truth About Race And Crime"
Watching the news, you would never guess that the research found black officers were just as likely as white officers to shoot an unarmed black suspect.
On Saturday, a man drove his car onto a Seattle freeway that had been closed by a Black Lives Matter crowd. The driver killed one person and seriously injured another after going the wrong way up a ramp and then around a barricade. Reports noted that police “don’t believe impairment was a factor.” Over the weekend, news outlets replayed the brutal hit, but there’s one thing you won’t learn from their coverage: The driver was black and his victims were white.
NPR linked this attack to other car-ramming incidents by “right-wing extremists targeting Black Lives Matter protesters.” They quote a researcher about how these right-wingers were “trying to intimidate the most recent wave of BLM protesters, to stop their movement.”
The driver was a Seattle local named Dawit Kelete. But you’ll find scant mention of the driver’s ethnicity in mainstream media coverage. You might have more easily learned that Kelete was black by going to the Australia Broadcasting Corporation. The American national media also doesn’t note that Kelete’s two victims were white. You can find that out over at the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
Among the few U.S. outlets to mention the race of the driver is Heavy.com. The rest of the news media seemingly would rather have people assume that a white driver attacked two black protesters. Acknowledging the driver’s and victims’ ethnicity wouldn’t advance their narrative of oppression, so it apparently isn’t newsworthy.
One case doesn’t prove a pattern. It could just be that while the American media knows almost everything about this killer, including his name, age, and where he lives, they couldn’t find information on his race. Possibly the foreign news outlets were just lucky to discover that information.
Of course, the media outlets might honestly not view race as essential to the story. But their selective reporting of it shows that they think race is important when it involves certain situations. The problem is that this gives readers a biased perspective, inflaming prejudice, and creating stereotypes.
Research conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center, of which I am president, on all police shootings from 2013 to 2015 found that while local news coverage will often mention the race of the officer and the suspect, the national coverage is much more selective. While the evidence indicates that black officers are no less likely to shoot suspects than white officers, local news coverage of black officers shooting black suspects gets picked up by the national news in just 9 percent of cases. By contrast, 38 percent of the cases in which local news reported on a white officer shooting a black suspect get national coverage.
The selective coverage creates the belief that white officers are the problem — they are the ones shooting blacks, presumably because white officers treat black suspects differently than white ones. Watching the news, you would never guess that the research found that black officers were just as likely as white officers to shoot an unarmed black suspect.
The media’s selective coverage has done real harm. It has heightened racial divides and sown distrust of the police in the communities that need them most. Now, with police sidelined and facing “defunding,” gun violence is rising fast in major cities around the country.
The media similarly seems intent on claiming that mass public shooters are disproportionately white and right-wing when nothing could be further from the truth. While 58 percent of the mass public shooters from 1998 to 2019 were white (excluding people of Middle Eastern descent), about 75 percent of the total U.S. population was white. Middle Eastern Arabs made up just 1 percent of the population but accounted for 8 percent of shooters. Of all the mass killers, 72 percent have no known political affiliation or views — only 3 percent are known to be conservative or Republican.
Race and politics increasingly divide Americans, and selective media reporting is largely to blame. The media, not Trump, is fanning the flames of violence. The destruction and the long-term harm that is being done to heavily minority parts of our cities is their responsibility.
Slavoj Žižek, "
The Spectre Is Still Roaming Around! (Introduction)"
The first, automatic reaction of today’s enlightened liberal reader to The Communist Manifesto is: Is the text not simply wrong on many empirical accounts, with regard to the picture it gives of the social situation, as well as with regard to the revolutionary perspective it sustains and propagates? Was there ever a political manifesto that was more clearly falsified by subsequent historical reality? Is The Communist Manifesto not, at best, an exaggerated extrapolation of certain tendencies discernible in the 19th century?
So, let us approach The Communist Manifesto from the opposite end: Where do we live today, in our global “post … ” (postmodern, postindustrial) society? The slogan that is imposing itself more and more is that of “globalization”: the brutal imposition of a unified world market that threatens all local ethnic traditions, including the very form of the nation-state. And, in this situation, is not the description in the Manifesto of the social impact of the bourgeoisie more topical than ever?
“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty, and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newly formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
“The need for a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.
“The bourgeoisie has, through its exploitation of the world market, given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All long-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life-and-death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw materials, but raw materials drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.”
Is this not, more than ever, our reality today? Think about Ericsson phones, which are no longer Swedish, about Toyota cars, 60% of which are manufactured in the USA, about the Hollywood culture that pervades the remotest parts of the globe … Yes, this is our reality—on condition that we do not forget to supplement this image from the Manifesto with its inherent dialectical opposite, the “spiritualization” of the very material process of production. That is to say, on the one hand, capitalism entails the radical secularization of social life—it mercilessly tears apart any aura of authentic nobility, sacredness, honor, etc.
