Crime Rate Madness

A SAPIENT Being's Guide to the Color of Crime, Antifa, BLM, SPLC & OSF Impacts on Criminal Justice

Corey Lee Wilson

• Publisher: Fratire Publishing LLC
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781953319319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A black man in America is more likely to be killed by lightning than by a police officer and it's rare for police to kill anyone and when a shooting occurs, it needs to be evaluated on its own merits. Numerous scientific studies have proven when behavioral, demographic, and other contextual factors are controlled-the racial disparity in police shootings disappears.

In 2019, police shot and killed 1, 003 people in the US, according to the Washington Post's Fatal Force database. Of those, 250 were black and 405 white and police shot and killed 55 unarmed suspects, including 25 whites and 14 blacks. The false narratives and fake news surrounding police shootings of innocent black suspects has caused law enforcement officers to be demonized, assaulted, and murdered.

According to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR), there were 686, 665 sworn police officers in the United States in 2018 which equals one unarmed black male shot and killed for every 49, 047 sworn police officers. Despite these facts, politicians, activists, and the media continue to push a false narrative with fake news about rampant police brutality. It's time to stop the lying and set the record straight!

In 2018, police made 10, 310, 960 arrests, according to the FBI, and the race was known for 5.6 million offenders. Of them, 1, 548, 690 (27.4%) were black and there were 229 black males shot and killed by police that year, according to the Washington Post, for a ratio of one out of every 6, 762 black offenders. The ratio of unarmed black men shot and killed (23) in 2018 was one out of 67, 334 black men arrested!

The hard facts, inconvenient truths, and multiple unbiased data sources used for Crime Rate Madness, more than prove there is no epidemic of racist police shootings in the US. Furthermore, a long list of scientific papers disproves systemic racial bias in police killings.

Nonetheless, for some of you this MADNESS book will be a will be a triggering event, denial of truth, and a painful intervention. For others, it will be a revelation, an epiphany, a sapient being moment.

1 – America's Embarrassing Crime Statistics & Perceptions

Credit: Lab Prolib in Gun Culture (2015).

Crime is a deliberate offense that a person, whether coerced or not, commits. United States crime has been monitored and reported since the 1700’s. Crime rates have risen and fallen since then. Crime started increasing after 1963 and reached a peak in 1993. Since the mid-1990s during the Clinton administration, there has been a significant downward trend from 1994 to 2013, increasing slightly up through 2020.

Public perception, however, is misleading and most people believe that crime rates are up and worse than ever before. According to 17 Gallup polls, six-in-ten people say that there is more crime in the U.S. now than compared with previous years.

Other research performed by Pew Research Center shows similar findings with 57% of registered voters believe that crime has gotten worse since 2008, even though the FBI data clearly indicates rates declining in double-digits.

There are many forms of crime, and they are divided into four major classifications:

• Personal – These crimes are committed against a person, which affects them either physically or psychologically. Rape, assault, and murder are examples of personal crimes. Robbery, which is also categorized as a crime against property, is also considered a personal crime in that it causes physical and emotional distress to the victim.
• Property – Ownership of property, whether a car or savings, is one of the basic rights of a person, and preventing someone from enjoying that liberty through unlawful ways merits punishment. Fraud, forgery, theft, and robbery are categorized under crimes against property.
• Inchoate – Inchoate offenses are crimes committed to fulfill another crime. Conspiracy, attempt (i.e., to commit manslaughter, robbery, etc.) and bribery are types of inchoate offenses.
• Statutory – Statutory crimes are committed against the government as well as the laws passed by its legislative body. Insider trading, statutory rape, drug trafficking, and drunk driving are classified as statutory crimes.

There are three degrees of assault in violent crime:

• 1st Degree which is intentionally inflicted bodily harm and may result in a felony murder charge.
• 2nd Degree which differs from 1st Degree in that it may use a potentially deadly weapon, but death neither resulted nor was it intended.
• 3rd Degree which is a misdemeanor assault causing bodily injury.

