The headline for the Arizona Republic, 30 August 2020, front page, blares, "Police Power out of Balance."  (I searched on the Republic's website as well as on two different search engines to find the article — no luck.  Politico has proof of its existence here.)

The accompanying graphic shows that the Phoenix police use force more often against blacks and American Indians relative to their proportion of the Phoenix population than they do against whites or Latinos.  The article makes no mention at all of the percentage of serious crimes committed by different races or ethnic groups.

So consider this report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an arm of the DoJ, showing violent crime levels by offender and victim for the years 2012 through 2105.  Those were the Obama years, when Eric the Red and Loretta would have had all the time in the world to fiddle the statistics, so I think we do not have to worry that they were skewed by white supremacists.  That report, especially Tables 2, 5, and 7, shows that blacks commit somewhere between 22 and 25% of all violent crime, yet they are just 13.4% of the U.S. population.  In other words, blacks commit nearly twice as much violent crime per capita as whites.

When it comes to homicide, the numbers are much worse.  Between 1980 and 2008, blacks committed murder at the rate of 34.4 per 100,000, while whites did so at the rate of 4.5 per 100,000 (see Table 1).  Aren't these numbers what Eric and Barack and Antifa and BLM and academics throughout the land love to label "disproportionate representation"?

To return to the Republic article, shouldn't we be surprised if police did not use force more often on blacks?  They're committing way more than their share of violent crime!  In addition, there is what the intelligentsia love to call "nuance" or "context."  For instance, did the person being apprehended put his hand in his pocket?  Reach under the seat?  Strike the officer?  Lunge for his Taser or gun?  All these things materially affect the outcome of the encounter.  In short, Gannett, which owns USA Today, the Republic, and over 100 other daily newspapers as well as nearly 1,000 weekly papers, is concerned with not informing, but indoctrinating.  Surprise!

Henry Percy is the nom de guerre of a writer in Arizona.  He may be reached at saler.50d[at]gmail.com.