Earlier this week, the police officer who shot and killed Chris Kaba was cleared of murder charges. For those unfamiliar with the incident: On September 5th 2022, Kaba was driving a vehicle that was linked to a shooting incident the day before, and was being followed by police. His car was stopped at a police road block and he was ordered to exit the vehicle. Kaba refused to do so, ramming two police cars in an attempt to escape. He was then shot dead by police officer Martyn Blake.
When the judge in the Kaba case finally lifted reporting restrictions yesterday, it was revealed that Kaba was a member of a notorious drug gang, and that he had shot another man in a nightclub the day before his death. However, neither these revelations nor the acquittal of officer Blake (by a unanimous verdict) has stopped Left-wing activists from blaming Kaba’s death on “racism”.
In relation to the incident, the Runnymede Trust posted a tweet claiming, “The legal system doesn’t deliver real justice for families bereaved by racist state violence” and “this lack of police accountability perpetuates cycles of violence and impunity.”
Likewise, the website Counterfire published an article claiming that “the reality of institutional racism is laid bare” and “this case is a reminder of the structural and institutional racism in this country”.
Even the supposedly respectable Guardian published an editorial noting that “since 2005, the Met has shot and killed four unarmed men in non-terrorist operations. All were Black”. The editorial went on to quote a report by Inquest, which referred to “deeply rooted patterns of racial disproportionality resulting in deaths after the lethal use of force”.
The problem with claims of “racist state violence”, “institutional racism” and “racial disproportionality” is that they don’t stand up to scrutiny.
To begin with, “killings of unarmed men in non-terrorist operations” is a rather arbitrary category. Why exclude terrorist operations? In any case, four data points isn’t much evidence to build a case on. And doesn’t the fact that only four unarmed men have been killed in almost 20 years suggest a remarkable degree of restraint on the part of the Met?
According to the Washington Post, 516 unarmed men have been killed by U.S. police since 2015. Adjusting for population (of the U.S. versus Greater London) and number of years (nine versus 19), this means the rate at which unarmed men are killed by police is more than seven times higher in the U.S. than it is in Greater London.
As a matter of fact, the overrepresentation of black people among the victims of police killings can be entirely explained by their higher rates of involvement in violent crime.
The Inquest report quoted by the Guardian found that, from 2012-13 to 2020-21, there were 119 deaths “in or following policy custody” or “following police contact”, and that 23 of the victims, or 19%, were black. Since black people are only 4% of the population (less if you average over the relevant time period), they are substantially overrepresented. If you use homicides as a benchmark, however, they aren’t overrepresented. From 2014 to 2020, black people comprised 18% of homicide suspects.
Homicides is clearly a more appropriate benchmark than population. Around 90% of the victims of police killings are men. Yet we don’t attribute their overrepresentation to “sexism” because we know that men commit the vast majority of violent crime and hence are much more likely to get into situations where a police officer ends up killing them.
The verdict in the trial of officer Blake suggests that Kaba was killed in lawful self-defence. And there’s no evidence that police are disproportionately killing black people due to racism.
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You are seriously misguided. Because the police is racist, they’re killing black people, which proves they’re racist¹. And every Guardian columnist is secretly very afraid that they could kill his street contact for illegal drugs next and then what?
¹ This circular logic is actually employed in this exact way, just usually not both halves of it at the same time. The canonical US example is “XY must be a Nazi because he frequents location X where Nazis are known to gather” and then, somewhat later, “location X is one where Nazis are known to gather because notorius fascists like XY frequent it.”
Mankind causes global warming. Global warming is taking place. Therefore Mankind causes global warming.
No such thing as global warming, there is however Mother Nature.
For Sure—–We have “perceived oppressors and perceived oppressed”….But oppression, just like beauty is all in the eye of the beholder.
The police are racist.
Against white people.
This may be an unpopular view but didn’t evolution (if you believe in it) create “racial disproportionality”?
How about we just stop talking about race and treat people as individuals?
Racial disproportionality is created by seeking it out. I’ve already mentioned this a few times: There would be no visible racial disproportionality if people killed by the police hadn’t been grouped by race because of someone’s a priori assumption that race must be the relevant factor here. A disproprotionality would very likely also be found when using any other group.
