BLM EXPOSED
In her book, A Primer in the Politics of Criminal Justice, Marion (1995) discussed how the media tended to distort or overinflate the perception of the public through repetition. As in the case of media reporting on police corruption, misconduct, and abuse of power, Marion (1995) suggested news media’s propensity to show a story as it broke and then relentlessly show it repeatedly inflated the public’s reality of how often these incidents occurred. News media also distorted reality by selecting what they would and would not show to the public (Marion, 2002).
As in the Rodney King incident, MacDonald (2017), who coined the term Ferguson Effect, suggested the news media, BLM, and sports figures perpetuated rhetoric rather than fact. She further suggested the significant rise in homicides of Black people in 2016 (7,881), 900 more than 2015, were not due to being killed by the police or Whites, but by other Black people. She further pointed out, contrary to the BLM narrative, in 2015 police officers were “18.5 times more likely to be killed by a Black male, than an unarmed Black male was to be killed by a police officer” (Mac Donald, 2017). Over the past decade, the data showed Black males accounted for 42% of cop-killers, yet only comprised 6% of the population (2017).
The national narrative created by the Obama administration and media held that police were killing African Americans at a higher frequency than Caucasians. However, statistics gathered by The Washington Post stated otherwise; the 385 fatal police shootings in 2015 were: 181 White, 109 Black, 57 Hispanic, 6 Asian, 3 other, and 34 unknown (Kindy, 2015). The fatal shooting statistics were public knowledge, yet the number of police officer executions and ambushes continued to increase since 2011 with relatively little intervention by the Obama administration (Porter, 2016).
Police Shooting deaths by Race in the US
from 2017-2020 (As of March 2020)
2020
WHITE 42
BLACK 31
LATINO 13
OTHER 3
2019
WHITE 370
BLACK 235
LATINO 158
OTHER 39
2018
WHITE 339
BLACK 209
LATINO 148
OTHER 36
2017
WHITE 457
BLACK 223
LATINO 179
OTHER 44
Overwhelmingly, the findings of the 2018 Police Officer Attitudes Towards Policing (PATP) survey painted a bleak outlook for police officers working in the law enforcement profession. Questions 16 through 43 of the PATP used a five-point Likert scale based on level of agreement to assess police officer personal attitudes toward policing. One of the valuable insights of this study stems from the events in Ferguson. At the time of the shooting death of Michael Brown, with the aid of news and social media, the Black Lives Matter movement took root in the United States. Virtually all police officers (98%) agree or strongly agree (M = 4.71) news media reporting on police officers negatively influences the public’s perception of police officers and the jobs they do. Additionally, 94.3% of respondents agree or strongly agree news media reporting on police interactions with citizens has made the job harder for all law enforcement officers. Most police officers (87.1%) agree (M = 4.31) the news media does not portray police officers and deputy sheriffs in a positive light (Landavazo, 2019).
In the aftermath of the justified shooting by the White police officer, Darren Wilson, of a Black man, Michael Brown, the news media relentlessly reported this as the shooting of an “unarmed black man,” which spurred a wave of violence toward police officers and spikes in violent crimes across the nation (MacDonald, 2017; Porter, 2016; Schouten & Brennan, 2016). The current 2016 FBI UCR report of Law Enforcement Officers Feloniously Killed from 2007-2016 of known offenders by race and sex shows a higher number of assailants were White (297) versus Black/African American (206). However, of the total 543 officers killed, the figures do not reflect Hispanic/Latino assailants who are classified as the White race (Investigation, 2016). According to the 2010 U.S. Census, 76.6% of the U.S. population is White and 13.4% is Black (Bureau, 2018). Thus, the percentage of Black offenders who killed police officers is disproportionally higher. As a whole, 93.3% of police officers who responded to the PATP survey, agree or strongly agree (M = 4.69) the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has not had a positive effect on law enforcement interactions with African Americans (Landavazo, 2019).