New York Post - USA (2020-11-15)

New York Post, Sunday, November 15, 2020

nypost.com

opinions

& ideas

How six

scientists

survived

‘living on Mars’

for a year

P. 32-33

I

’M a 25-year-old

black New

Yorker and a firm

believer in Black

Lives Matter. I’m

also a firm be-

liever in Law and Or-

der. And I don’t be-

lieve I have to choose

between both.

Back in 2009, when I

was walking home from

high school in Yonkers,

I was robbed by a group of black and

Latino guys. I didn’t call the police be-

cause that would be considered

“snitching.” I learned something that

a majority of black and Latino men al-

ready knew. I had to be street smart.

But, as I have gotten older, I have

come to know more men and women

of color who are police officers. I

wouldn’t think twice before reporting

a crime to the police. Especially if I

knew I was saving somebody’s life.

So I’m amazed that one third of my

fellow young Americans (33 percent),

aged 18-34, support abolishing the po-

lice — more than any other age group.

According to a new poll, 64 percent

of college students agreed that this

year’s anti-police “rioting and looting

is justified to some degree.”

Ironically, these destructive actions

hurt the very people they are attempt-

ing to protect. In Minneapolis, where

George Floyd was killed, inner-city

black residents are now suing their

municipal government over increases

in crime due to a severely diminished

police presence. Wide-

spread riots across

America in the summer,

costing an estimated

$2 billion in damage,

disproportionately im-

pacted minority resi-

dents.

In the aftermath of

last month’s viral police

killing of Walter Wal-

lace Jr. in Philadelphia,

over 30 businesses have

been looted and destroyed across the

city. Jameelah Scurry, a black female

entrepreneur, was left in shock when

her boutique store was destroyed by

looters and rioters.

At the heart of social media activism,

protests, and riotous demonstrations

is the myth that there is an epidemic

of racist police violence in America.

The most common line of reasoning

to support this argument is that “Afri-

can Americans are over 30 percent of

victims in police killings but less than

13 percent of the US population.”

But using population levels is the

wrong benchmark to assess police be-

havior. Rather, police shootings are a

function of how often officers encoun-

ter armed and violent suspects. Though

black Americans make up just over a

tenth of the population, they commit

more than 50 percent of the murders

and are six times more likely to get mur-

dered than whites. Given this distribu-

tion of crime, cops disproportionately

encounter black suspects, which in turn

increases the probability that any given

encounter will get out of hand.

Another widely shared stat is that

“black Americans are more than three

times as likely to be killed by police

as whites.” But once again, this doesn’t

tell the complete picture. When the

disproportionately high black homi-

cide rates are factored in, whites are

found to be actually three times more

likely to be fatally shot by police than

blacks. Moreover, study after study

from renowned scholars at Harvard

to University of Chicago find no racial

bias in deadly police shootings. As

(left-leaning) renowned University of

Chicago economist Sendhil Mullai-

nathan writes about his research,

“eliminating the biases of all police of-

ficers would do little to materially re-

duce the total number of African-

American killings.”

No, not every police officer is good,

but to paint a whole group of people

with the same brush is foolish. Many

people assume every police officer is

a Trump-supporting, super conserva-

tive, white, heterosexual man who

walks around with American flag tat-

toos on their arm. This isn’t the case at

all. Some police officers are gay, some

are liberal, and some are even black.

In the NYPD, 15 percent of officers

are black, and more than half are

members of a minority group. Con-

trary to media narratives about sys-

temic police racism, black Americans

are the most overrepresented group

in law enforcement (they make up 15.5

percent of law enforcement members

but 12.3 percent of the population).

Many young black people like me

support the cops. Andrea “Drea” Mar-

shall, a 24-year-old young black

woman in Decatur, Ga., told me, “The

absence of police would be the ab-

sence of order.” She added that we

“need someone to hold us accountable

for our wrongs [and] to catch the ac-

tual bad guys.”

Alajah Whitehead, a 24-year-old

black woman from Yonkers, isn’t just

for keeping the law around — she

wants to see them more often. “I don’t

suggest getting rid of the police,” she

said. “I feel as if there should be a big-

ger police presence at community

events.” She went on to say that there

should be more activities where police

officers and firefighters meet the youth

in the communities that they serve.

James CB Gray, 40, of Harlem, re-

called a time when “police and com-

munity were one in the fight against

crime and worked together to combat

and deter criminal activities. Defund-

ing the police is not the solution; cru-

cifying the police is not the solution,

and going to war in our own commu-

nities is definitely not a solution.”

While black people absolutely de-

serve justice, we also deserve peace.

We can’t achieve the latter if we de-

fund the police, or if police officers

keep retiring en masse because we as

a society failed to support them.

Dennis Richmond Jr., is the founder and director

of the NYNJ HBCU Initiative. Criminology student

Rav Arora contributed additional research and

writing to this essay.

Justice and Peace

Why many black

youths like me

support both BLM

and the police

Dennis

RichmonD JR.

Many members

of the black

community support

police officers —

such as in

Minneapolis, where

black residents are

now suing to undo

cop cuts.

AFP via Getty Images