Donald Trump, Race, and Crime - Here Are The Facts

Donald Trump stepped into a hornet’s nest when he, or likely one of his staffers, tweeted this meme about race and crime statistics.

Granted, it probably wasn’t the best idea, particularly given the fact that the meme was inaccurate on several counts. Besides, if Trump or anyone is going to even touch an area as volatile as that, it must be done carefully and with several qualifiers, and common sense says that starts with NOT using Twitter. However, judging by the media and blogosphere reactions, one would think Trump had said that slavery should be reinstituted or that we should start bombing refugee camps.

Among many, Claudia Koener over at Buzzfeed was quick to knock down Trump’s straw man by reciting the obvious inaccuracies, including the fact that, indeed, 81 percent of whites killed were NOT killed by blacks. Duh, right? It’s almost as if the inventors of the non-existent “Crime Statistics Bureau of San Francisco” created that meme with wild exaggerations just to discredit and render moot any talk of race and crime.

No, Trump shouldn’t have sent that Tweet, but does that mean the topic shouldn't merit a candid discussion?

The headline screamed “Donald Trump Tweeted Made-Up Statistics About Race and Murder.” After all, since that meme was patently wrong in some areas, it must be wrong in all of them, right? Donald Trump must be a racist and, further, it’s absurd to think there is an issue with race and crime beyond the politically-correct narrative (evil whites, good everyone else, only black lives matter, blah blah blah).

So, don’t bring it up anymore; the end, nothing to see here except don’t vote for that racist Trump;

Well, as Lee Corso would say, not so fast!

There is, indeed, a story when we analyze the REAL FBI statistics Ms. Koener quotes and conveniently refers to. I’m in the camp that believes the race-baiting, race-guilting, and race-hustling need to stop and, as Eric Holder has famously asked for, the honest conversations about race need to start. After all, just because the facts are uncomfortable doesn’t make them any less factual. Proponents of “social justice” can deny reality until they’re blue in the face, but the reality is in fact quite the opposite of the Politically-Correct Fantasyland they want us all to live in.

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To the left’s chagrin, facts aren’t racist, they just … are.

Before we dive into the data, it should be noted that the way Hispanics are counted among victims and perpetrators represents a change from typical FBI reporting. They are finally included to a limited extent, but the data must be analyzed in order to get the most out of it. Hispanics are a different ethnic group, a different culture, are treated as such by the left when it comes to propagating “white guilt” (except when it suits them, such as the “white” George Zimmerman), and should certainly not be grouped in with non-Hispanic Caucasians when it comes to crime reporting.

The FBI has finally done that, but oddly doesn’t include non-Hispanic whites as a victim group, which doesn’t make it easy when it comes to doing our own calculations using the data. (If you have any questions as to how I arrived at my calculations, feel free to write in the comment section and I will respond.)

Still, there is enough data to tell a different story than the mainstream media would have us hear.

First, some perspective: As of 2014, Non-Hispanic whites make up approximately 62.1 percent of the population; blacks, 13.2 percent; hispanics, 17.4 percent.

Koener is largely correct about the percentages of whites killed by blacks - which lies between 14 and 15 percent. She then does a bit of padding on her own, however, even if accidental. Remember, this is important because the “narrative” says white equals bad, everyone else, Hispanic included, equals good. If they are going to refer to white malfeasance, they most certainly need to cite it correctly.

In citing her 8 percent of black victims who were killed by white offenders, she divides the 2,451 black victims of homicide by the 187 “white” perpetrators, except this includes 81 Hispanics. Remove those, and you have 106 blacks killed by non-Hispanic white offenders. Even one is a tragedy, of course, but 4.3 percent is hardly a nationwide hate crime spree, especially when you consider that non-Hispanic whites make up almost two-thirds of the population.

In fact, given this data, a non-Hispanic white person is THREE TIMES MORE likely to be killed by a black person as the opposite.

Regarding the overall homicide rate in 2014 - 2,064 offenders, or 36 percent, were non-Hispanic white, compared to 62.1 percent of the population, while 2,693 were black, fully 47 percent of all homicide perpetrators. This, from 13.2 percent of the population.

The balance here, of course, is that although blacks represent a disproportionate percentage of criminals, the vast vast majority of blacks are law-abiding. There is no excuse for anyone to mistreat the innocent because of the guilty. Perhaps one reason some don’t want to hear these facts is they are afraid they will be misused, much like the psychopath Dylann Roof did to help “justify” his murderous rampage.

However, ignoring reality will not make it go away.

Many conservative black leaders, including the greats Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, have addressed this issue from a perspective that would actually make a difference - such as ending welfare dependence and restoring black fatherhood. Liberals, however, aren’t interested in truly solving problems. They just want to keep blacks bound by the “chains” of dependence so their votes keep rolling in.

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