Soon after George Floyd’s death, thousands of people peacefully marched in American streets protesting police violence. As the sun went down in those cities, however, multitudes of people rioted and looted, causing more than $1 billion in damage.

The damage from riots and looting across the U.S. following the death of George Floyd is estimated to be the costliest in insurance history – between $1 billion and $2 billion. Insurance Information Institute (or Triple-I) compiles information from a company called Property Claim Services (PCS), which has tracked insurance claims related to civil disorder since 1950, and other databases.

Yet we have millions of people in the U.S. and major newspapers who will not call $1 billion in damages “rioting” or “looting.” That is a repeated phenomenon these days on both the political right and political left: people making strong arguments by ignoring contradictory evidence.  This article focuses on denialism on the political left.  My topic is police violence and race.

It’s important that we gather the facts, whether it be the existence of riots and of police violence, especially violence toward African American people. Many people would rather not look at actual crime statistics, however, and this has led to an untethered and dysfunctional conversation regarding police violence. Sam Harris experienced harsh pushback (and also praise) when he released a podcast titled, “Can We Pull Back From the Brink?” His “sin” is that his podcast contained actual crime statistics:

Again, cops kill around 1000 people every year in the United States. About 25 percent are black. About 50 percent are white. The data on police homicide are all over the place. The federal government does not have a single repository for data of this kind. But they have been pretty carefully tracked by outside sources, like the Washington Post, for the last 5 years. These ratios appear stable over time. Again, many of these killings are justifiable, we’re talking about career criminals who are often armed and, in many cases, trying to kill the cops. Those aren’t the cases we’re worried about. We’re worried about the unjustifiable homicides.

Now, some people will think that these numbers still represent an outrageous injustice. After all, African Americans are only 13 percent of the population. So, at most, they should be 13 percent of the victims of police violence, not 25 percent. Any departure from the baseline population must be due to racism.

Ok. Well, that sounds plausible, but consider a few more facts:

Blacks are 13 percent of the population, but they commit at least 50 percent of the murders and other violent crimes. If you have 13 percent of the population responsible for 50 percent of the murders—and in some cities committing 2/3rds of all violent crime—what percent of police attention should it attract? I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it’s not just 13 percent. Given that the overwhelming majority of their victims are black, I’m pretty sure that most black people wouldn’t set the dial at 13 percent either.

And here we arrive at the core of the problem. The story of crime in America is overwhelmingly the story of black-on-black crime. It is also, in part, a story of black-on-white crime. For more than a generation, crime in America really hasn’t been a story of much white-on-black crime. [Some listeners mistook my meaning here. I’m not denying that most violent crime is intraracial. So, it’s true that most white homicide victims are killed by white offenders. Per capita, however, the white crime rate is much lower than the black crime rate. And there is more black-on-white crime than white-on-black crime.—SH]

The murder rate has come down steadily since the early 1990’s, with only minor upticks. But, nationwide, blacks are still 6 times more likely to get murdered than whites, and in some cities their risk is double that. And around 95 percent of the murders are committed by members of the African American community. [While reported in 2015, these data were more than a decade old. Looking at more recent data from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the number appears to be closer to 90 percent.—SH]

. . .

Roland Fryer, the Harvard economist who’s work I discussed on the podcast with Glenn Loury, studied police encounters involving black and white suspects and the use of force. His paper is titled, this from 2016, “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force.” Fryer is black, and he went into this research with the expectation that the data would confirm that there’s an epidemic of lethal police violence directed at black men. But he didn’t find that. However, he did find support for the suspicion that black people suffer more nonlethal violence at the hands of cops than whites do.

So let’s look at this. The study examined data from 10 major police departments, in Texas, Florida and California. Generally, Fryer found that there is 25 percent greater likelihood that the police would go hands on black suspects than white ones—cuffing them, or forcing them to ground, or using other non-lethal force. Specifically, in New York City, in encounters where white and black citizens were matched for other characteristics, they found that:

Cops were…

• 17 percent more likely to go hands on black suspects
• 18 percent more likely to push them into a wall
•  16 percent more likely to put them in handcuffs (in a situation in which they aren’t arrested)
• 18 percent more likely to push them to the ground
• 25 percent more likely to use pepper spray or a baton
• 19 percent more likely to draw their guns
• 24 percent more likely to point a gun at them.

This is more or less the full continuum of violence short of using lethal force. And it seems, from the data we have, that blacks receive more of it than whites. What accounts for this disparity? Racism? Maybe.

Stephen Pinker became a target of cancel culture for releasing accurate crime statistics. I detail that episode here.

