The Hard Truth Americans Need To Understand About “Police Bias”

America, it’s time we have this talk.

First of all, police officers should not play executioner. Murder is never a good thing. It’s very very bad, and that’s exactly what the officer (and participating officers) did to George Floyd.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about “police bias”, crime rates, and uncomfortable truths.

Find more statistics at Statista

As you can see from the chart above, violent crime rates in the United States have been going down for a long time. There may be a couple of upticks here and there, but violent crime has been cut in half in the last 30 years.

This is a good thing. Crime has been going down thanks to police departments across the country, but few, if any, are talking about that fact.

Again, cops killing people is bad. Bad cops are bad. I don’t know why I feel like I even have to say that, but people will read this and say “oh, so you think cops killing black people is okay,” and I’m saying “no, that’s not what I’m saying at all.”

If the goal of Black Lives Matter is to ultimately stop the death of black people at the hands of police, we need to get to the root of the problem.

The uncomfortable truth is, black men commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime relative to their percentage of the total population.

I’ll go ahead and do that math for everyone. According to the FBI crime reports, white people killed roughly 3,000 people in 2018 (rounding will make this easier). Black people killed a little over 3,100 people in that same year. When you break it down by gender, the numbers show that men (of both genders) commit more homicides than women.

So, when you look at the data, you have a group that makes up roughly 7% of the population committing almost half the homicides in this country. Most of the victims of these homicides are of the same color as the individual committing the crime.

This is usually the part where people start calling me a racist for pointing at numbers. These are just numbers, people. Don’t get mad at me for simply showing you data.

The reason the police have a supposed bias isn’t merely because cops hate black people. If that were the case, the police wouldn’t let black people become cops. Newsflash: they do. The reason for the bias is because black men commit a ridiculously disproportionate amount of crime compared to their makeup of the total population in this country. Sure, there may be a few bad cops here and there, but let’s not pretend they are the only ones to blame here.

AGAIN, THESE BAD COPS ARE BAD AND SHOULD BE THROWN IN PRISON.

The only thing I want to do is fix a problem, but we can’t fix it if we don’t talk about it. Yes, police killing unarmed black men is a problem, but it’s not the biggest problem we face. Unarmed white people get killed by cops too. That’s a fact. Cops killing unarmed people is bad, no matter who is the victim.

The reason there appears to be a bias is because black men statistically commit more crime than any other group. If black men committed less crime, there wouldn’t be a bias. You could argue “ya there would be,” but I say we give it a shot… What’s the worst that could happen?

Ignoring an issue to make people feel comfortable is not love. Saying the truth is love. The longer we ignore the real issue, the longer racial tensions will continue to grow. We need to be willing to speak uncomfortable truths, and make necessary changes to make our world a better place.