Perception vs Reality: Police-On-Black Brutality

There tends to be a disconnect between what humans perceive and reality; one example of this can be seen with police-on-black homicides involving police officers shooting unarmed black men.

The above figure shows that many people think a large number of unarmed black men were fatally shot by police officers in the United States in the year 2021; in reality, the documented number was 11.

Despite the rarity of unarmed black men being killed by police officers, we have witnessed outsized focus from Legacy Media on police/black interactions. One way to visualize the coverage disparity is to compare the coverage of police-on-black shooting deaths to police-on-white shooting deaths.

The above graph from Zach Goldberg quantifies the disparity in coverage of victims who die from being fatally shot by police officers; Black victims get ~9x the coverage as White victims.

We can further break down the data by comparing the White victims whose deaths received the most coverage to Black victims whose deaths received the most coverage. The graphs in this case, for White victims and Black victims respectively, were presented separately side by side presumably because the sheer scale of coverage received by Black victims would shrink the bars representing coverage of White victims into near invisibility. Some of the coverage is quite ridiculous as exemplified with the below New York Times article.

There’s something sinister about crafting a false narrative of large-scale police violence against Black people and interviewing demoralized Blacks to pump out articles. It’s also priming audiences to be receptive to the types of stories that are being regularly published and engaging in emotional manipulation. What can be done to counter the false narratives being peddled by Legacy Media outlets like the New York Times? This could be where Citizen Journalists step in.

I ran a poll to gauge how many of my followers were aware of the data surrounding police-on-black homicides before finding my account; the results of that poll are shown below:

42% of the 15k+ people who answered the poll were unaware of the actual number of documented fatal police shootings of unarmed Black men. When confronted with the true value, some in the replies moved the goalposts from the narrative that "police are killing large numbers of unarmed Black men" to "even 10 is too many."

If “even 10 deaths are too many”, then why don't discussions regarding black-on-black homicides (which claim thousands of innocent Black lives each year) receive the same level of national coverage as incidents involving police officers? Shouldn't Woke anti-racists be concerned about what is objectively a bigger issue?

The BLM movement was pumped, much like a crypto scam coin, into prominence on a false premise, enabled by delusional Utopians, and ignored the forest (black-on-black homicides) for the trees (police-on-black homicides)—a consequence of Legacy Media disinformation campaigns. Ultimately, the Black Lives Matter movement was a profitable scam upheld by useful idiots who can’t decouple crime from the black identity.

42% of people being unaware of the data surrounding police-on-black homicides is a crazy number; if this value translates to broader followings that means myself and other data accounts have revealed the truth to over 100,000 people. This is the value proposition of citizen journalism.