Cops More Likely To Kill Unarmed Whites Than Unarmed Blacks

by JASmius

If we have to have a race war, can’t we fight it based upon the actual underlying numbers, rather than a bunch of made-up racist nonsense?:

With the turmoil in Ferguson, Missouri, the latest example, [extreme]ists and many reporters would have us believe that police officers are prejudicially “trigger happy” when dealing with black suspects.

But a scientific study from Washington State University-Spokane suggests just the opposite. In truth, according to findings from the research team’s innovative experiments:

Officers were less likely to erroneously shoot unarmed black suspects than they were unarmed whites — twenty-five times less likely, in fact.

And officers hesitated significantly longer before shooting armed suspects who were black, compared to armed subjects who were white or Hispanic.

“In sum,” writes Dr. Lois James, a research assistant professor with the university’s Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology who headed the study, “this research found that participants displayed significant bias favoring Black suspects” in their shooting decisions. [emphasis added]

Twenty-five times less likely, hm?  And the white American population is, what, five and a half times the size of the black American population?  So figuring together all these factors and extrapolating them to their fullest extent, cops would massacre all of “white America” before barely over a fifth of “black America” had been liquidated.

And this is why the Black Klan is threatening to burn down the country?  Because they don’t want the cops to cut down all the crackers before they can get to us?

So where did this cockamamie notion that (white) police officers are racist and trigger-happy come from?  Answer: “studies” that, um, weren’t so “scientific”:

In the past, based largely on incident report analyses and simplistic laboratory experiments, various researchers have concluded that in making deadly force decisions police are strongly influenced by the race or ethnicity of suspects, “independent of criminality.”

In the 1970s, this perspective was memorably captured in one researcher’s statement that “the police have one trigger finger for whites and another for blacks.” Another claimed that the “disproportionate” number of police shootings of blacks (according to DOJ figures, they are four times more likely to be shot by police than whites) “strongly suggests racial discrimination on a national basis” in law enforcement.

But James points out that it is difficult if not impossible to ferret out racial bias as a decisive factor in shootings from the incomplete and occasionally questionably accurate information included in most incident reports. And the laboratory experiments suggesting bias, she says, commonly “bear almost no resemblance” to real-life deadly force encounters.

For example, a typical research method has involved subjects sitting before a computer and viewing flash pictures of black and white “suspects” paired with weapons or “neutral objects” such as wallets or cell phones. The subjects must respond to these images by pressing “shoot” or “don’t shoot” buttons. Racial bias is then inferred by whether participants are “consistently quicker to shoot armed suspects of a particular race” and by whether decision errors tend to be greater for one race than for the other.
This process lacks what James calls “external validity” — that is, it doesn’t come close to reflecting real-world circumstances, and thus its conclusions are of limited value. “[T]he complex process involved” in deciding to shoot or not shoot and then actually firing a gun is “dramatically different” from the simple reflex of pressing a button, she writes.

In short, the “racial bias” wasn’t in the cops’ split-second decision-making process whether or not to shoot (anti-black racial bias, anyway), but the racist agenda and leftwing ideology-driven “researchers” who had an anti-white Narrative to push and unethically and mendaciously steered their “studies” toward the results they wanted them to yield.  “Cardassian academics,” if you will: choose your desired outcome and work backwards through your “research” and “experimentation”.

Now why, do you suppose, are cops in reality vastly disproportionately less likely to shoot black suspects than their white counterparts?  I can’t fathom a conceivable reason, can you?  Talk about a stumper.