Conservative activist and street reporter Maggie VandenBerghe, otherwise known as “Fog City Midge,” recently attended a Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest, sparked by the death of George Floyd, in San Francisco, where she read aloud a series of “real facts” about police killings that contradict the BLM and mainstream media narrative.
“I wanted to read something that I read that was so crazy from The Washington Post,” VandenBerghe started. “Do you guys all read The Washington Post?” The crowd yelled back in the affirmative.
“In 2019, there were 10 million arrests in America and we had 1,004 times those arrests were fatal,” she continued. “Forty-one of those people were unarmed. Nineteen of those people were white. Nine of those people were black.”
“Eighty-nine police were killed last year in the line of duty,” the activist stated, as the camera pans to officers protecting the protesters at the San Francisco demonstration. “And [27] people last weekend were killed in Chicago.”
“We need justice for George Floyd,” VandenBerghe closed, adding, “We also need to stop violence against one another.”
After a few seconds of silence, the crowd offered some applause.
“REAL FACTS MATTER!” VandenBerghe captioned the post of the video via Instagram. “I was filming at a BLM (Black Lives Matter) protest at a police station in San Francisco. They asked if anyone else wanted to speak. I had to. I had to drop some facts.”
“I was so nervous but I tried to bring some perspective and ease tensions!” she wrote. “2019: 10 Million Arrests. 1004 Fatal Arrests. 41 were unarmed including 19 White and 9 Black. In the same year, 89 police officers were killed in the line of duty. ONE WEEKEND alone 92 were shot, 27 killed in Chicago.”
“Attacking cops? Defund police? STOP!” added VandenBerghe. “Get some perspective. Real facts matter!”
Floyd, who is black, died last month after a police officer knelt on the 46-year-old’s neck for eight minutes and 46 seconds during an arrest, as shown in viral video footage.
Since the incident, all four officers involved in the arrest have been fired, investigations from the FBI and state law enforcement have been opened, and the officer at the center of the incident was taken into custody and charged with second-degree murder; the three other officers involved have since been charged, too.
The narrative surrounding the protests in connection to Floyd stems from the accusations of alleged systemic police racism. Though many, including author and academic Heather Mac Donald in her book “The War On Cops” and more recently at The Wall Street Journal, argue that “systemic police racism” is a “myth.”
“In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015,” Mac Donald wrote at the WSJ. “That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.”
“The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015,” she continued. “The Post defines ‘unarmed’ broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”
“This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black,” added the author. “Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.”
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