About a week ago, economist Glenn Loury interviewed economist Robert Cherry of Brooklyn College. Before offering their opinions and conclusions, they offered crime statistics, focusing on dramatic increases in crime since the death of George Floyd. It is important to get the facts on the table before having conversations, and I commend Loury for doing that as part of this interview. Urban crime cannot be understood through mere anecdotes. A shooting here and a shooting there does not tell a meaningful story when there are thousands of shootings in urban areas. Despite this, many protesters refuse to look at the statistics. I see this on Twitter, where many people jump to conclusions but refuse to first consider easily available statistics regarding crime. Loury has made available a video excerpt from his much longer discussion with Robert Cherry:

I am also pasting in the following written excerpt from Loury’s discussion with Robert Cherry. These two economists are not shy about offering opinions. Before doing that, however, they establish facts through statistics. That this is critically important and necessary should go without saying. But in our current environment of cancel culture and Wokeness, it apparently needs to be stated explicitly.

I subscribe to Loury’s writings and podcasts, which include many sessions with both Glenn Loury and John McWhorter. If you value information like this, consider visiting Loury’s Patreon website and becoming a supporter. Here is that excerpt:

LOURY: We started out with you talking about how the crime problem is up 2020 over 2019, violent crime [and] homicide in particular. And a lot of cities around the country have a serious problem because it impedes economic activity and employment, and how that’s a vicious circle.

Talk to us a little bit about what’s actually going on. You’ve been looking at the numbers. I saw one of your pieces where you had a table that had the top cities in terms of the proportionate increase in homicides, 2020 over 2019.

There were a lot of big cities in there. A lot of cities had very substantial increases. What’s going on? What are the numbers saying? And why do you think that’s happening?

CHERRY: I was able to cobble together the largest 50 cities, and 25 of the next 29, the homicides in 2020 versus 2019. Overall, in those 75 cities the increase was about 34%. Pretty striking.

LOURY: Whoa, whoa, hold on. Homicide in the top 75 cities in America is up 35% over a one year period of time?

CHERRY: Yes. And I think shootings are up even more.

LOURY: Is there any historical precedent for that, one year over the next, at least in the last hundred years?

CHERRY: Well, I don’t know, but it certainly hasn’t been in the last 20. I don’t know, in the 80s there might have been something. But now homicides in many cities are at levels that were reached 20, 25 years ago.

LOURY: People should understand, there was a huge increase in violent crime in America going up through the early 90s, but then it peaked and then tailed and fell off sharply over the last 25, 30 years. But it looks like we’re seeing another resurgence comparable to what it is that we saw at the height of violence in American cities in the 1990s. Not quite.

CHERRY: And if you just look at homicides of Black men, even before this year—I mean, I don’t have numbers on this year, but I looked at numbers from 2005 to 2019—in 2005 and 2006, homicides of Black men were about 10 to 15% higher than the homicides of white men. It is now 60% higher. That is, for every 10 white men who are victims of homicides, there are 16 Black men who are victims.

LOURY: Mind you, there have gotta be at least five times as many white men as Black men in the population.

CHERRY: You’ve got that right. So it’s an inordinate disparity. And this is the so-called Black-on-Black crime. These are not white vigilantes and white supremacists going into Black neighborhoods and killing people.So you have, already before this year, increases in gun violence in Black neighborhoods. And I would expect it’s even worse this year, where those increases are overwhelmingly of Black Americans.

LOURY: Let’s give people some idea of how many people we’re talking about. Homicides in America in a year—like 15,000, 17,000, something like that?

CHERRY: Yeah, you’re actually right in there. 15,000-17,000.

LOURY: Black men killed in a year, an order of magnitude of like 8,000, something like that?

CHERRY: 7,000, yeah. Well, that’s all Blacks that are killed, about 7,000 to 8,000 before this year.

LOURY: People, please don’t get mad at me for saying this, but I want you to compare that to the number of unarmed Black men shot and killed by police officers, which you could probably measure on the digits of your hands and your feet.

CHERRY: Last year, it was actually 13. The year before it was 14.

LOURY: Again, I’m not grinding an axe. Please don’t get mad at me out there. But I just want you to take on board what we’re talking about here, the magnitude of the threat to the integrity of the Black body. The risk of actually getting killed and losing your life if you’re Black, it’s orders and orders and orders of magnitude higher from the phenomenon of crime, civil society within African-American communities, than it is from police violence. That should have a political implication, it seems to me.

CHERRY: Well, the problem is there’s no easy solution for this so-called Black-on-Black crime. And there’s a fear that you are blaming the victims. Here you have Black men, who are growing up in neighborhoods where you have intergenerational poverty. I have numbers. There are eleven cities that stand out in terms of the homicide rates. They are all cities where at least 36% of the population is Black, and it’s just amazing the kinds of differences: these cities have three times the number of children living in high poverty, they have double the disconnected rate, double those living in extreme poverty. You know, there is one measure after another, when you look at those cities—and we know where they are, they’re Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland.

LOURY: St. Louis.