“It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.”
However, the fundamental lesson of the “critique of political economy” elaborated by the mature Marx in the years after the Manifesto is that this reduction of all heavenly chimeras to the brutal economic reality generates a spectrality of its own. When Marx describes the mad, self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation reaches its apogee in today’s metareflexive speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the specter of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources the capital’s circulation is based, and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this “abstraction” is not only in our (financial speculator’s) misperception of social reality, but that it is “real” in the precise sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the “solipsistic” speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much uncannier than the direct precapitalist socioideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their “evil” intentions, but is purely “objective,” systemic, anonymous. Here we should recall Etienne Balibar, who distinguishes two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s world: the “ultraobjective” (“structural”) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the “automatic” creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the “ultrasubjective” violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) “fundamentalisms”—this second “excessive” and “groundless” violence is just a counterpart to the first violence.
The fact of this “anonymous” violence also allows us to make a more general point about anticommunism. The pleasure provided by anticommunist reasoning was that communism made it so easy to play the game of finding the culprit, blaming the Party, Stalin, Lenin, ultimately Marx himself, for the millions of dead, for terror, and for gulags, while in capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms, although capitalism has been no less destructive in terms of human and environmental costs, destroying aboriginal cultures … In short, the difference between capitalism and communism is that communism was perceived as an idea which then failed in its realization, while capitalism functioned “spontaneously.” There is no Capitalist Manifesto.
Daniel Greenfield, "
The Black Lives Matter Effect is Killing Black Children: “Where is the outrage? Our babies are being shot.”
Mekhi James, a 3-year-old boy, cried, "It hurts", after he was shot in Chicago.
Then he died.
Sincere Gaston, a 1-year-old boy, was also shot and killed in Chicago. A 3-year-old girl was shot in the chest while playing in the front yard with other children. She was among the four toddlers shot in Chicago in two weeks. Older children are also being shot. An 8-year-old girl was grazed in the head, and a 5-year-old boy in the buttocks.
Natalia Wallace, a 7-year-old girl described as “quiet and sweet” was shot and killed on the sidewalk.
“Where is the outrage? Our babies are being shot. These are our babies," Chicago PD's Chief of Operations Fred Waller, who is African-American, asked.
The question ought to be directed to Black Lives Matter as the BLM Effect fuels shootings and deaths around the country. And the most vulnerable of the BLM Effect’s victims are black children.
Eight children under the age of 10 have been shot in Chicago in the past few weeks. The cause of these shootings is an upsurge in crime from the Black Lives Matter riots that have devastated the country.
The Black Lives Matter riots are killing black people, and particularly black children, in two ways.
Chicago murders are up 83% in June, while arrests fell 55%, street stops 74%, and traffic stops 86%. If you want to see what defunding the police looks like, just stop by Chicago and bring a bulletproof vest.
John Catanzara, the president of the Fraternal Order of Police, blames a new Ferguson Effect in the George Floyd era where officers, “pause and say: ‘I want to go home today safe. I want to make sure I keep my job. And I want to make sure I don’t go to jail.'"
Mayor Lightfoot argues that it’s due to the police being tied up by the Black Lives Matter protests.
And they’re both right. The BLM Effect has a dual function.
The protests are tying up large numbers of cops, leaving gang members free to fight their battles, and the dismantling of proactive policing and the scapegoating of cops makes the police less proactive.
Alderman Chris Taliaferro, the African-American chair of the Chicago City Council Committee on Public Safety, said, "Our police officers don’t want to be the next headline."
Even as Democrats around the country endorsed Black Lives Matter and championed defunding the police, Chicago’s black political leaders rushed 1,200 cops to the streets for the July 4th weekend.
African-American Police Superintendent David Brown ordered sweeps of street corners for gang members and pleaded with the courts to keep them in jail for at least the weekend.
"Our endgame is arrests," he said, vowing to break, "the pipeline for shootings and murders in Chicago."
A white ACLU official warned that would, “drive a wedge between the CPD and communities of color.”
While Democrats, their leftist leaders, and the media insist that the real threat to black people comes from police officers and white ‘Karens’ who try to defend themselves, the truth is in the hospitals.
Not just black people, but black children are being shot across America because of the anti-police riots.
In Detroit, a 9-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl were shot while shooting off fireworks.
In Washington D.C., a world away from where Democrat and Republican politicos sell out children like him by conspiring on “police reform” and “criminal justice reform”, Davon McNeal, an 11-year-old boy, was shot and killed while grabbing a phone charger and earbuds before heading to a July 4th BBQ.