Eg, 50% of all police killings in the 2020s happened in London despite London has only 13% of the population of the UK. There must some deeply rooted pattern of londonophobia at work here!
Sadly it will continue to be sought out long after we are gone
Can you imagine how many would be crying ”racism!” if the policeman had been black and the criminal victim white? It’d be like a night and day reaction compared with what’s happening now, wouldn’t it? In fact, going by the way this case is being reported, we are left to just presume that Martyn Blake is in fact white, but unless his race has been mentioned anywhere we really don’t know, do we? I’m wondering how the situation would’ve played out had Blake been a black police officer. Again, they couldn’t state it was racism because, as Noah says above, black people are over represented when it comes to being involved with violent crime, and a black officer shooting dead a black perp can hardly be described as racism. Rational people can see that it’s nothing whatsoever to do with racism and everything to do with it being a numbers game.
Black gangster shot but white policeman prosecuted. Sounds racist to me.
What’s so difficult to understand here?
Black people are, for whatever reason, more likely to be involved in violent crime.
Consequently they are more likely to be chased by the police.
Sometimes, as a result they are killed.
I think gang culture is made up of predominantly black men and youths, though I don’t have any source to hand to support that.
Mogs, the female gang members are no different to the guys, they are just better at staying out of plods way.😀😀😀
My impression is the same, Teutonic blond girls appear seriously underrepresented even though they could claim that, being daughters of Brunhilda, it’s part of their cultural heritage.
Systemic racism in the gangs?
The white population should be proportionally represented in the criminal fraternity or it’s just clear evidence of bias.
Humsa Yousless should have riffed on this theme instead.
Disgraceful.
Fortunately the solution is simple.
The police should start arbitrarily shooting white men such as brazilian electricians. It would only take a dozen a year or so to get the numbers straight.
Yup if you’re in charge of such an operation you get promoted to Met Police Chief
I’m not sure if Jack the Dog would meet the other qualifying criteria: woke mindset, uncritical parroting of the latest lefty shibboleth and a total lack of talent for anything.
A talent for political manoeuvring
Re: Deeply rooted patterns of racial disproportionality resulting in deaths after the lethal use of force
Some remarks about this statement.
A pattern is a visible regularity on the surface of something. That’s an abstract concept and concepts have no roots.
Deaths after lethal use of force is a more pompous rendering of police killings for the purpose of more pomposity. Secondary function is to convey an air of expertise by using the internal police phrase for this.
Raw statistics about police killings can be made to exhibit racial disproportionality with the help of some mathematical postprocessing. As already pointed out in the text, they could also be made to show a sexual disproportionality but as nobody’s particularly interested in calling policemen murderous misandrists instead of rapacious racists, this property isn’t used.
That racial disproportionality is a result of calculations done with certain raw statistics is the exact opposite of the claim that these raw statistics resulted from racial disproportionality.
Racial disproportionality refers to a discrepancy of rates of property X in two different populations, specifically, the percentage of people killed by the police who are black is higher than the percentage of people who are black. The obvious conclusion from this is that police killings don’t occur randomly and hence, second and first rates differ which they wouldn’t (simplified) if police killings were random. The police is thus accused of not killing people randomly, something they should apparently really be doing.
Sonst alles klar unter’m Pony?¹
…
¹ Everything else all right below the hairdo?
Summing this up:
Statistics show that the police isn’t killing people randomly. Therefore, it must be racist!
Didn’t fit in the other text but the sheer idiocy of this claim merited posting it nevertheless. And that’s now supposed to become a topic to be discussed with people who maintain they’re both absolutely serious and very intellectual.
Meh.
I don’t know why they are saying he was unarmed, he was in control of a vehicle that he was using as a weapon. Simply driving a vehicle does not make it a weapon, but after using it to ram police cars it should be considered as such
It was only after the incident and after a search of the vehicle that it was established he was unarmed. There was no way of knowing prior.
Since he had shot someone previously it was reasonable for police to consider he might be armed.