CHERRY: St. Louis is just unbelievable. They’re really hurting, those cities. Something has to be done. And this idea that, well, it’s much easier to focus on the excesses of police, because they’re people we have some control over, and we can change their behavior, get them fired, get them this and that. And it’s true with police: it’s more than just, how many do they kill? How many did they throw up against the wall? How many did they do other things to besides killing them? Certainly, we don’t want to totally understate the concern about police behavior.
But as I’ve said before, it’s not done in a balanced way. You know, there are good things they do, and the Black community wants more policing.

LOURY: That’s a fact that deserves to be underscored. If you ask people on the ground in Black communities when they want, it’s not an ideological, theoretical argument about white supremacy and systemic racism. It’s that my car got jacked the other day, it’s that I’m afraid that somebody is coming in through my window in my bedroom, it’s that I heard gunshots the other night, it’s that my kid got rousted and mugged, et cetera. That’s how they answer those questions. I just wanted to say a couple of things. One of them is, you say, the number of children and families in poverty and whatnot in the cities where you see the high Black crime victimization rates—a lot of people would say, of course, exactly, that’s what I’m saying, Poverty causes crime. Of course, if you don’t do something about joblessness and poverty, you’re gonna have these problems.

CHERRY: But it’s not the whole thing. I did some statistical work on these 75 cities. And poverty and employment do show up to be important predictors. But even after you take that into account, the share of the population of the city that’s Black is still a strong predictor of crime. So there’s stuff going on more than poverty. The other thing about poverty is there are a number of cities that are high poverty, but low homicide rates. They’re almost all cities that have a very large Latino population. Latino poverty doesn’t lead to the same dynamics that Black poverty does. And there’s a reason for that.

LOURY: What is it, Bob? That’s a very important thing to say. What is the reason?

CHERRY: Blacks have guns and Latinos have machetes, and you really can’t do drive-bys with machetes. But I think it’s this intergenerational poverty. In the Black community, it’s not simply that there are poor young men, but that their fathers and mothers were poor, and their grandparents were poor; whereas in the Latino community, even if they’re second generation, they’re not wedded to this victimization and hopelessness that many young Black people become engendered with. They go out and work, they have networks for jobs. So there’s still a hopefulness. Now what happens, if, by the third generation, they’re still poor? Who knows. There may be something like the Black phenomenon. But [Latinos] have a much more hopeful situation. They have much more of an employment network than young Black people have. So they don’t get caught up in the same street corner dynamics and hopelessness that Blacks have. And they also don’t have the [sense of] victimization. One of the things I pointed out in the article that you read is these demonstrations in the late spring and over the summer that went on forever—how is that going to impact a young Black kid who is somewhat separated from employment, from school, and even their family? They’ve got a lot of anger. And these demonstrations and the notions of white supremacy, what does that do to those kids? You don’t have that in the Latino community. They don’t talk about white supremacy. And they don’t talk about that kind of victimization—you know, maybe in their home country, there was that. So I think there are just different cultural dynamics among poor Latinos than there are among poor Blacks.

LOURY: That’s a very controversial statement, Robert. It’s one that I agree with whole-heartedly. But it’s such a difficult matter.

We cannot have meaningful conversations without meaningful facts. We cannot have the full story without looking at the statistics, even though statistics alone will not give us the full story. Many facts regarding police killings and race are available, but many people willfully ignore these statistics because they are inconvenient.  For example, many people don’t want to hear that that most Black people living in urban areas want more police, not fewer. They would rather shout “Abolish the Police” and smash windows.

Abolishing the police will not significantly lower the number of deaths of unarmed Black men.  It will do the opposite. It will dramatically increase the deaths of Black men.  From the above statistics, “only” 14 unarmed black men died at the hands of the police last year.  Even if that number is wildly incorrect, ten times understated, 140 unarmed Black men died at the hands of the police last year.  Compare that to the total number of Black men killed in the U.S last year: 7,000.  My wildly inflated number would be .02% of those killings. Abolishing the police (ignoring the fact that taking police off urban streets causes non-police killings to dramatically rise) does almost nothing to stop the deaths of Black men, who are most often murdered by other Black men.  And see here:

In 2018, where the homicide victim was black, the suspected killer also was 88 percent of the time. And this is not an exceptional situation. From 1976 to 2005, 94 percent of black victims were killed by other African Americans. In fact, as I will demonstrate, high rates of black-on-black killing have been the norm for well over a century.

If the goal is to save the lives of Black men in urban areas, almost all of our effort needs to be something other than stopping police from killing innocent Black men. This is an extremely thorny set of issues that depresses me, because so many people cannot wrap their heads around even basic statistics. It doesn’t take much review of our major news sources to see that comforting narratives are the new glitzy substitute for facts.  Comforting narratives save us all that trouble of trying to figure out what is really happening.

The fact that the main threat to the lives of urban black men is potential highly complex and it is something other than police misconduct, which has been so widely and loudly proclaimed to be low hanging fruit.  We need a populace that is much more patient about statistics and much more courageous to look squarely at inconvenient truths. How do we get to such a place?  How shall we tamp down sloganeered public policy and get back to saving lives?