Dear America

Dear America,

Systemic racism defined as “forms of racism which are structured into political and social institutions. It occurs when organizations, institutions or governments discriminate, either deliberately or indirectly, against particular groups of people to limit their rights”.  Police departments historically have been used as an instrument of oppression and control, to keep mostly African slaves under control. Even after the 13th amendment, police departments were filled with systemic racism. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has to deal with systemic racism within police departments during the civil rights movement. However, despite what some media, celebrities, and groups like Black Lives Matter would want you to believe, systemic racism in policing does not exist any longer.

Today, police are more likely to shoot whites than blacks. Harvard Professor Roland G. Fryer, an African American economist who conducted a study titled “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” after becoming angry about the deaths of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray, concluded that 1,332 police shootings over the 2000-2015-time frame revealed that blacks are really 20 percent less likely to be shot at by police than whites, in spite of the fact that blacks and whites are just as likely to be carrying a weapon. This strengthened the findings by John Jay College of Criminal Justice assistant professor Peter Moskos, who concluded that when the homicide rate is fine-tuned, "whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks [to] die at the hands of police. Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police."

Furthermore, American Free Press’s Peter Papherakles found that "For every black killed by a white police officer in the U.S. every year, there are about 71 blacks killed by other blacks." Mr. Papherakles reached that conclusion after examining FBI data from 2007-2012 in addition to a report from the Wall Street Journal that highlighted "hundreds of homicides by law enforcement agencies" that are not included in the FBI database. The Wall Street Journal after analyzing that "the newest data from 105 of the country’s major police agencies,” they “discovered an additional 550 police killings from 2007-2012 that were missing from the national tally. Or in some cases, were not correctly attributed to the police agency involved. The Wall Street concluded that it is impossible to determine accurately how many people are killed by the police each year. Mr. Papherakles, following these results adjusted the yearly death tally to 492 police killings per year, which is how he found "For every black killed by a white police officer in the U.S. every year, there are about 71 blacks killed by other blacks."

Now, if you were to google systemic racism in police departments, you can find many articles and anecdotal evidence that shows systemic racism in police departments. The Department of Justice even tried to proclaim that racial bias in the Ferguson Police Department was inherent in the statistic that black people consisted of 85 percent of all traffic stop between 2012-2014, in spite of being only 67 percent of Ferguson's residents, while white people made up 15 percent of all traffic stops while only consisting of 29 percent of the Ferguson's residents. What the Department of Justice doesn’t take into account is the rate of traffic violations among black, and white drivers. Research that has been conducted in New Jersey and North Carolina had shown that black drivers speed at twice the rate of white drivers. These studies were confirmed by a 2013 report by the National Institute for Justice that concluded that 3 out of 4 blacks said they were pulled over for a "legitimate reason."  Additionally, the National Highway Safety Administration issued a report that concluded that "blacks simply violated traffic laws at higher rates than whites."