“The police are damn thugs.”
That is, according to a recent episode of ABC’s family sitcom, “Blackish.” The episode focuses on the Johnson family watching a fictional court case unfold on CNN which involved police brutality and an unarmed black teenager. When a grand jury decides not to indict the police officers involved, “violent” protests, “fires” and incidences of “looting” invariably follow, and the Johnsons must come to grips with how blacks are treated by the police. The consensus was largely that police officers and the justice system are to blame for the systemic discrimination blacks face throughout the country.
After a long (and, frankly, one-sided) discussion, the family decides that the right thing to do is to join the protests. After all, nothing says “family fun” like a night out on the town, looting and burning down buildings.
This episode is a perfect example of how the political left has crafted a narrative that is mostly false and does more harm than good.
Unfortunately, we have entered into an era where feelings matter more than facts. “Blackish” is guilty of spreading this narrative by pandering to people’s emotion and ignorance rather than their reason.
The narrative is that blacks have increasingly become the target of police discrimination and violence. But this is simply not the case. According to data from the Center for Disease Control , police shootings of black suspects are actually down 75 percent from what they were two to three decades ago. We are living in a far safer time period than our parents and grandparents.
In fact, The Washington Post found that out of the 965 suspects killed by police in 2015, less than 4 percent were unarmed black men killed by white police officers. The vast majority of the people killed by police were either armed or resisting arrest.
And blacks are not the only ones involved in police shootings. It may come as a surprise to some but, in 2015, a study by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that, “whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.”
Despite this evidence, the left maintains that police brutality is reaching epidemic proportions. Of course, if by “epidemic proportions” the left means “statistically insignificant,” then I would completely agree. However, words mean things, and by no stretch of the imagination can one claim that police violence against blacks is currently a rising issue in this country.
As a proud son of a Pennsylvania state trooper, I have seen firsthand the dedication our law enforcement has in making communities a safer place for Americans to live. The true epidemic is violence within the black community itself, not police brutality. Homicide is now the leading cause of death among young black people, and among those killed, 93 percent are killed by other black people. I seldom see Black Lives Matter rallying behind these victims.
Booker T. Washington feared that there was “a certain class of race problem solvers who [didn’t] want the patient to get well.” This episode of “Blackish,” ironically entitled “Hope,” convinces me that there are people who don’t want the black community to recover because they are far more interested in creating victims than real solutions.
Tyler Grudi is a contributing writer to the Bona Venture. His email is gruditj15@bonaventure.edu
