Free Republic

Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke in sober terms at a news conference on Saturday at Woodhull Hospital after two police officers were shot and killed in Brooklyn. It is the sequence that every mayor dreads: the ominous report, the scramble to the hospital and the confirmation that, yes, an attack against the police has proved fatal. But for Mayor Bill de Blasio, the tragedy on Saturday — when two police officers were shot and killed in an ambush in Brooklyn, according to the authorities — arrived at a particularly trying moment, amid an already fractious relationship with the police. Police...

Al Sharpton, who has been pushing an agenda of racial division for decades, decried the deaths of two innocent NYPD officers tonight. Yet, despite the fact that his actions in propagating lies about Ferguson inflamed the situation, he didn’t even have the common decency to get his condolences right. Sharpton, who for months has been saying that “the fight ain’t over” against police, took to Twitter to distance himself from the horrendous murders of Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos. The disgraced race-hustler stumbled over himself to post the following tweet. This is the original tweet, unedited: “An eye for an...

Do blacks trust police more than whites do? Given the anger over events in Ferguson and New York City, the very question seems absurd. But it is not. Behind the polls and demonstrations, there is evidence that blacks trust police at least as much as whites do. The poll results are hardly surprising. A new Gallup poll confirms blacks place less confidence in police and the criminal justice system. Using survey data from 2006 through 2014, Gallup found:

Larry Elder at Real Clear Politics breathes essential statistical insight into the ongoing fight over whether or not white cops have a predilection for shooting black men: In 2012, according to the CDC, 140 blacks were killed by police. That same year 386 whites were killed by police. Over the 13-year period from 1999 to 2011, the CDC reports that 2,151 whites were killed by cops — and 1,130 blacks were killed by cops.Police shootings, nationwide, are down dramatically from what they were 20 or 30 years ago. The CDC reported that in 1968, shootings by law enforcement — called...

The President and Mrs. Obama took to People Magazine to whine about alleged racist slights they’ve received over the years. The President complains that he used to have trouble hailing a cab and was mistaken for a valet. The First Lady whines that at Target someone asked for help getting something off a shelf. The Obama’s apparently believe this constitutes racism, likely of the mythical white privilege variety. In reality none of these events constitute racism, they only constitute common mistakes people make. In the cast of the lady at Target, she made the mistake of asking someone as arrogant...

Oprah Winfrey says she wishes people wouldn't rush to judge private conversations between Sony executives that were revealed in a recent hack. I would hope that we would not stand in judgement--in such harsh judgement--of a moment in time where somebody was hacked and their private conversations were put before the world. Because if we were to look at your computer and everybody else's computer...I try to write everything as though it's going to show up in the New York Times. But there are things that you say in your private conversations with your friends and your colleagues that you...

Parties and protests don’t typically overlap, but the “Selma” cast made an exception and a statement on Sunday night following the film’s Manhattan premiere. At one point during the otherwise splashy festivities, director Ava DuVernay took to the steps of the New York Public Library with actors David Oyelowo, E. Roger Mitchell, Wendell Pierce, Omar Dorsey, John Lavelle, Stephan James, Kent Faulcon, Lorraine Toussaint, Andre Holland, Tessa Thompson and Colman Domingo, donning “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirts over their partywear and raising their arms in the “don’t shoot” pose. It was not just an unusually sobering photo op, but also a...

Five people were injured in a drive-by shooting Sunday evening in Overtown, according to Miami Fire Rescue. Police said a group of people were standing in front of 1311 Northwest 2nd Avenue around 6 p.m. when a black SUV drove by and someone inside opened fire.

[SNIP] "There is a reason that they racially profile us in the way they do. Sometimes it is wrong, and sometimes it is right," Barkley said. The problem with these statements isn't just that they are misleading -- 16 out of 29 witness statements said that Mike Brown had his hands up to surrender, in direct conflict with Darren Wilson's story; and police used a banned choke hold on Eric Garner, a measure that was known to cause death -- but that Charles Barkley is uniquely and astoundingly unqualified to discuss issues of race, law and police violence. If property...

An unequal economic recovery has helped create the largest wealth gap between minorities and whites in more than a decade, a new report found. The gap has grown, as white Americans -- who are more likely to own stocks -- rode surging financial markets to greater wealth, the Pew Research Center said Friday. Meanwhile, minorities, hit harder by the housing crash, saw their wealth decline between 2010 and 2013.

