We are supposed to be living in this golden age of technology where it provides us with great insights — artificial intelligence, machine learning, and business analytics. These are activities that are all based on dealing with large amounts of fact-based data.
Yet it seems that every day there are journalists and pundits yammering on about light-weight anecdotal observations or even ‘fake news’. It stimulates the obvious question: Does reality, empiricism, and cold hard facts really matter to anyone anymore? As an example, here is a recent excerpt on crime statistics disclosed by the US federal government, which is very germane to many of the ‘social scientists’ running around Washington and large US cities:
The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881.
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Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks… Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243.
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Four studies came out in 2016 alone rebutting the charge that police shootings are racially biased. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. That truth has not stopped the ongoing demonization of the police—including, now, by many of the country’s ignorant professional athletes. The toll will be felt, as always, in the inner city, by the thousands of law-abiding people there who desperately want more police protection.
It makes you wonder if people really want to solve these unfortunate crime problems… Or perhaps that have another (political) agenda.