The post that led to my termination

Article author: 
Isaac Kriegman
Article date: 
2 January 2022
Article category: 
National News
Medium
Article Body: 

The following article contains a wealth of expository information on black versus White crime and police enforcement.

"This is the post that I made to Thomson Reuters’ internal social media site, called the Hub, that precipitated a barrage of hateful and racist attacks from BLM supporters within the company. When I contacted Thomson Reuters’ Human Resources department about the harassment, my post was removed, and I was told I was not allowed to use any company communications channels (email, teams, the Hub, etc.) to discuss the harassment I had experienced. Receiving no support from HR, I raised the issue with my colleagues and senior leadership over email, for which I was fired. Below is the Hub post that precipitated this chain of events, in full." - Isaac Kriegman, 7 December, 2021.

BLM Spreads Falsehoods That Have Led to the Murders of Thousands of Black People in the Most Disadvantaged Communities

I believe the Black Lives Matter (“BLM”) movement arose out of a passionate desire to protect black people from racism and to move our whole society towards healing from a legacy of centuries of brutal oppression. Unfortunately, over the past few years I have grown more and more concerned about the damage that the movement is doing to many low income black communities.  I have avidly followed the research on the movement and its impacts, which has led me, inexorably, to the conclusion that the claim at the heart of the movement, that police more readily shoot black people, is false and likely responsible for thousands of black people being murdered in the most disadvantaged communities in the country.

Thomson Reuters must do better to resist simplistic narratives that are not based in facts and evidence, especially when those narratives are having such a profoundly negative impact on minority or marginalized groups.  And, as one of the most important and respected media institutions in the world, Reuters News has a special responsibility to correct widely-repeated falsehoods that are spread as a result of structural and systemic patterns in our society which have historically disenfranchised blacks....

The Falsehood at the Heart of the BLM Movement

... Putting aside, for the moment, whether language suggesting an intentional genocide is hyperbolic, it’s clear that BLM activists and proponents are emphatically asserting that police are targeting blacks with lethal force: shooting and killing them in circumstances that they wouldn’t shoot and kill whites.  And, this claim, that police are targeting blacks with lethal force, seems to be, if not the most important claims of the BLM movement, at least one of the most important claims.

The only problem:  it’s completely untrue....

Perhaps the most direct measure of the danger of grievous injury that police face is the rate at which they are actually murdered by criminals.  Thus, if we benchmark police shootings against the number of police murdered by criminals, we should obtain a very good indication of whether police use lethal force more readily in response to lower levels of threat for one group than another.  This yields similar results:  “Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.”

In other words, if you measure police shootings against a legitimate benchmark, one that is actually related to how often police need to use lethal force for entirely lawful, ethical and moral reasons—such as defending themselves or others from grievous injury—there appears to be a clear anti-white bias....

Roland G. Fryer Jr. is a star economist at Harvard University... In what he describes as “the most surprising result of my career”, his study “didn’t find evidence for anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-White disparities when controlling for race-specific crime.”  Fryer was so shocked that he disbanded his original research team, hired an entirely new team, and repeated the entire data annotation and analysis process from scratch.  He found the same results.... no properly designed study controlling for the circumstances of shootings has, before or since, produced any findings to the contrary....

Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for news-media and even researchers themselves to report research findings sloppily or falsely....

I have been unable to find any study that supports the narrative of anti-black bias by police in the application of lethal force while properly accounting for the circumstances of shootings....

The reason that police have more confrontations in predominantly black neighborhoods in Boston is because that is where the great bulk of violent crime is occuring....In plain english, the number of arrests for violent crime is proportional to the number of violent crimes actually committed by each group... Instead, the reason more blacks are arrested for violent crimes is because black neighborhoods suffer more from violent crime...

The core grievance of the BLM movement, that police are much more prone to use lethal force against black suspects, appears to be unambiguously false.  The truth is that the best available evidence suggests that they are not....

The best explanation I can come up with for why a person (white, black or any other race) would support the BLM movement, is ignorance of even the most rudimentary facts.  For example, support for BLM correlates very highly with being more liberal, and a recent survey found that among those who describe themselves as “Very Liberal”, more than 50% believe law enforcement killed 1,000 or more unarmed black men in 2019.  Nearly 8% believed they killed more than 10,000!  According to the Washington Post, the real number of unarmed black men shot and killed by police in 2019 was 11. That’s a difference of 3 orders of magnitude.  It’s impossible to reason intelligently when your beliefs about the relevant facts are so completely divorced from reality.  

For those reasons, I don’t believe that anti-black racism is a primary factor in explaining why so many people support BLM.  Rather than racism, rank ignorance appears the likely culprit. 

The history of this neglect may not be written for a long time, seeing as how BLM’s ascent appears to continue unabated.  But when that history is someday written, it will not be kind to those who played key roles in enabling and promoting falsehoods of such tremendous destructive force....

One of the most pernicious aspects of the BLM movement is its name.  A more accurate and descriptive name for the movement might be something like the “Anti Proactive Policing Movement”....

Article comment:

You can't reason with the people pushing these narratives, not because there isn't good reasoning to be had, but because they aren't open to understanding the truth. They aren't teachable.

Related

Marxism, BLM, and American gullibility

The BLM Funding Database, Claremont Institute, 2023.

And a River of Racism Runs Through It

Identity Politics: squabbling factions

Intersectionality - stacking levels of perceived discrimination