This is the statement put out by those lovely but utterly incompetent and heartless people at the CPS.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/cps/news/cps-statement-acquittal-martyn-blake
Not content with putting Officer Martin Blake through two years of hell they put a statement out supporting a career criminal, now thankfully gone. Not a shred of sympathy for a policeman who has had his life ruined for simply doing his job. Even the tone of the statement is horribly tainted with accusatory overtones. What the statement really says is..
‘The jury really phooked up and we are sorry.’
Heads need to roll at the CPS.
Didn’t Kneel do a bit of part-time work for them at one time? Badly I believe.
[…] my thoughts and those of the CPS remain with the family of Chris Kaba
[head of CPS Special Crime and Counter Terrorism Division]
Gross.
It would appear that the timing of these announcements might be geared towards a protest this weekend. Now that wouldn’t be anything to do with the Patriots March which Tommy Robinson is leading would it?
BLM marauders on the streets?
“ Since black people are only 4% of the population…”
Nonsense! At least 90%. I watch the telly and they are ubiquitous, in every village, town, city, street, house, marriage, place of work, bus, train, store – occasionally a White person passes in the background and rarely, an Asian person is seen.
And all the males are simpering clowns.
I despise whoever the hell it is that makes the decisions about what people and behaviour to feature in ads.
What’s not to respect and be proud of in your police force here? Had the perp been white he’d have gotten the full Tommy Robinson treatment; pepper sprayed at close range and manhandled into the van. But as he’s not he gets to make demands and has loads of officers bending over backwards to meet his expectations and listen patiently to his mad ravings. Interestingly, all the officers look Caucasian so it must be the ‘white guilt’ and obligatory subordination they regularly practice;
https://x.com/NotFarLeftAtAll/status/1849027407090499836
The officer’s name has been publicised and he and his family are in hiding due to a £10k bounty put out by the gangs. Absolute disgrace.
All armed police should surrender their weapons and go on strike out of principle. They get no love from their employers.
This guy was a scrote, white or black. Racism doesn’t come into it
Is that all these people can come out with?, You is racist, always whites that are racist, never blacks, the bloke was a serious criminal, he played with fire, he got burnt, and no one, but NO ONE gets to pick their skin colour, just another pathetic “poor me” not my fault comment.
Just as with the Manchester Airport incident part of the problem is that reaction can be instantaneous and therefore un- or underinformed. In the Kaba case, and the Manchester affair, events leading up to the outcry remained unknown. Whether one might be able to get a 48-hour delay written into responses, so they could be withdrawn when new evidence emerged, I am not sure. But the person I feel sorry for is the policeman who, because he was named, now has a bounty on his head.
There can rarely have been a story more starkly at odds with easily discoverable fact than the imaginary plight of large numbers of black men in the 21st century West living in fear of violence and oppression at the hands of their white fellows. Any fair-minded narration of events of the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd whilst being arrested by a Minneapolis police officer, would have been a very different telling than the one that gushed hysterically from the Western world’s mainstream media. It would – after acknowledging that the actions of the officer did indeed warrant urgent investigation – have moved on to also acknowledge that the incidence of black men dying at the hands of police is dwarfed by the problem of them dying at the hands of other black men. And as protests erupted in cities across the Western world, the plot would have thickened when it turned out that this protest regularly found expression in the looting and vandalising of nearby black and Asian neighbourhood businesses. And as the summer wore on, journalists and tv crews would have started to pick up on the sharp upsurge of black-on-black violence in the most crime ridden neighbourhoods as shamed and demoralised city police departments backed off from attempting to maintain order.
Anyone really wanting to get at some truth on the subject of violent crime perpetrated against black can – with just a modicum of effort – access reliable crime statistics showing that the per capita incidence of white-on-black violence is less than (not more than) black-on-white violence. In fact inter-racial violence is much rarer than intra-racial violence generally. The truly unconscionable threat faced disproportionately by blacks, in certain dysfunctional inner city areas, is the one that comes from being caught up – whether willingly or not – in the violent underclass world of their neighbours. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/back-in-the-summer-of-2020