Homicide, domestic violence, aggravated battery, hate crimes, rape, and physical and sexual abuse of an adult or a child all fall under the category of violent crime. Violent crimes include homicide, accidental or intentional murder, rape, or other sexual assault charges, robbery with or without a weapon, assault, inducing aggravated or simple assault and purse snatching or pickpocketing. All of these crimes include injury or threat of injury to the victim.

Property crimes are burglary with or without the intent of theft. Anyone who is not authorized to be onsite at a property and breaks in or is found there illegally is guilty of burglary. Theft is also a crime within this classification and can be as simple as theft of cash or small belongings. Motor vehicle theft is also included in this category; this includes attempted robberies that are unsuccessful.

Race, Crime, and Police Violence

In this section, Barry Latzer, professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY provides a number of key points from his June 2020 essay, “The Facts on Race, Crime, and Policing in America.”

Big city police are deployed in high numbers to low-income African American communities. Why? Because that’s where most of the crime is. That’s where it has been since the 1920s, and especially since the 1960s. Such deployments were far less common prior to the 1960s, when black communities were severely under-policed. The result was impunity for many black violent criminals and, in turn, an incentive for black men to engage in more violence as a self-defense mechanism.

The late 1960s changed this pattern. As black-on-white crime rose, police departments came under mounting pressure to control crime, much of which occurred in or near minority neighborhoods where it victimized black residents. African American violent crime rates soared between the 1960s and the early 1990s. During that period, in big cities, arrests of African Americans for homicide, the most accurate measure of violent crime, accounted for 65 to 78 percent of all homicide arrests. This is an extraordinary figure when one considers that the nonwhite population of these cities ranged from only 20 percent to a bit over 35 percent.

The situation today has improved considerably. African American crime rates, and United States crime rates generally, have fallen dramatically. For all persons of all age groups, the homicide death rate fell 34 percent from 1990 to 2016. For black males in the same time frame, the decline was 40 percent.

While violent crime has fallen, it nevertheless remains disproportionally high in communities of color. The latest police data collected by the FBI indicates that blacks comprised 58 percent of all murder arrests and 40 percent of those apprehended for all violent crimes. This disproportional involvement of African Americans in violent crime turns out to be the most significant factor of all in explaining the use of force against blacks by police.

It will be no surprise that violent criminals in the United States are commonly armed and dangerous. For assaults, for instance, 71 percent of arrested persons carried firearms. Among suspected murderers, 58 percent had guns, as did 42 percent of apprehended robbery suspects. This tally doesn’t include the knives or blunt instruments recovered from violent offenders, including over 48,000 cutting instruments possessed by those arrested for assault alone.

Police, of course, are well aware of this situation. Charged with a duty to apprehend offenders, they are—and must be—prepared to use force. Confrontations, often armed confrontations, in these circumstances are inevitable.

Such confrontations will frequently involve white police and black suspects. Whites are a declining proportion of police departments in the United States, but they’re still close to half the force in big-city departments where white males make up 44 percent of full-time sworn officers.

Does the Criminal Justice System Treat Blacks Less Fairly Than Whites?

Barry Latzer notes: The most recent 2020 George Floyd incident has raised anew the issue of police use of force, especially against people of color. Most Americans, black and white, believe that the criminal justice system treats blacks less fairly than whites. A 2019 Pew Research poll found that 84 percent of blacks and 63 percent of whites support this view. Those numbers may rise in the wake of the George Floyd episode.

Numerous proposals to reduce police violence are now being offered, but I’m skeptical that these will change things in the short or medium term. The reason for my lack of optimism is not that American police are incurably racist. Police are probably no more racist than the average American. Rather, it is that African Americans (or blacks, both terms used interchangeable throughout this book)—low-income, young, male, urban African Americans, to be precise—engage in violent misconduct at higher rates than other groups, and violent crime begets police violence. As numerous examples, studies, and reports will show, the more a group engages in violent crime, the more the police will use violence against members of that group.

Everyone Agrees Excessive Use of Force Should Be Eliminated

On June 6, 2020...