You’ve probably heard this argument many times: There may be few, if any, unlawful killings of blacks by white policeman that have a provable racial motive, but certain data mixed with commonly held perceptions prove that police killings are the result of a thoroughly racist law enforcement system—and, therefore, blame lies at the feet of everyone wearing a badge.
We’ve seen this mantra heralded by protestors in many places—for many weeks. Numerous towns and neighborhoods provide the settings for hundreds, if not thousands, of demonstrations that have become the largest anti-police movement in U.S. history.
There’s been almost constant hostility towards officers at many of these events. Black officers are mocked for their physical features and accused of being race traitors. Female officers are sexually harassed and taunted about being raped as crowds chant “kill a cop”. The chaos is backdropped by fires and buildings covered in graffiti that exhort the assassination of police by car, or gun, or any means necessary. Jeers of nazi, fascist, pig, and murderer fill the air as melees of physical attacks are carried out by extremists. Beatings, blindings, spitting, throwing projectiles, and blasting with explosives make up the thousands of assaults on police. Adding insult to injury, a massive “defund” push has left police short-handed and special units disbanded. Now they’re less effective, more vulnerable, and quite frankly, less willing.
Still, the most underreported and troubling aspect of these protests is they monopolize law enforcement staff and resources, making police less active in their jurisdictions which emboldens violent criminals. When their focus should be on troubled neighborhoods, it’s, instead, drawn towards nightly protests that often take immense amounts of manpower to manage potential hostilities. Because of these tactics the police in many cities are a shadow of what they were just a few months ago and urban communities, many black, have suffered a huge increase in murders.
The following is an attempt to quantify this surge in three cities: Oakland, Washington, and Chicago—using two methods. The first method, takes black homicide totals of the month before the George Floyd protests became prominent and compares them to the month(s) that came after. The second method, compares the month(s) at the height of the unrest to the same month(s) in the previous year.
Not all the raw data is conveniently laid out on-line. For instance, the amount of black murder victims in DC and Oakland by month couldn’t be found. So, the total homicide amounts had to be tabulated from police reporting and then the average percentage of black victims from previous years was applied to arrive at those figures. Admittedly, there’s room to quibble over some of these numbers but the trends are unmistakable.
Oakland, CA: Here was the most severe uptick in black murders out of the three cities. May 2020 saw 32 black murders—four of those (12%) on May 31. The George Floyd killing happened in the latter part of the month with Oakland’s first protest held on May 29, 2020. Then June produced 57 black murder victims while July shot up to 66.
In comparison to 2019, all blacks murdered for the entire year totaled 56.
Let that sink in.
The two months immediately following the initial George Floyd protests, June and July of 2020, each saw a higher number than all twelve months of the previous year—combined. That is nothing short of staggering.
Washington, DC: This is the city out of the three with the smallest increases. The district’s law enforcement apparatus has a large federal portion, as one would assume, and that division of power was on display throughout the protests. Arguably, this allowed municipal officers to more typically monitor the city. After the initial eruptions, the first few weeks in June saw relatively few arrests at protests that regularly featured high profile politicians. But as the month went on the tenor of the demonstrations began to match the chaos seen elsewhere.
There were 13 black murders in June of 2020. July saw 24. The previous year July had 16.
These are fairly small numbers, but the contrast is clear—by either comparison—July 2020 is the outlier.
Chicago, IL: The Chicago Tribune has an excellent database for tracking homicide data. It’s much like the Washington Post’s police shooting database in terms of filtering. This allows for entirely precise data.
May of 2020 had 56 black homicides. June had 73 and July had 75. In 2019, June and July had 42 and 39 respectively.
In all three cities, once vitriolic protests laden with arrests became the norm, police attentions shifted from struggling neighborhoods and black murders spiked. Whether compared to previous months or previous years, the dramatic increases are undeniable.
Elsewhere, the news is equally daunting. Los Angeles saw homicides increase 250%, while New York, a city where 96% of gun violence targets blacks, experienced a 350% jump in weekly shootings. Scores of municipalities tell similar stories.
Just from the three featured cities alone (Oakland, Washington, and Chicago) their combined increases show an additional 104 black murders compared to the preceding month and 170 added black murders in contrast to the identical months in 2019.
These cities represent 3.9% of America’s 98 million city dwellers, but when this sample is applied to the entire nationwide urban population it translates to an average of 3,368 additional black murder victims.
To put that number in perspective, that’s a Tulsa every three days for nine continuous weeks. The Klu Klux Klan lynched roughly the same amount of blacks over a period of 86 years. BLM and their allies reached that milestone in two months.
That’s a lot of George Floyds.
Don’t misunderstand. This isn’t some deviation from Black Lives Matter. This isn’t highlighting organic gang violence or minority abortion rates. This is precisely about the consequences of the BLM protest movement and namely, their monopolization of police resources, causing the abandonment of black urban America to the wolves.
There’s some sick irony to the reality that white politicians deprive black urbanites of the ability to carry firearms for protection while discontented white millennials torch minority businesses and decimate police protections in black neighborhoods—all the while, claiming to be the righteous defenders of black America.
Can you imagine the criticism if other protest movements defied their core purpose? What if the Women’s March encouraged more rape or the Right to Life March caused more abortions? Wouldn’t that be a newsworthy contradiction? So, why is there no public outcry for a Black Lives Matter movement that actually accelerates the disposal of black lives?
And even crazier than that, after a death toll that resembles a black 9-11, the left is still successfully projecting their own systemic racism onto local police departments. But the lesson of three thousand fresh coffins filled with black murder victims is unmistakable:
The under-policing spawned by the George Floyd Protests is an exponentially greater detriment to Black America.
