Bringing up Ferguson in this thread is like bringing up the Duke Lacrosse team. Sure, things happened. But it's a secondary derail on a primary derail that already had an at-best questionable conclusion. Why do it? Is it a mental deflection because of some kind cognitive dissonance generated by the original topic of an innocent black man killed by police? Does the fact they were black police somehow make conservatives flip out and start screaming, "it can't be racism because Black people! BLM did it!" Then, when they realize BLM didn't do it, they have to bring up BLM in May 2020 and then when it seems that was other factors, they have to bring up BLM something else? It's very weird behavior and illogical.
Still, it might be worthwhile to review some facts regarding the primary derail.
First, the claim is that BLM was engaged in carnage post-George-Floyd protests that explains a higher murder rate of Black victims across the country that peaked in July 2020. Here is a monthly breakdown of homicide rate that includes the July 2020 peak:
To review--George Floyd was murdered May 25th. Any alleged effect from violent riots allegedly orchestrated by BLM we expect to observe in the consolidated May number and perhaps also June. Yet, we still see a seasonal peak in July numbers and a drop-off after July like we normally see for the seasonal cycle of murders. Moreover, if we look prior to May, we see April 2020 is higher than all the other Aprils in the graph. We observe March 2020 is higher than all the other March's. We see that Feb 2020 is higher than all the other Feb's.
But let's not stop there. If you look at the other statistic that Oleg brought up, Black victims of homicide, that graph goes back to 2014. We can observe that Feb 2020 is the highest Feb back to Feb 2014. But that isn't the only trend. March 2020 is also the highest. And so is April 2020 out of all the Aprils. April 2020 is
so high that it is higher than most of the July seasonal peaks from previous years:
To review some dates here--George Floyd wasn't murdered until May 25th, 2020. February, March, and April are all calendar months that occur prior to May. Logically, there is an increasing trend of homicides that occurred prior to George Floyd's death that isn't understood well enough.
There are a few other facts in regard to post-George-Floyd protests that ought to be mentioned. Yes, there was some violence around the protests. No one is sayin there wasn't. But let's look at this rationally with some statistics in mind. If we define
violence very loosely to include vandalism and property damage, not merely homicides, we see that the vast majority of protests post-George-Floyd's death were non-violent. Yes, there were murders, assaults and other crimes that occurred at some, but those were in the minority of a minority of protests. For example, one group estimated that in
93% of the protests there was completely peace and nothing violent at all using that loose definition of violence to include property damage and vandalism. Another analytical group estimated peaceful protests above
96% of the protests. It is clear that there was some violence including significant crimes and lesser crimes but murders were pretty rare.
Within that small percent range of violence, (at least one) protester or bystander was at least injured or even killed at
1.6% events. So this again is a loose statistic since injuries are far more common than deaths. So, you expect homicides associated with the demonstrations to be far less than 1.6% of protests. One article written documents
19 dead within the first 2 weeks of protests where the deaths were somehow associated with the protest. Many of those were non-ideological, like a victim of a carjacking, etc. Any that were due to extremists out of control, were very few, and probably the same magnitude as police and white nationalists and militia groups killing people, too, very small.
Looting is a real thing that happened. Yes, it happened. Most of the looters were non-ideological and taking advantage of a situation.
In any case, clearly, BLM did not go out and murder all the Black homicide victims throughout the country.
Upon learning how ridiculous that is, some right-wingers changed their argument to say that police got angry at BLM and police reforms and so refused to do their jobs. This is so weird coming from right-wingers that angst over Black people led them to throw police under the bus....Police....whom they have supported with rhetoric over and over, like Back the Blue, and Blue Live Matter, and Police are the Heroes. Suddenly, they're accusing them of neglect because police are crybabies?
Because I have some pity on right-wingers, I am going to try to help them out a little bit with a more coherent hypothesis. Perhaps, it is possible that during the protests which coincided with the pandemic, police were being stretched very, very thin. They were already experiencing absences due to covid and probably contact with sick limiting duties. It is plausible that this created a void of coverage in some neighborhoods where there were no protests but still high areas of crime.
It isn't clear how little this could impact statistics of homicides, but we already know from the graphs that homicides were increasing prior to the protests.
And none of this has anything to do with Tyre Nichols' death.
www.police1.com
