White deaths by cop are invisible

Here’s something I won’t put on Facebook because I just don’t have the patience to deal with the irrational blowback.

In recent posts I have shown that police kill twice as many whites as Blacks, that the overall number of deaths is tiny when placed among millions of cop/civilian interactions each year, and that the further left your beliefs, the more likely you are to exaggerate the number of Blacks killed. It is rampant bias confirmation and the media is partly to fault. 

Right now, we have a perfect example of this effect.

As we were digesting the Derek Chauvin trial, a white policewoman shot and killed Daunte Wright  as he resisted (a detail often ignored) a warrant for his arrest.

In Columbus, a white policeman rolled up on a confusing scene but saw Black teenager Ma’Khia Bryant, knife in hand, lunge at a Black woman dressed in pink. The officer shot Bryant to save the unarmed woman.

In North Carolina, deputies trying to serve search and felony arrest  warrants shot and killed African-American Andrew Brown Jr. 

Bang. Bang. Bang.

All achieved broad cable news coverage, plus print.

A previous column, using the Washington Post data base of police shootings, proved twice as many whites are shot, 457 last year.

That’s more than one a day and the rate is probably the same this year. It’s almost certain some white people have been killed by police in the past week. 

How many stories have you seen or read about a white person being shot and killed? I have seen none, but — coincidence — hours after I wrote this Saturday afternoon, the AP carried a story logging six deaths of civilians in a 24-hour period. The story did not report race in all cases. One was identified as white, we know the race in several of the cases discussed here, and one man’s surname identified him as Asian. The dead white man with a long rap sheet got the least coverage, three paragraphs.

It’s like dead whites are invisible.

No, this isn’t white fragility on my part, save your tears. It is a simple observation of fact. This is irrespective of the facts in each case. 

The shooting of a Black person immediately results in marches, demonstrations and calls for justice, also irrespective of the facts in the case. 

The reality is white deaths at the hands of police are not regarded as newsworthy as Black deaths.

Why?

Woke media executives, with Black Lives Matter dancing in their heads, view a lot of news through the prism of perceived racism. If you want to find it, you probably can.

Why does that matter?

Because it hurts white people? No. Because it hurts Black people. It feeds into the misperception that it is open season on Blacks.

Unfortunately, many African-Americans believe this falsehood. It impacts them in negative ways. It is psychologically damaging, destroying their feelings of self-worth, personhood, and birthing fear that they are not safe in the presence of any police officer. That is simply untrue and the numbers prove it is untrue.

We can’t ask the media to not cover the news.

We can ask the media to provide the context, to report these tragedies for the rarities they are, and to withhold judgment until the facts are known in each case, because each case is different.