Survey: 44% of Liberals Think Cops Killed Around or Over 1,000 Unarmed Black Men in 2019 - It Was Actually 25

By Jack Cowhick February 23, 2021 at 4:14pm

Misinformation is an epidemic, and the liberal media is spreading it.

Forty-four percent of liberals believe 1,000 or more unarmed black men were murdered by police in 2019, according to a study released Saturday.

1/n A recent nationally representative survey commissioned by Skeptic Mag asked respondents to estimate the number of unarmed blacks killed by police in 2019. Overall, 44% of liberals guessed 1,000 or more as compared to 20% of conservatives (this calculation is based on the.. pic.twitter.com/WvCvij3SF3

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) February 23, 2021

The study, published by Skeptic Research Center, specifically details that about 27 percent of those who reported being “liberal” estimated about 1,000 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019, while about 31 percent of those who reported being “very liberal” estimated the same.

In contrast, about half of those who reported being “conservative” or “very conservative” estimated about 10 unarmed black men were killed in 2019.

The actual numbers are staggering; according to a Mapping Police Violence, a crowdsourced database cited in a USA Today fact-check, just 25 unarmed black men were killed.

It’s easy to get caught up in partisan debates over police brutality, and it’s obvious that most of these men shouldn’t have died the way they did, but the issue remains: how did so many people come to such an overexaggerated and dangerous estimate?

The answer is simple: mainstream media.

While never explicitly overexaggerating the actual number of deaths by police, publications like The Washington Post do use percentages that contrast the small African-American population to the much larger percentage of shootings, in the end making the true statistics seem far larger than they actually are.

In one piece, Radley Balko for the Washington Post wrote in a June 2020 piece about this “disparity.”

“A New York Times examination after the death of George Floyd found that while black people make up 19 percent of the Minneapolis population and 9 percent of its police, they were on the receiving end of 58 percent of the city’s police use-of-force incidents.”

This is correct, however, the data was accumulated across five years of cases. And, across those five years, most uses of force were non-fatal.

Balko also writes that, according to a 2020 Austin Office of Police Oversight, Office of Innovation and Equity Office report, African-Americans and Latinos were “more likely than Whites to be stopped, searched and arrested,” even though there were reportedly similar “hit rates” for narcotics among those groups.

However, this paragraph doesn’t mention specific numbers or figures at all, only increasing the misleading nature of the article.

Of course, the obvious question always looms; which group of people commits more crime? Wouldn’t that solve the issue?

Yes, actually. According to Federal Bureau of Information statistics, more than half of homicide offenders are African-American.

When bringing up statistics like this one, unfortunately, those who use it are accused of racism. However, the math works out; if more African-Americans are committing violent crimes, it simply makes sense that police officers would use force against more African-Americans.

It’s about time conservatives stop accepting the liberal media agenda and start reporting the facts. Overexaggerations like the ones SRC’s study found are unacceptable and frankly dangerous to American politics. Rather than let these wade around and die down on their own, we ought to stomp the lies out now.

CORRECTION, March 1, 2021: This article originally claimed, incorrectly citing a USA Today fact check, that 13 unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. In fact, the correct number cited by USA Today using Mapping Police Violence, a crowdsourced database, is 25. We apologize to our readers for the error.

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