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The Myth of Trigger-Happy White Cops
By: John Perazzo
Monday, April 16, 2001

Moreover, the minds of protesters such as those in Cincinnati have, for many years, been fed a steady diet of rhetoric from “civil rights leaders” like Al Sharpton, who once stated that “the real mobsters” who prey upon the black community often “wear blue uniforms and carry nightsticks.”

Perhaps it is time that Americans were finally told the truth about the police, so they might avoid falling prey to the self-serving lies of the aforementioned, self-anointed guardians of “civil rights.”

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that in 1998, fully 62 percent of the 367 suspects killed by police officers nationwide were white, and 35 percent were black. In fact, police killings of white suspects have outnumbered those of black suspects in every single year since 1978.

Moreover, black officers are far likelier to shoot black suspects than are white officers. In 1998, for instance, the black-officer-kills-black-felon rate was 32 per 100,000 black officers – much higher than the white-officer-kills-black-felon rate of 14 per 100,000 white officers. While part of this disparity is due to the fact that black officers often tend to be assigned to black neighborhoods, clearly no case can be made from these numbers that white officers are in any way “trigger-happy” when confronting black suspects.

The intra-racial nature of most police shootings has existed for many years. Between 1976 and 1998, about 65 percent of homicides by police officers were against suspects of the same racial background. The rate at which white officers shoot black suspects has been declining steadily for two decades, while the rate at which they shoot white suspects has remained fairly constant over that same period. When a white officer kills a suspect today, that suspect is usually white (63 percent). When a black officer kills a suspect, that suspect is usually black (81 percent).

Overall, black officers are slightly likelier than white officers to kill a suspect in the line of duty. Indeed whites comprise 87 percent of all police nationwide, but account for only about 80 percent of homicides against criminal suspects, regardless of race. Meanwhile blacks, who constitute 11 percent of American police officers, are responsible for about 17 percent of homicides against criminal suspects.

Some readers may find this information shocking, particularly in light of the media’s and the civil rights establishment’s disproportionate focus on instances of white officers killing black suspects.

The rest of the history

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