Mayor Muriel Bowser offered her "thoughts and prayers". But the little boy shot at the Frederick Douglass apartments didn't need thoughts and prayers recited on Twitter, he needed the police.
The boy’s mother was a community D.C. Violence Interrupter and his grandfather is a Guardian Angel. He was surrounded by alternatives to police, including a city initiative that spent $10 million on community activists that were supposed to somehow ‘interrupt’ violence, but don’t stop bullets.
"We’re protesting for months, for weeks, saying, ‘Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.’ Black lives matter it seems like, only when a police officer shoots a black person," John Ayala, the boy's grandfather, said.
"What about all the black-on-black crime that’s happening in the community?”
In St. Louis, a 4-year-old boy was shot in the head over the July 4th weekend. He was one of 4 children shot on the Fourth of July in the city and one of over 60 children that have been shot there this year.
St. Louis Children's Hospital's ER has seen more children with gunshot wounds in May than any previous month in its history.
An 8-year-old girl was shot and wounded on July 4th in Cleveland. A 15-year-old boy was among three people who were shot in Boston in 24 hours. In Delano, California, an 11-year-old and a 12-year-old girl were shot and killed at a party. The girls were Latino and their lives don’t matter at the moment.
But in New York City, TreShawn, an 11-year-old boy was wounded while playing outside his home.
There’s a 44% increase in shootings and a 23% rise in murders in New York City. Call it the BLM Effect.
"More people not in jail," NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan said, explaining the rising violence. "Rikers Island in New York is empty. Between Covid, between bail reform, the protests caused animosity towards the police, which took us out of neighborhoods that needed us the most."
In Rutherfordton, North Carolina, Aaliyah Norris, a 7-year-old girl, was shot and killed by Shaquille Francis. Her 9-year-old older sister won't sleep and won't eat after the murder.
Royta Giles Jr., an 8-year-old boy, was shot and killed in a Birmingham mall. Another girl was wounded. A 5-year-old boy was also shot and wounded in Birmingham while riding in a car.
Royta will receive a tiny fraction of the media attention and leftist outrage that Rayshard Brooks did. When a movement cares more about a violent thug than a little boy, that sums its moral compass.
A 6-year-old girl was shot and killed in Palm Bay, Florida. Two children were shot in a drive-by attack in Baton Rouge. A 5-year-old and a 12-year-old were shot during a gun battle in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Clarity Coleman, the 5-year-old, was shot in the leg while being pulled on a wagon.
“I didn’t even know that I got shot until I started feeling the pain,” Chyesha Smith, the 12-year-old, said.
70 children were shot in Philadelphia this year. A 43% rise. 96% of the child victims of violence are black.
This is what Black Lives Matter looks like in the real world.
In Minneapolis, where the city council has voted to defund the police, 50 kids from a youth football team, some as young as 5 years old, ran for cover as shots were fired by rival thugs in a park. Elsewhere, a 7-year-old boy was shot in the foot. 116 people were shot in June. That's a 400% increase.
Sasha Cotton, who heads the city's office of violence prevention, blamed angst and trauma from Floyd's death. Her office's plan to prevent the violence is to urge the victims not to retaliate.
Coach Thompson, who is black, said, "It was crazy to have 50 to 60 rounds fired and no police presence.”
But he’s considering supporting the defunding of the police.
The BLM Effect is taking black lives across America. In Milwaukee, shootings are up 95%, in Hartford, they've risen 36%, and in New York City, shootings are up 142%. In just one week, an extra 37 people were shot. That excess capacity can be credited to Black Lives Matter and all of its supporters.
While Democrat leaders grappled with taking down statues of the great explorer and possibly even renaming the city, Columbus, Ohio is experiencing one of its deadliest years.
Cincinnati is headed toward its deadliest year in over two generations. Murders are up 65%. The average murder victim is black. Only 4 were white.
“Each of those lives matter and the majority of those who have lost their lives this year, last year and the year before that are African Americans. It's unfortunate to say it is at the hands of other African Americans," Christopher Smitherman, the black head of Cincinnati’s public safety committee, said.
Smitherman is the former president of Cincinnati’s NAACP.
Black Lives Matter falsely pretends that black people are mostly endangered by police, when in reality, in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the country, they’re protected by police officers.
And those police officers are increasingly black.
Black Lives Matter declared war on the police on behalf of criminals. The death toll in black lives is shocking. And the toll in the lives of black children is even more heartrending. When the police leave, the criminals take over, and the hospitals and morgues pile up with the black victims of gang violence.
That’s the BLM Effect.
Supporting Black Lives Matter means not only supporting criminals over the police, it means enabling the mass deaths of black people and black children that inevitably follow in the wake of the riots.
If you support Black Lives Matter, you’re killing black children.
The Cry of the Karens
