Democrats Have Controlled Cities Where Most Blacks are Killed by Police for Over 50 Years
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The protests and riots following the death of George Floyd have been replete with claims of systemic racism. But, a friend pointed out that Democrats, the group favored by those making the charge of systemic racism, were in charge of Minneapolis when Floyd died and that the police chief, Medaria Arradondo, was appointed by them. Despite these facts, charging the officer who was apparently responsible for Floyd’s death took several days, during which time outrage about the incident exploded into mayhem.
So I thought I would take a look into the systems that are allegedly institutionally racist, focusing on cities because when we discuss black deaths by police, we are talking about actions conducted in behalf of city authorities, as opposed to state or federal authorities, which are also systems but irrelevant here.
I thought it important to determine if there was indeed a problem and what it was given that the protests and riots premised upon the idea that a pervasive systemic racism leads police to kill blacks has led to at least a dozen dead people, hundreds of damaged businesses, felled and decapitated statues, and a Paris ’68-style commune in Seattle.
Since Black Lives Matter and the charges of institutional racism are about black people killed by police, I looked up the data using a source called Mapping Police Violence that would be unfavorable to the police to avoid any accusation that I used a pro-police source.
A note about Mapping Police Violence: the site advertises on its homepage that “Police killed 1,098 people in 2019.” This seems unlikely given that the data that they provide on their own site for police killings from 2013 to 2018 — a period of six years — amounts to 1,973 deaths. They again claim that there are over 1,000 killings a year on their About the Data page but this isn’t corroborated by the data on their website that is actually sourced.
