title: 5 FACTS The Media Won’t Tell You About Cops Killing Blacks [VIDEO]
text: Scholar and journalist Heather Mac Donald toiled away early on in her career at liberal enclaves, but through her street-level reporting on social services and the police, her worldview shifted away from liberal-progressive to conservative.Her shift  was not some kind of epiphany from reading conservative principles,  but by hearing the voices of welfare recipients who told her  government aid becomes a narcotic. Her latest book,  The War On Cops  is now available for purchase. In her book, she outlines the false narrative that is being pushed by Black Lives Matter and the leftist media that law enforcement officers are  Out to get Blacks  in America.For almost two years, a protest movement known as  Black Lives Matter  has convulsed the nation. Triggered by the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement holds that racist police officers are the greatest threat facing young black men today. This belief has triggered riots,  die-ins,  the murder and attempted murder of police officers, a campaign to eliminate traditional grand jury proceedings when police use lethal force, and a presidential task force on policing.Even though the U.S. Justice Department has resoundingly disproven the lie that a pacific Michael Brown was shot in cold blood while trying to surrender, Brown is still venerated as a martyr. And now police officers are backing off of proactive policing in the face of the relentless venom directed at them on the street and in the media. As a result, violent crime is on the rise.The need is urgent, therefore, to examine the Black Lives Matter movement s central thesis that police pose the greatest threat to young black men. I propose two counter hypotheses: first, that there is no government agency more dedicated to the idea that black lives matter than the police; and second, that we have been talking obsessively about alleged police racism over the last 20 years in order to avoid talking about a far larger problem black-on-black crime.Let s be clear at the outset: police have an indefeasible obligation to treat everyone with courtesy and respect, and to act within the confines of the law. Too often, officers develop a hardened, obnoxious attitude. It is also true that being stopped when you are innocent of any wrongdoing is infuriating, humiliating, and sometimes terrifying. And needless to say, every unjustified police shooting of an unarmed civilian is a stomach-churning tragedy.Given the history of racism in this country and the complicity of the police in that history, police shootings of black men are particularly and understandably fraught. That history informs how many people view the police. But however intolerable and inexcusable every act of police brutality is, and while we need to make sure that the police are properly trained in the Constitution and in courtesy, there is a larger reality behind the issue of policing, crime, and race that remains a taboo topic. The problem of black-on-black crime is an uncomfortable truth, but unless we acknowledge it, we won t get very far in understanding patterns of policing. ImprimusHere are 5 indisputable facts that prove this narrative to be one big LIE:1. Cops killed nearly twice as many whites as blacks in 2015. According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The majority of these victims had a gun or  were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force,  according to Mac Donald in a speech at Hillsdale College.Some may argue that these statistics are evidence of racist treatment toward blacks, since whites consist of 62 percent of the population and blacks make up 13 percent of the population. But as Mac Donald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties. Such a concentration of criminal violence in minority communities means that officers will be disproportionately confronting armed and often resisting suspects in those communities, raising officers  own risk of using lethal force,  writes MacDonald.2. More whites and Hispanics die from police homicides than blacks. According to Mac Donald, 12 percent of white and Hispanic homicide deaths were due to police officers, while only four percent of black homicide deaths were the result of police officers. If we re going to have a  Lives Matter  anti-police movement, it would be more appropriately named  White and Hispanic Lives Matter,'  said Mac Donald in her Hillsdale speech.3. The Post s data does show that unarmed black men are more likely to die by the gun of a cop than an unarmed white man but this does not tell the whole story. In August 2015, the ratio was seven-to-one of unarmed black men dying from police gunshots compared to unarmed white men; the ratio was six-to-one by the end of 2015. But Mac Donald points out in The Marshall Project that looking at the details of the actual incidents that occurred paints a different picture:The  unarmed  label is literally accurate, but it frequently fails to convey highly-charged policing situations. In a number of cases, if the victim ended up being unarmed, it was certainly not for lack of trying. At least five black victims had reportedly tried to grab the officer s gun, or had been beating the cop with his own equipment. Some were shot from an accidental discharge triggered by their own assault on the officer. And two individuals included in the Post s  unarmed black victims  category were struck by stray bullets aimed at someone else in justified cop shootings. If the victims were not the intended targets, then racism could have played no role in their deaths.In one of those unintended cases, an undercover cop from the New York Police Department was conducting a gun sting in Mount Vernon, just north of New York City. One of the gun traffickers jumped into the cop s car, stuck a pistol to his head, grabbed $2,400 and fled. The officer gave chase and opened fire after the thief again pointed his gun at him. Two of the officer s bullets accidentally hit a 61-year-old bystander, killing him. That older man happened to be black, but his race had nothing to do with his tragic death. In the other collateral damage case, Virginia Beach, Virginia, officers approached a car parked at a convenience store that had a homicide suspect in the passenger seat. The suspect opened fire, sending a bullet through an officer s shirt. The cops returned fire, killing their assailant as well as a woman in the driver s seat. That woman entered the Post s database without qualification as an  unarmed black victim  of police fire.Mac Donald examines a number of other instances, including unarmed black men in San Diego, CA and Prince George s County, MD attempting to reach for a gun in a police officer s holster. In the San Diego case, the unarmed black man actually  jumped the officer  and assaulted him, and the cop shot the man since he was  fearing for his life.  MacDonald also notes that there was an instance in 2015 where  three officers were killed with their own guns, which the suspects had wrestled from them. 4. Black and Hispanic police officers are more likely to fire a gun at blacks than white officers. This is according to a Department of Justice report in 2015 about the Philadelphia Police Department, and is further confirmed that by a study conducted University of Pennsylvania criminologist Greg Ridgeway in 2015 that determined black cops were 3.3 times more likely to fire a gun than other cops at a crime scene.5. Blacks are more likely to kill cops than be killed by cops. This is according to FBI data, which also found that 40 percent of cop killers are black. According to Mac Donald, the police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black than a cop killing an unarmed black person.Despite the facts, the anti-police rhetoric of Black Lives Matter and their leftist sympathizers have resulted in what Mac Donald calls the  Ferguson Effect,  as murders have spiked by 17 percent among the 50 biggest cities in the U.S. as a result of cops being more reluctant to police neighborhoods out of fear of being labeled as racists. Additionally, there have been over twice as many cops victimized by fatal shootings in the first three months of 2016. -Via: Daily Wire Watch Heather MacDonald explain how the lies the media and the Left are pushing about cops targeting Blacks will ultimately harm Black communities:Here is Heather MacDonald s speech at Hillsdale College in its entirety: