The media have blood on their hands in Dallas

Ordinarily, I’m not the type who screams at his television. To be honest, I don’t watch a lot of television “news” shows because they mostly degenerate into people shouting over one another. One thing I rarely do is watch any news on the weekends. After wallowing in the issues Monday through Friday, I find it best for my sanity if I take a break for a couple of days.

It was the Saturday after the Dallas police shootings and my wife wanted to catch up on the news so I reluctantly switched from a documentary about the greedy rich to CBS. It was a special edition of 48 Hours. I watched as they trotted out the ‘white guilt’ professors and the Black Lives Matter activists until I found myself literally screaming at the television. Yep. I had become ‘that guy.’

What so infuriated me was knowing that they know. What I mean by that is I know the statistics on police shootings. I know white folks are far more likely to be shot by the police than black folks. I know that study after study has revealed there’s no evidence of racial bias in police shootings and that there is no war on black people. And I know that the people at CBS know this. The question is why do they continue to lie?

I’ve often said media bias isn’t what they tell you, it’s what they don’t. If all they show you are the cases where white police officers shoot unarmed black people then eventually you’ll believe that’s all there is. Names like Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner have become household names. You can’t name a white victim.

The truth started to raise its head so the Washington Post had to do their best to tamp it back down. They said it was true that more whites are killed by police than blacks, but you have to look at that in relation to their percentage of the population. Sounds fair but it’s not the whole story.

You not only have to look at the percentage of shootings in relation to the makeup of that particular group in the general population, you have to look at the propensity of that group to commit crimes. In other words, how likely are police to come into contact with a certain group?

For example, I don’t know the percentage of American nuns, but let’s just say it’s 1 percent. I can almost assure you that the percentage of nuns that have contact with the police as criminals is near zero.

So, understanding that contact with the police surely has to factor into who gets shot, black folks make up 13 percent of the population and make up 24 percent of the police shootings. However, they commit 52 percent of the murders. They commit almost 40 percent of all violent crimes. If you just compare their percentage in the population to their percentage of shootings you might come to the conclusion that the system is somehow racist. 

It’s not.

The government makes it almost impossible to get a true picture of crime by race because they categorize all Hispanics as white, which, of course, skews the white stats. To give you an example, out of the current FBI Top Ten Most Wanted list, five are Hispanic. But here’s a startling statistic: 40 percent of cop killers are black. 

No matter how you slice it, black criminals grossly overrepresent their numbers in the general population and white criminals underrepresent theirs. If you really look for a war on blacks, you won’t find one.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.