If you’re like me, you find those videos that often appear and start playing automatically on the right side of the screen on many websites hellishly annoying. Conservative sites such as Breitbart and Twitchy have ones that show recent news clips. Often these are referred to as “partner videos,” which we all know is a form of ad revenue.
Just now, I was on one site and the godforsaken partner video loaded. It caught my attention right away because a video by ITN started playing called “Ferguson one year later: The facts and figures.” The names of people who have died while in custody and made headlines as of late flashed across the little rectangle.
This $#*! again? I thought.
I slid my pointer up to pause the video as I often do, and the audio began to play–an instrumental which started as some keyboard tune that wanted to sound mournful but came off as cheesy then busted out in some pseudo-hip hop wannabe dramatic heavy beat piano piece that was trying to scream out, “Pay attention, this is a very important video, people!”
As the video proceeded to play, words flashed across the screen with photos behind them from anti-police protests and Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Ferguson and elsewhere. The video lists a number of statistics which seem to be sourced from a Washington Post article that looked at the number of deaths of people in police custody.
ITN, which stands for “Independent Television News,” is a news-service based out of London.
London.
Get this misleading junk off my American internet.
Except I’m about to be guilty of adding to the attention the video has gotten. If you feel like watching it, here’s the video as it appears on YouTube from On Demand News (ODN), which used to be known as the ITN YouTube channel:
Now because this video was produced by ITN, which is not exactly the most well-known news source for Americans, I would not have thought enough about the video to write about it if not for the fact that it’s getting such wide exposure as part of that autoplay video crap that appears on so many websites.
While YouTube shows less than 500 views for the video, the views of the video as an autoplay “partner” video ad could be in the thousands, if not millions. Sites like Townhall have even given the video an individual post of its own on their sites. The only text that accompanies the video that those sites are hosting as a legitimate news posting lifts the following bogus statistic as it appeared in the video: “Since the day of the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, at least 1,091 people have been killed by US police.”
What the hell, man. Cops are killing three people a day? Stop it.
Progressives loooove throwing piles of cherry-picked statistics at people. I don’t intend to go over every statistic, or I’ll be here for a while. But there are a couple of which I will give attention–the ones that the producers thought were the Very Important Point they were making.
The video said that 24 black people with no arms have been killed by police in 2015 so far, or one every nine days.
So much for the #Every28Hours hashtag that people were touting like mad for a while. It should be amended to somewhere around #Every216Hours now.
Also take into consideration how many of these 24 individuals were resisting arrest or otherwise not obeying police orders. How many of those 24 would be alive right now if they obeyed the orders of law enforcement like normal people do?
But really, the Very Important Point is one I have made before, but it bears repeating until people start listening.
The statistic that puts this all into proper context is that according to the FBI, law enforcement officers in the United States made over 11 million arrests in 2013, which looks to be the latest final figure they have available. The number the FBI gave was 11,302,102, to be exact.
Basic math time, people. I’ll go through it slowly so everyone in class can follow along.
If we were to take that “one every nine days” statistic as though it would stay constant until the end of the year, that means there would be–
365 days of the year…
Divided by nine…
Equals…
41 deaths of armless black people at the hands of cops by the end of the year. (40.55555555, to be precise, but I’m rounding upward to be generous).
So now let’s take that number 41 to figure out the percentage in relation to all arrests made in 2013, which may not be exact, but it’s a good ballpark figure.
Okay, here goes. You ready? This may be alarming to some.
41 deaths…
Divided by…
11,302,102 arrests…
Carry the egg sandwich…
Move the decimal point two places to the right…
The magic statistic that really puts it into perspective is..
.00036276% of all arrests ends with a black person sans arms being shot to death by law enforcement.
Which means that 99.99963724% of all arrests do not result in the officer-involved shooting death of an arms-devoid black person.
That’s a pretty damn good record of success, I would think.
That statistic doesn’t take into account how many encounters law enforcement has with the public every year where no one gets arrested. That would make the number even less significant.
Yes, it sucks that people die. But people die. And often on account of their own stupid actions.
So before you start calling America a police state with cops massacring black youth all around us, take a look at the big picture. For crying out loud, the same number of Americans died from falling televisions in 2011. Where was the outrage then?
And don’t forget to take a look at who is really killing whom on our streets. You know who I’m taking about.
That’s one thing we should focus on instead. That is what should make Americans angry.
