It is an epiphenomenon of wokeness that many journalists have become trained seals, balancing the ball of racial inequity on their noses as a spectacle for all to behold. There is the inequity of black school children being disciplined at a higher rate than white school children. There is the inequity of black cannabis users being criminalized at a higher rate than white cannabis users. There is the inequity of black motorists being pulled over by the police at a higher rate than white motorists. And so on.
Our trained seals clap and bark and bounce that ball of inequity out to their readers, never bothering to dig deeper into the subjects about which they write as real journalists ought to do. Relevant questions go unasked: Do black school children misbehave more than white school children? Are black cannabis users less discreet than white cannabis users? Are black motorists more lax about things such as keeping their vehicle registration stickers up to date than their white counterparts?
Another inequity cited by journalists involves the percentages of black victims of homicides and non-fatal shootings, those percentages being much higher for black victims than white victims. The woke spin on these disparities typically involves emphasizing black victimhood to the exclusion of black culpability for said disparities. I was mildly surprised, then, when I came across this Minneapolis Star Tribune piece with the title “Minneapolis gunfire claims Black victims at disproportionate rate, data show” that also at least mentioned black culpability.
The article was based on current non-fatal shootings data for 2022 released by the Minneapolis PD. According to the article, 83 percent of shooting victims were black in spite of the fact that blacks make up only 19 percent of the population of Minneapolis (and an even smaller percentage of the surrounding areas which were also considered in the report). Of known suspects responsible for the shootings, a whopping 89 percent were black. If this 89 percent of known suspects is a good representative sampling, it would mean that 89 percent of the total shootings would be attributable to black shooters. There were 354 shooting victims so far as of August 8, averaging out at about 1.6 per day.
Now if black people make up no more than 19 percent of Minneapolis and its environs but are responsible for 89 percent of the shootings, it means that a whopping 70 percent of those shootings are attributable to black shooters going way over and above the percentage of shootings expected from a population group of that size. Instead of 354 shootings, Minneapolis should have had about 106 shootings. Those extra 248 shootings exact a cost in resources from the public that the public otherwise wouldn’t have to bear: police and EMTs responding to the calls, ER doctors and nurses, hospital doctors and nurses, physical therapists, homicide detectives following up on the cases, Sheriff’s deputies and detention officers running the county jail, assistant district attorneys, public defenders, bailiffs, judges, state prison corrections personnel, disability payments to indigent victims who might be left crippled, paralyzed, mentally impaired, or suffering from PTSD, and the like.
The report also cited other violent crimes but without giving a racial breakdown of either the victims or the perpetrators: There were 56 homicides and 328 carjackings as of August 8. Curious to see if I could find the source of the data for the report, I explored the Minneapolis PD website and found a “Crime Dashboard” with figures current as of August 22: assault 5,971; homicide 59; robbery 1,184; carjackings 362 (a subset of robbery); and gunshot wound victims (i.e. shootings) 377. So in addition to figures for shootings, homicides, and carjackings, we also have figures for assaults, and we can calculate the number of robberies not involving carjackings as 1,184 – 362 = 822. Although a racial breakdown is not given for these other violent offenses, if 89 percent of shootings are attributable to black offenders, it’s a good bet that black offenders commit a disproportionately high amount of these other offenses as well. The Minneapolis PD needs to incorporate a racial breakdown into their Crime Dashboard or at least provide a cumulative racial breakdown at the end of each year.
What happens when a city is overrun with violent criminality disproportionately committed by a small minority? The city has to respond by hiring more police, which means the agency has to dip deeper into the applicant pool, which means they might end up hiring people they might not otherwise have hired. And we’re not just talking about Minneapolis here—Minneapolis is but a single example of what is going on in cities across the country. An inevitable result of this situation is that some of the legion of black criminal offenders will be on a collision course with certain of the bad apple cops hired to deal with the onslaught of black criminality. A case in point was the death in custody of George Floyd after having been knelt on by Derek Chauvin. After that incident, the city—already sapped by black criminality—was further sapped to the tune of several hundred million dollars by the ensuing rioting.
We have been gaslighted into believing that the biggest problems in our country are police brutality, racism, and white supremacy, all the while overlooking the real problem.
