LIES, DAMN LIES AND THEN THERE ARE STATISTICS

A famous line and it couldn’t be more relevant than now. You know that I have ranted about this several times before. And it couldn’t be more important to remind you of it now.

Yesterday when Trump was asked about blacks still being killed by police he responded that so were whites and in greater numbers. Now the left went immediately ballistic and came up with the nonsense that supposedly blacks are three times more likely to have deadly force interactions than whites if you consider the relative populations of blacks and whites. I will leave you to consider the writings of Mollie Hemingway for how bogus this is.

However, let me remind you of what I have been ranting about for years. There are two types of discrimination — disparate treatment and disparate impact. Disparate treatment means that one group is singled out based on their race, gender or whatever, for discrimination. Disparate impact applies in cases where an apparently neutral requirement has a disparate impact on a race. Obama and Holder pushed the later to claim that everything that didn’t come out equally between blacks and whites based on their percent of the population was by definition discrimination.

Based on what I can recall, and look up Mollie Hemingway for the actual numbers, blacks are 15% plus of the population but commit 40% plus of the crime. Is it any surprise that there would be more interactions between police and blacks than whites proportionally? Look at Chicago, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Saint Louis. Are whites committing all these murders? No. So are you surprised that there are more interactions involving blacks with the police than whites proportionally?

Just remember that when the left claims blacks are being singled out, the real question is how many crimes are being committed and by whom. Don’t fall into the disparate impact trap. Committing a crime is not a disparate impact issue, it is a crime regardless of race and there is absolutely no reason to believe that commission of a crime will be evenly distributed among the races.