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Perceptions & Myths - Police

THE PERCEPTION

Police officers have a perceived reputation in the Black community for singling out Blacks for everything from traffic stops to shooting unarmed suspects. The perception doesn't have to actually be true - that is the nature of perceptions - but unfortunately it is what many people believe. As the saying goes, "perception is reality".

THE TRUTH

Law enforcement is a hazardous profession. One in every 1,860 police officers were killed in the line of duty in 2020 ^{[1], [2]}. Officers are called to deal with domestic disturbances where emotions and tensions are high and people aren't thinking straight, often threatening others with weapons. Officers must confront persons engaged in criminal activity who desperately don't want to be caught and face accountability. Other deaths have nothing to do with criminal activity - an officer may simply stop to help a disabled motorist and be hit by a passing vehicle ^{[13], [14], [15]}.

Police officers don't go around just looking for people to accost. Their charter is Public Safety, which covers checking out suspicious behavior that may or may not turn out to be innocent, to protecting us by citing persons operating automobiles unsafely, to intervening in personal disagreements that have escalated, to intervening in a crime in-process ^{[3], [4]}. Police also face situations where they are ambushed ^{[16], [17], [18], [11]}. In each case police officers may face a lethal threat but are expected to check their own emotions and fears, to objectively confront the situation at hand. That's something officers are trained to do, but it's very hard to do and in rare cases there are lapses in meeting this standard.

Let's look at a couple examples:

• Traffic stops - activists claim that police disproportionately single out Black people for traffic stops. Have you ever tried to watch cars coming down the street to single out Black drivers from other races? Good luck. More likely is that the number of Public Safety officers is greater in areas of higher crime, which in many cases is in Black communities (check the crime statistics). Thus, there is simply more exposure to witness unsafe driving incidents in Black communities.
• Beer summit - Officers responded to a report of two men breaking into a house. The incident involved a Black man whose door was jammed and had to break into his own house. After the owner provided his ID he was incensed when the officer asked him to step outside to discuss. Without bothering to investigate the facts around the situation, President Obama immediately stated that the officer had "acted stupidly". The officer summed up his actions by saying "all I wanted was to go home to my wife at the end of the day". The officer feared that the other Black man who had gone upstairs could at any moment have come down and killed him ^[5]. Throughout President Obama's 8 years in office he repeatedly inflamed divisive racial tensions by claiming racism was involved in incidents before he had any facts.

LIBERAL LEFT LIES

In virtually every case where there is a police involved shooting ^[10]:

• The person was involved or reported to be involved in a criminal activity
• The person did not obey lawful orders of the police officer
• In most cases the person took actions that would normally be perceived as a threat

Perceptions often don't align with the facts. In addition, perceptions die hard. But in this case the TRUTH has a powerful enemy.

Liberal Democrat activists loudly proclaim, and Mainstream Media, Big Tech and Big Sports parrot the lie that these are innocent people who have been accosted by police for no reason. One Liberal Left activist organization even proclaims that "Police violence is a leading cause of death for young men in the United States. Over the life course, about 1 in every 1,000 black men can expect to be killed by police" ^[6]. The facts are that Black Men are 28 times more likely to be killed in their own communities, predominantly by other Black Men, in Liberal Democratic-led cities ^{[6], [7], [8], [9]}.

The Liberal Left lie is compounded by the fact that they overstate the deaths of Black men at the hands of police by more than 22% as confirmed by the publicly reported facts ^[12]. The correct figure is that Black Men are over 36 times more likely to be killed in their own communities, predominantly by other Black Men, in Liberal Democratic-led cities.

While no death is good, police violence is certainly not a leading cause.

Don't Take The Bait

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