http://www.nationalreview.com/node/437691/print Obama’s Police Distortions
Instead of healing America’s racial wounds, Obama makes them worse with cowardly inaccuracies.
By Rich Lowry — July 12, 2016
President Barack Obama is a lawyer, not a statistician, and it shows.
After the controversial officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, La., and Falcon Heights, Minn., Obama unloosed a series of statistics in his remarks in Warsaw, Poland, to show “racial disparities that exist in our criminal justice system” — in other words, racial bias by police, prosecutors, and judges.
Obama related numbers about disparate rates of police shootings, arrests, and searches, among other things, without mentioning the single most important factor to put such figures in context, which is that blacks commit criminal offenses at higher rates than whites.
No one likes to point this out, and so it usually is left out of our perpetual “national conversations” about race, even though it is highly relevant information. It opens up whoever says it to charges of racism, or at least callousness in the aftermath of questionable police shootings.
If anyone should be free to speak the truth, though, it should be President Obama, who imagines himself a coolly analytical figure on a historic mission to bind the nation’s racial wounds. Instead, he routinely gives a fundamentally distorted picture of the American criminal justice system — and police shootings — by eliding truths apparently too uncomfortable for him to say and his supporters to hear.
“African-Americans,” Obama said in Warsaw, “are arrested at twice the rate of whites.” But African-Americans commit about 24 percent of violent crimes, even though they are 13 percent of the population. Of course they are going to be arrested at disproportionate rates. About half of murderers are black, and over 40 percent of killings of police officers are committed by blacks.
more
