Conservative commentator and comedian Steven Crowder of “Louder with Crowder” took a look at all of the high-profile cases of police-involved shootings that have been used by the Black Lives Matter movement to promote the narrative that racist police officers are deliberately targeting and murdering black people. In a 14-minute video, Crowder walks case by case through the facts and finds that the narrative repeatedly crumbles under scrutiny. But, as Crowder says, unfortunately “facts don’t matter.”
“The purpose of this video is not to justify nor condemn any of the deaths that occurred during these police-civilian interactions,” explains Crowder at the beginning, “but to provide you with the context that MTV News and Vox and HuffPo refuses to.”
He then moves into the facts that we know so far about the Philando Castile case, which is still under investigation but which, Crowder highlights, is not simply a case of a man being “shot for a broken tail-light,” as some outlets have suggested. Rather it appears to have been a case of the officer believing that Castile was reaching for a gun and firing in self-defense.
The Alton Sterling case, likewise still under investigation, Crowder underscores, was absolutely not a “man being shot for trying to sell CDs.” In fact, police were called to the scene because Sterling had allegedly threatened a homeless man with a gun, which was likely illegally obtained, as he had a lengthy rap sheet, “including being a registered sex offender and having done time in prison for violent crimes.” After being tazed, Sterling continued to resist arrest and appeared to be reaching for his gun, at which point he was shot.
Crowder moves on to Jamar Clark, who had assaulted his girlfriend and evidence indicates was trying to reach for the officer’s weapon. Regarding the Walter Scott shooting, for which the officer involved has been charged with murder, Crowder exclaimed, “The system worked!”
Crowder then addresses the Michael Brown “gentle giant”/”Hands up, don’t shoot!” narrative — which has been thoroughly debunked and which even the Obama Department of Justice was forced to admit was utterly false, fully exonerating the officer involved, Darren Wilson. The commentator goes on to debunk the rest of the false popular narratives surrounding Sandra Bland, Corey Jones, and Freddie Gray, underscoring that while some of the deaths were not warranted and might have been avoided, that does not mean the victims were targeted by racist cops, as Black Lives Matter supporters repeatedly claim.
Crowder’s findings align with those of recent studies, including a comprehensive Harvard study finding no racial bias against blacks in police-involved shootings, a conclusion the study’s author, Prof. Roland G. Fryer Jr, called “the most surprising result of my career.” As the Daily Wire has reported, other studies have likewise found that the narrative of racial bias in use of lethal force by police is largely based on de-contextualized data and false assumptions:
In 2015, for example, 50% of the victims of police shootings were white, while 26% were black. Some have tried to argue that this is evidence of racial bias against blacks because they represent only 15% of the population; however, as Heather Mac Donald points out, blacks account for a disproportionate percentage of major crimes, including 62% of robberies, 57% of murders and 45% of assaults. Another example of de-contextualized data is that showing a higher percent of unarmed blacks who are shot than unarmed whites, but as both Mac Donald and Fryer found, when the details of the cases are included, such statistics turn out to be misleading.
And it is not just researchers concluding that officer-involved shootings are often not cases of racial bias. So far most of the high-profile cases that have been tried have resulted in the officers being acquitted, including the officers tried in the deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Jonathan Ferrell, and Freddie Gray.