Affirmative-action Answer? Black Cops MORE Likely Than White Cops to Shoot Blacks

Perhaps, as gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder (R-Calif.) was accused of having been, they’re the “black face of white supremacy.” What black cops are not, however, is a policing panacea that will bring peace to savage streets and end the law enforcement “war on blacks.” This isn’t just because you can’t end something that isn’t occurring, but also for another reason:

Black and Hispanic officers are actually more likely to shoot black suspects than white cops are, according to studies.

What’s more, this phenomenon could be attributable to — and certainly is exacerbated by — affirmative action policies, which subordinate merit to racial quotas in the name of increasing police departments’ non-white representation.

The January 10 death of 29-year-old Tyre Nichols at the hands of five Memphis police officers might’ve been at least partially a result of this quota mentality, too. For at least two of those officers were hired under dumbed-down, leftism-inspired standards, according to a report.

Of course, if having the melanated as masters of a metropolis could deliver what the Left longs for, we wouldn’t now be discussing Memphis. After all, the city’s police chief is black, its city council is majority black, its population is 64 percent black, and its cops are 58 percent black (and three percent Hispanic).

Despite this, Wakanda it ain’t. There’s a reason the Memphis cops’ black representation and that of its general population closely mirror each other, too: It’s the result of a decades-long effort to forge a police force that “looks like the city,” The Washington Post tells us. Translation:

For decades, color trumped competence.

That is, when the former is the number one priority, the latter can’t be.

Making this very point Monday evening was researcher Heather Mac Donald, author of When Race Trumps Merit. Asked to assess the Memphis situation while appearing on Fox News program Tucker Carlson Tonight, she responded, “Well, this makes me long for the days … when we heard ad nauseam from academia that blacks cannot be racist because racism equals power plus privilege, and blacks by definition have neither of them.”

“Now we’re at the point where racism is a virtually non-falsifiable proposition; my favorite example of this new paradigm is the claim that the fact that the five officers in Memphis were indicted for murder is itself a product of racism,” Mac Donald continued. “So, you know, what’s an ally to do? The only thing you can do is absolve favored victim groups of all accountability.”

In reality, these so-called “allies” are infantilizing black Americans, (inadvertently?) portraying them as creatures without human agency at the mercy of the “man” and his ever-mutating machinations. Or as commentator Rich Lowry amusingly put it yesterday, “There’s nothing white supremacy can’t do.”

“It is supposedly so pervasive and powerful that it can cause black men to sign up to serve as police officers in a majority-black city and beat up a black arrestee.”

“It is to the contemporary left what capital was to Marx, sex was to Freud and gravity was to Newton,” Lowry continued — a recurring, maniacal obsession.

Returning to Mac Donald, she then made the larger point that

the post-George Floyd horrors never stop coming. We lost thousands more black lives to drive-by shootings — not a single one of those protested by Black Lives Matters activists. And police departments are now facing a retention and recruitment crisis. At the same time that the pressure is escalating yet again to hire by race, a pressure that began under the Obama administration….

Letting race trump merit is always a disaster…. And the premise for this diversity hiring is not even true. It is not the case that the more black officers you have on a force the less excessive force or brutality you have.

The Obama administration itself found that in Philadelphia, black and Hispanic officers were more likely to shoot unarmed blacks than white officers [were]. A 2017 study found that the more black officers on a force, the more black civilians were killed. So this whole story — the narrative of police racism and the narrative that getting rid of standards will solve our crime or policing problems — is completely false…. [Video below.]

Host Carlson then concluded, saying that “none of this has anything to do with racial justice…. It’s not about race — it’s about destroying civilization.”

This warrants elaboration. In truth, much of this is driven by misguided passion. Yet it’s reasonable to believe that there also are Machiavellians here pushing an agenda: nationalized police.

Leftists don’t hate police in principle; they merely hate police they don’t control. And the fact is that while the Left has seized virtually all institutional levers of power — the media, academia, entertainment, Big Tech, most of corporate America, the intel agencies, and the military — the everyday boots on the ground — the cops — are still mostly conservative. How do you snatch them?

The formula:

• Demonize and handcuff police so they mayn’t do their job.
• This will ensure demoralization, prompting the more honorable among them to quit.
• Dumb down standards, prioritizing racial quotas over merit, and replace the ex-officers with incompetents who can’t do their job.
• Exacerbate this degradation by defunding police as much as possible.
• Finally, indignantly lament that locally controlled cops “just aren’t up to the task,” and send in the fed cavalry to “save the day.”

After that, you won’t be seeing any more police beatings and killings on the news — but not because they won’t be happening.