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hands up and not shooting, the statistics just don’t comport with reality. In fact, it appears that people are dying at a much lower rate at the hands of police officers over the last five years.
The Washington Post has maintained a national database for police shootings since 2015. According to their statis- tics, since 2015 there has been a 63 percent decrease in the shooting of African Americans. More importantly, the statis- tics show that in the vast majority of police shootings, the al- leged victim was armed with a dangerous weapon. In 2019, the statistics tell us that 39 unarmed people (14 of whom were African Americans) were killed by police officers. We all agree that 14 people is still too many, as each and every one of them, no matter their actions or criminality, were people and loved by someone. But when you compare the total number of police-involved homicides nationally in 2019, which was approximately 1,000 people, you need to really stretch to find a bona-fide epidemic. Is it me, or does 14 seem to be a somewhat statistically small number? It certainly does not make a rational person conclude that we have an epidemic raging across the country.
In Chicago, the numbers are even less offensive. As of Sept. 1, there have been 11 police-involved shootings, in which four people have been killed. The total number of shootings as of Sept. 1 in Chicago is 2,338, of which 475 have been killed by homicide, for a total of 518 homicides. While I
was told there would be no math today, it appears that Chi- cago police are responsible for .004 percent of all shootings and...sorry, my calculator does not go low enough to calcu- late the percentage of shootings by police in which the per- son dies. I am unaware of any Chicago Police Officer being charged with murder this year.
But the ACLU tells us that we are in the midst of a nation- al epidemic of police shootings. Reading between the lines, this tells us that the community response in the form of looting, protesting, attacks on police, defunding and the un- told millions lost to our economy as a result of this unrest is in fact justified, or at the least understandable. I must have missed a memo. Is this not amazing evidence of restraint by Chicago Police Officers, considering the tens of thousands of police citizen contacts? Have the training, observance of the use-of-force policy and overall tactical approaches not been been recognized and adhered to?
Any killing of a human being is a tragedy and should be condemned, but Chicago Police Officers are certainly not engaged in an epidemic of unwarranted shootings, and neither are police across the nation. The narrative is false, and there simply is not a rash of unjustified shootings as the ACLU, social justice warriors and media tell us. I will leave you with one more statistic: 49. That’s the number of police officers killed in the line of duty in the U.S. in 2019.
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