While the number of blacks killed since the start of Black Lives Matter is stunning, the number of cops killed by black criminals since the start of Black Lives Matter is also shocking. Perhaps the NFL players should reconsider following Colin Kaepernick’s lead, who started kneeling to protest violence by cops against black youth, by kneeling for our national anthem. Better yet, perhaps instead of kneeling to protest, the NFL players should start kneeling to pray for the black youth of America, who are killing each other in record numbers, as they seem to have completely lost their moral compass…

Lost in the uproar over the NFL sideline protests against police brutality are newly released statistics showing that the threat to black men is skyrocketing — not from trigger-happy or racist cops, but from crime.

More than any other demographic group, black men are paying the price with their lives with a surging violent crime rate over the past two years, including a 20 percent jump in the overall homicide rate, even as the number of blacks killed by police declines.

Using homicide figures from the 2016 FBI Uniform Crime Report released Sept. 25, Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald found that the number of black homicide victims has jumped by nearly 900 per year since the Black Lives Matter movement took root in 2014.

“The majority of victims of that homicide surge have been black,” Ms. Mac Donald said in an email. “They were killed overwhelmingly by black criminals, not by the police and not by whites.”

Meanwhile, the number of blacks killed by police dipped from 259 in 2015 to 233 in 2016, with 2017 so far coming in below both years with 175 deaths as of Oct. 12, according to The Washington Post’s Fatal Force database.

Ms. Mac Donald and others have blamed the increasingly hands-off approach of police officers who are worried about running afoul of the Black Lives Matter movement after the 2014 shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. She dubbed it “the Ferguson effect.”

Peter Moskos, associate professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, tracked the same phenomenon in Baltimore after the April 2015 rioting over the death of a black man in police custody. He calls it “the Freddie Gray effect.”
He found a spike in homicides and shootings after the riots, which were followed by Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby’s decision to charge six officers in Gray’s death. Three of the officers were acquitted in non-jury trials, and charges against the other three were dismissed.

“Police were instructed — both by city leaders and then in the odd DOJ report city leaders asked for — to be less proactive since such policing will disproportionately affect minorities,” Mr. Moskos said in a Sept. 4 post. “Few seem to care that minorities are disproportionately affected by the rise in murder.”

Officers also have been hit: Ms. Mac Donald said there was a 53 percent increase in 2016 in the shooting deaths of cops, while The Washington Post database found that only 16 of the 233 black men killed by police in 2016 were unarmed.

“A police officer is 18 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer,” Ms. Mac Donald said. “Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop killers over the past decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population.”

Why the lack of focus on black-on-black crime?

Those involved with Black Lives Matter have said in the past that prosecuting such killings is easier than cases involving police force against civilians.

While the NFL kneeling began as a protest against police brutality, those involved have increasingly expanded the point to encompass what San Francisco 49ers safety Eric Reid described as “systemic oppression that has been rampant in this country for decades and decades.”

Rashad Robinson, senior campaign director at Color of Change, said President Trump’s recent suggestion that owners should fire players who refuse to stand for the national anthem represents a view within sports that “black people serve at the pleasure of white people.”

“Almost every NFL owner is white. Nearly 70% of players are Black,” Mr. Robinson said in a written statement. “Yet for Donald Trump, this power imbalance is not enough — he wants to be sure that players who exercise their right to protest social injustice can be fired with impunity. This is what it means to advance a white supremacist worldview.” –Washington Times

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