Inconvenient Statistics Regarding Urban Homicides and Race, Including Comparison of 2019 and 2020

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.

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The Most Important Thing we are Losing

On January 5, Sam Harris kicked off his newest season of his podcast, Making Sense, with an episode he titles "A Few Thoughts for a New Year. He covers a lot of ground in 30 minutes. I wish I could say that I disagree with him on any of the major points he is making. His main concern is that we seem to be losing grasp of our ability to work together to solve the problems we face as a country.

As always, Sam articulates his concerns precisely and he avoids taking political sides. His focus for the coming year is seeking real life solutions for the many pressing issues he touches in this podcast. I highly recommend listening in. If you can't afford it, he offers subscriptions without cost. Simply listen to the end of this episode for details.

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Coleman Hughes Speaks in Favor of Color Blindness

Excellent discussion by Coleman Hughes.  The introduction ends at Minute 2:25.  Here's the key take-away (4:25):

"The point isn't to avoid noticing race, which is impossible. The point is to notice race and then disregard it as a reason to treat people differently and as a category on which to base public policy."

I'll conclude with a few more excerpts from the video:

Another source of confusion that I try to avoid and will avoid in this talk is the misleading word post-racial. The “post” in post-racial suggests that there are two separate eras: a racial era characterized by the presence of racism and a post-racial era characterized by its absence, and the only question is which era we are currently living in, because colorblindness in this framework would only make sense during the second racism-free era.

Many critics of colorblindness have dismissed it on the grounds that we're not there yet which is to say we have not yet eliminated racial prejudice and they're right about that. Racism still exists. Racial prejudice still exists and probably will always exist, to some extent. But they frame the issue upside down. Colorblindness is not a synonym for the absence of racism. I's an ideology created to fight racism.

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It would appear that virtually everyone has unanimously rejected color blindness as a backwards value, an old-fashioned out-of-date way of maintaining the white supremacist status quo. Yet even as it has become virtually taboo among elites colorblind policies continue to dominate in the court of public opinion especially on the issues of hiring and college admissions. In 2019, the pew research center asked people whether employers should only take a person's qualifications into account even if it results in less racial diversity and 74 percent of Americans agreed that agreed with that statement. Not only did a majority of Americans as a whole agree with this statement of colorblind hiring even at the expense of diversity, a majority of each individual racial group, whites, Blacks and Hispanics, also agreed with this message. Roughly the same percentage agreed that colleges should not consider race in admissions.

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The extent of the attacks on color blindness is sometimes surprising. For example, the best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi in his latest book, “How to be an Anti-Racist,” says “the most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right's unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular Americans’ drive for a race neutral one.” So yeah, to say that colorblindness is wrong-headed is one thing. To say it is worse than the alt-right is quite another. It's impossible to understand the hatred directed at colorblindness without first understanding critical race theory this was an intellectual movement that originated at Harvard Law School in the 1980s.

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[Min 41]

If you take a Martin Luther King quote and you just say it verbatim you may get cancelled if you're white, even if you're Black, frankly. The strange thing about Dr King is we all venerate him--nobody ever speaks ill of him--but also he's basically ignored. He's in this uncanny valley where he is not exactly canceled but he's also not listened to, which is a strange place to be in. It speaks to the moral authority and credibility that we feel his message has. The awkwardness of acknowledging that, the main thrust of anti-racist activism, is exactly the opposite of what he stood for. That's a very awkward thing for the anti-racist movement to acknowledge, because they would lose some moral credibility if they outright said what is true, which is that we reject Dr King's goal. That's the truth but that can't be said out loud.

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[Min 44]

I've read hundreds of pages of Martin Luther King’s speeches and writings and virtually every three or four pages there is something that if said today you would be cancelled for. That's just the truth. It’'s trivially easy to find 20 Martin Luther King quotes expressing the colorblind ethic in the simplest terms and very difficult to find any quotes of him expressing that race is a crucial aspect of your identity to dwell upon and affirm.

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Glenn Greenwald Warns of the Domestic War on Terrorism

Here are the opening paragraphs of Glenn Greenwald's latest article, "The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming":

The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism” that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.

We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,” vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,” treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.

Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology. Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU . . .

An entire book could — and probably should — be written on why all of this is so concerning. For the moment, two points are vital to emphasize.

First, much of the alarmism and fear-mongering is being driven by a deliberate distortion of what it means for speech to “incite violence.” . . .

To illustrate this point, I have often cited the crucial and brilliantly reasoned Supreme Court free speech ruling in Claiborne v. NAACP. In the 1960s and 1970s, the State of Mississippi tried to hold local NAACP leaders liable on the ground that their fiery speeches urging a boycott of white-owned stores “incited” their followers to burn down stores and violently attack patrons who did not honor the protest. The state’s argument was that the NAACP leaders knew that they were metaphorically pouring gasoline on a fire with their inflammatory rhetoric to rile up and angry crowds.

But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, explaining that free speech will die if people are held responsible not for their own violent acts but for those committed by others who heard them speak and were motivated to commit crimes in the name of that cause (emphasis added)

. . .

And that is directly relevant to the second point. Continuing to process Washington debates of this sort primarily through the prism of “Democrat v. Republican” or even “left v. right” is a sure ticket to the destruction of core rights. There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside.

The last several months of politician-and-journalist-demanded Silicon Valley censorship has targeted the right, but prior to that and simultaneously it has often targeted those perceived as on the left. The government has frequently declared right-wing domestic groups “terrorists,” while in the 1960s and 1970s it was left-wing groups devoted to anti-war activism which bore that designation. In 2011, British police designated the London version of Occupy Wall Street a “terrorist” group. In the 1980s, the African National Congress was so designated. “Terrorism” is an amorphous term that was created, and will always be used, to outlaw formidable dissent no matter its source or ideology.

If you identify as a conservative and continue to believe that your prime enemies are ordinary leftists, or you identify as a leftist and believe your prime enemies are Republican citizens, you will fall perfectly into the trap set for you. Namely, you will ignore your real enemies, the ones who actually wield power at your expense: ruling class elites, who really do not care about “right v. left” and most definitely do not care about “Republican v. Democrat” — as evidenced by the fact that they fund both parties — but instead care only about one thing: stability, or preservation of the prevailing neoliberal order.

Unlike so many ordinary citizens addicted to trivial partisan warfare, these ruling class elites know who their real enemies are: anyone who steps outside the limits and rules of the game they have crafted and who seeks to disrupt the system that preserves their prerogatives and status. The one who put this best was probably Barack Obama when he was president, when he observed — correctly — that the perceived warfare between establishment Democratic and Republican elites was mostly theater, and on the question of what they actually believe, they’re both “fighting inside the 40 yard line” together

Greenwald then links to this video of Barack Obama.

This point can't be over-emphasized, but I fear that this point is invisible to the tens of millions of Americans who are convinced that U.S. politics can best be understood as a tribal pursuit between the "Left" and the "Right."  They are deeply trapped in an illusory matrix that has the viscosity of fundamentalist religion. Greenwald's articles are mostly only for subscribers, but this one is open to the public.

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