Protest last night in Richmond. Photo credit: Ned Oliver
Wow, a lot of rage has been unleashed in the United States. Remember when “angry white men” was used as a put-down of the Tea Party movement? The implication was that anger clouded the reason and judgment of conservative voters, and their concerns thereby safely discredited and dismissed. Well, in the minds of many folks, the anger prompted by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis reflects a righteous rage against a systemically unjust system, so it’s OK.
Protests erupted last night across the country and much of Virginia — Richmond, Manassas, Hampton, Lynchburg, Charlottesville, Hampton, Staunton, Roanoke, Danville and Harrisonburg — and most of them were peaceful. But some weren’t. In Richmond, protests deteriorated into vandalism, arson, looting, and violence. Two policemen received minor injuries and a motorist was shot.
Based on what we’ve seen in videos, I understand the horror and outrage of the killing of George Floyd. It sure looks like an instance of police brutality that warrants prosecution…. although we all should have learned by now that instances of police violence almost always turn out to be way more complicated than portrayed initially by protesters and the media. Still, I get it. And I support peoples’ right to protest, even if I don’t agree with many of their slogans.
The question that absorbs me right now is where all that rage comes. Here in Virginia, one source is the reckless rhetoric of state Attorney General Mark Herring.
There is a widespread sense among protesters interviewed on cable TV — not to mention the cable celebrities who purport to be “journalists” — that the protests and riots alike are a reaction to systemic racism and injustice. Of course, anyone can create any impression he wants to by cherry-picking incidents and blowing them out of proportion. For example, were I a giant media conglomerate, I could create the impression that police violence against whites is out of control by taking incidents like these….
…. and portrayed them as representative of police interactions with whites. It would help, if every time a white person were killed seemingly unjustifiably, a White Lives Matter group organized massive protests after each event to magnify the impression left upon the public mind.
We count on our elected officials to rise above such irresponsible behavior and try to knit our communities together. Unfortunately, some find it expedient to feed the beast. Thus, I received in my inbox recently a statement from Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring that validated the most paranoid African-American fears. After criticizing violence and destruction for “snatching the focus” from where it rightfully belongs — the inequities of the criminal justice system — he writes:
In my conversations over the last few days I’ve heard over and over again words like ‘tired’ and ‘exhausted.’ The weight of fear that our society places on the shoulders of African Americans is immoral and unsustainable. No one can be truly free if they live in constant fear that they, their children, or their loved ones could be killed if they go out for a walk, or run an errand, or if a traffic stop takes a bad turn. I can never personally know the weight of that fear, but I recognize it, and I will do anything in my power to ease that burden and that fear.
If African-Americans in Virginia bear that fear, it is because politicians like Herring have done everything in their power to provoke it.
What is the reality? Luckily for me, the Virginia State Police published its Crime in Virginia 2019 report just last week. Here are some highlights.
There were 28 officer-involved shootings in Virginia in 2019. Twelve resulted in fatalities, and twelve in injuries.
Source: Virginia State Police. Click for larger image.
Remarkably, given the racially sensitive nature of police killings, the shooting victims are not broken down by race, so we don’t know if blacks are more likely than whites to be victims of police violence. The fact is, we just don’t know. So, if Herring is looking to the Virginia State Police crime report for validation of his sweeping assertions, he would find nothing.
Given the frequency with which police are assaulted — with guns, knives, cars, fists, blunt objects — it’s a testament to their training that more killings don’t occur in the execution of their duties. Fortunately only one officer was killed in the line of duty last year, according to the Virginia State Police. However, there were 1,939 other assaults on officers. Of those, 22 resulted in “major” injuries and 497 in “apparent minor” injuries.
Of the millions of encounters that police had with Virginia residents every year, and of the tens of thousands of encounters that took place during the investigation of crimes and making of arrests, and of the hundreds that involved violence against police, only 12 resulted in shooting deaths. Of those 12, some number were black. But the fact is, we don’t know the number — and neither does Herring.
(For whatever value you place upon police investigations into the shootings, all 28 were found to be “justified.”)
In the past, Herring also concocted the existence of a surge in hate crimes by white supremacists. Here is the 2019 data:
Let’s take these statistics at face value and not worry about how the reporting and classification of crimes as “hate crimes” may be politically biased. There are roughly 8.5 million people in Virginia. Each and every day, there are millions of interactions between individuals of different races. Over the course of a year, there are literally billions of interracial interactions.
Of all those interactions, people engaged in race-based “intimidation” (making threats) 55 times, engaged in “simple assault” (typically pushing, shoving) 54 times, destroyed property (vandalism, typically spray painting) 48 times, and committed aggravated assault 12 times. Not one hate crime resulted in a death or injury. Even if all aggravated assault victims were black, they would represent a infinitesimal fraction of the total number of black-white interactions.
By contrast there is a very real chance of African-Americans being victimized by other African-Americans. Inter-racial murder is relatively rare. Most whites are killed by other whites, typically domestic partners, family members or acquaintances, and the same applies to blacks. When inter-racial murders do occur, they are more likely to be black-on-white than white-on black. In 2019 253 African-Americans were victims of murder and non-negligent manslaughter. (African-Americans were the offenders in 270 murder and manslaughter cases.) While the state police data don’t specifically state how many blacks were killed by whites, the number is extremely small. And Herring has absolutely no data to suggest otherwise.
In sum, Herring’s suggestion that Virginia’s 1.6 million African-Americans might “live in constant fear” if they go out for a walk or a traffic stop takes a bad turn is utterly divorced from reality. The notion is a hallucination and a fraud. If despite these facts blacks do live in fear of police brutality or white supremacists, then look to race baiters like Herring for spreading the idea.
Herring may not have participated in the riots last night, but he has been lighting rhetorical matches for a couple of years now. The thought of him running for Governor is frightening.
