The dark lie of Black Lives Matter

Former Minneapolis policeman Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd. The world witnessed Floyd’s last conscious moments on video shot by bystanders. Chauvin was fired and has been charged in Floyd's killing, which most people regardless of color agree was brutal and unnecessary.

Black Lives Matter wants you to believe systemic racism – racism built into our social system aimed at blacks and to a lesser degree other non-whites – is responsible for confrontations between primarily young black men and police – predominantly white police. This is a smokescreen which denies the facts and falsely impunes police and other citizens around the country.

That’s because there’s a common denominator of criminal behavior in many of these confrontations – certainly the high profile ones that have generated an apparent justification to loot and burn neighborhoods and now to literally occupy a multi-block area of Seattle after city government surrendered it.

Back in 1991 Rodney King was driving drunk, leading police on a high speed chase through Los Angeles because a DUI would violate his parole on a robbery conviction. That was no excuse for the beating he got from cops, but King himself controlled the beginning of his story that night.

Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., stole from a convenience store and shoved a clerk after what may have been a drug deal there got rough, then fought a cop for the policeman’s gun back in 2014 before the cop shot and killed him.

George Floyd, whose criminal record dated back decades and amounted to numerous stints in jail and prison, tried to pass a fake $20 bill at a Minneapolis store before the incident that led to his police confrontation. He resisted getting into the patrol car and was subsequently subdued and handcuffed before Chauvin held his knee on a handcuffed Floyd's neck for nearly nine minutes, killing him. Toxicology reports said Floyd had fentanyl and methamphetamine in his system when he died. Store employees who confronted Floyd about the bogus $20 bill before calling police said he was very intoxicated and “not in control of himself.”

If we can’t ignore the element of race in these incidents, we also can’t ignore the role criminal activity played. The chronology is too often the same regardless of the race of the subject involved: Subject is confronted or apprehended for a crime or suspected crime, suspect resists arrest, police reaction ends in subject’s death. At least part of the solution should be simple: Number 1, don’t be a criminal; and number two, don’t resist police authority to enforce the law.

Black Lives Matter wants to focus on race as the issue instead of criminality, but the statistics don’t support the fervent emotion of that claim. Last year nine unarmed black men were killed by police, while 19 unarmed white men were killed by police. Black men – overall 6 percent of the population – commit 44 percent of all murders and 50 percent of violent crime. The number one cause of death for black men age 15-34 is homicide – and 93 percent of all homicides are victims of someone of their own race.

Most Americans regardless of race live by the rules. We go to our jobs, we pay our taxes, we drive at least somewhere close to the posted speed limit. Most of us don’t drive drunk or high, we don’t shoot at members of rival gangs and hit innocent bystanders, and we don’t fight the police if we’re in a situation where we’re detained or arrested. This doesn’t mean we’re not flawed or that we’re some kind of heroes, but it does indicate we at least have a core respect for the society we live in and the laws we enact to protect us.

It’s apparent that the black lives that matter most to Black Lives Matter are those that can fit a false narrative of surging racism and rampant police brutality that can be leveraged for political gain, not the black lives being forfeited every day on the streets due to gang violence and homicides committed by other blacks.

How unfortunate that the energy that’s gone into protests and the sacking, looting and burning of some of America’s cities apparently can’t be brought to bear against the foundational problems that far and away cost the most black lives. ###

– Dane Hicks is publisher of The Anderson County Review in Garnett, Kansas.