A recent letter to the editor asserted we’re not getting the facts and the media is woefully negligent for not printing the truth that there’s no systematic racism in policing in America. As proof, the author cited figures from the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2019 of nine unarmed black men killed by police vs. 19 unarmed white men.
At face value this would seem to support his position, until you factor in that the U.S. population of African-Americans is only about 13 percent in total. Assuming all’s relatively equal, that should equate to roughly 3.6 of the reported 28 deaths, not the nine. Actually, the facts he provided reveal that percentage-wise African-Americans are nearly three times as likely to be killed by the police than whites.
The poll that he referred to, that most of those surveyed distrust the media is somewhat accurate, though it also found that the answers fell sharply along partisan lines with the vast majority of that distrust building up over the past four years among Republicans. Coincidental?
Respectfully, I submit that misleading half-truths are woefully negligent.
Dennis Doolittle
Arlington
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