As the protest over his death has reached London, we can say that what happened to Eric Garner, whatever his faults, is certainly, tragically terrible. If I had been a police officer I probably would have stopped holding him down when I heard "I can’t breathe!", but then I'm not a police officer used to dealing with criminals lying all the time, including Garner himself who - as is shown in a distressing video that includes his altercation with the police before his arrest - had possibly been lying to the police until a few seconds earlier, when he...

How does one explain liberals’ relentless obsession with race? Democrats and left-wing activists clutch the notion of racism as America’s defining characteristic just as streetcorner drunks cling to their fifths of cheap booze. No matter what, neither community can unhand those bottles. In fact, this debilitating liberal addiction deserves a name: raceaholism. Advertisement Raceaholics like President Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, New York mayor Bill de Blasio, overexposed circus barker Al Sharpton, Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, their allies, and their media enablers cannot stop talking about race. They refract almost every issue through that prism. According to them,...

In the responses to my “When Whites Just Don’t Get It” series, I’ve been struck by the lack of empathy some whites show for members of minority groups. So imagine if the world were reversed. Then “the talk” might go like this: “Don’t curse. It is wrong, but it’s the way the world works. And that’s why Mom and I are scared for you. With us whites in the minority, some cops are just going to see you as a threat no matter what. You’re going to get stopped by black cops, and I want you to promise you’ll never...

In a Dec. 5 op-ed, the president of California State University (CSU) claimed if you are “light skinned” you have “significant unearned privilege” and routinely think less of those who are different than yourself. In her piece, “Privilege at The Beach,”—referencing the Long Beach area where the school resides—Jane Close Conoley, a white woman herself, asserts that “light skin color and high income levels may attract significant unearned privilege.” Those who qualify for such privilege, often unknowingly exert distrust and “lower expectations of behavior” on those of another skin color. “Those who are less affluent with darker skin or from...

“I'm minding my business, officer,” pleads the man on the video. “Please just leave me alone.” Minutes later the man, confronted by police for allegedly selling “loose” cigarettes, would be placed in a chokehold and wrestled to the ground, eventually dying from injuries sustained by the restraint. The video recording of Eric Garner’s death is deeply disturbing, and has once again stoked protests and fiery debates about police tactics and racial biases. However, focusing the anger and debate on racial bias or specific actions by individual police officers, misses the broader and far more important public policy issues raised by...

A disturbing conversation with one of my smartest, most astute friends who is from a border state but has been observing race relations for a long time now. He is white. He is definitely idiosyncratic. This, in paraphrase, is what he said: “I keep reading in the newspapers and seeing in the mainstream media how angry blacks are at whites over the Trayvon Martin case, the Ferguson case and the Staten Island case. And what the media is missing is that as angry as the blacks are at the whites, that’s how angry many — not all — whites are...

Those are not the facts but facts never matter when Barack Obama is involved. Barack Obama has been in overdrive in trying to boost his appeal to his base (blacks and Hispanics, in particular) as he loses the respect of the rest of America. His latest bid to bolster his support among his most loyal of supporters is his recent claim that racial equality has improved under his reign. He did this in an interview with Univision-the Spanish-language network controlled by one of his most generous donors. Justin Sink reports at The Hill  that President Obama believes racial equality...

The president of prestigious Smith College is red-faced and apologetic Tuesday for telling students on the Northampton, Mass., campus that "all lives matter." Kathleen McCartney wrote the phrase in the subject line of an e-mail to students at the school.... “We are united in our insistence that all lives matter,” read the e-mail,in which she made clear she was strongly behind the protests, writing that the grand jury decisions had “led to a shared fury… We gather in vigil, we raise our voices in protest.” But she soon received backlash from students for her phrasing. They were offended that she...

President Obama believes racial equality has improved during his tenure, partially thanks to policies — including his signature health care law — undertaken by his administration. “If you look at the history of race in America, it’s usually not a single moment where everything gets solved — it’s a process,” Obama said in an interview Tuesday with Univision. “I think that because of our policies, there’s more equality than when I came in. With respect to health care, with respect to access to college, with respect to opportunity. I think because of the work Eric Holder has done under my...

19-Year-Old Jessica Lane Chambers was brutally murdered in Mississippi two nights ago. Unfortunately the details of her murder are so horrific to comprehend they make the current racial anxiety in the headlines seem small, yet also potentially more explosive. …When the fire department got there, she was walking down the road on fire. […] They squirted lighter fluid down her throat and in her nose… Yes, Jessica was white; and no, by all accounts her killer(s) were not. She wasn’t just attacked, beaten, and burned alive – she was brutalized beyond all horrific imaginings. When you identify what took place,...