- The Left (the Democratic Party) Has Sought to Denigrate Police
THE SCOTT COUNTY REPUBLICAN CENTRAL COMMITTEE SHOULD TAKE THE LEAD LOCALLY AND EMPHASIZE AN IMPORTANT NATIONAL GOP ISSUE: THE DEFENSE OF POLICE, LAW AND ORDER HERE AND NATIONWIDE?
- Is reluctance because of the fear that the ‘local newspaper’, the QC Times , would find it an “unacceptable” position, or “politicization”, that it would anger the BLM?
- By the way, is that sort of concern, timidity, offending leftists, why the local party has been absent as regard general mask mandates as a government overreach.
- What about those local neighborhoods whose concern is not too much policing, but would like more?
And, what about the police officers, who put their lives on the line every time they answer a citizen’s call for help in a dire situation? And, finally, what about voters…do they want their police departments to have fewer resources and a lesser ability to respond when everything is on the line for the average person in the community?
Heather MacDonald illustrated the why behind fear of “CANCEL” Her op ed last week in the Wall Street Journal illustrated just how the left’s “cancel culture’ can intimidate what are mistakenly considered “thoughtful public opinion makers”…and full-throated advocates for “free speech”!
The ‘liberal’ news media, as the QC Times would proudly proclaim itself to be, today, tend to be anything but thoughtful, and certainly no friend of the ‘free speech’ concept.
MacDonald’s column in the Journal was an account of the handling of an important and enlightening research study by a couple of scholars of two typically liberal institutions of ‘higher learning’…Michigan State Univ. and the Univ. of Maryland.
MacDonald writes: “Psychologists Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland, in a study published by The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer-reviewed journal, analyzed 917 fatal police shootings of civilians from 2015 to test whether the race of the officer or the civilian predicted fatal police shootings.
Neither did. Once “race specific rates of violent crime” are taken into account, the authors found, there are no disparities among those fatally shot by the police.
These findings accord with decades of research showing that civilian behavior is the greatest influence on police behavior.”
In September 2019, MacDonald cited the article’s finding in congressional testimony, and in an article in the ‘City Journal’.
In the latter article she noted that “two Princeton political scientists, Dean Knox and Jonathan Mummolo, had challenged the study design. Cesario and Johnson stood by their findings. They wrote, there is “no significant evidence of anti-black disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by the police.”
In the City Journal’s op-ed MacDonald had quoted the Cesario-Johnson study’s conclusion verbatim.” It set off a firestorm at Michigan State, she said. “The university’s Graduate Employees Union pressured the MSU press office to apologize for the “harm it caused” by mentioning my article in a newsletter. The union targeted physicist Steve Hsu, who had approved funding for Mr. Cesario’s research. MSU sacked Mr. Hsu from his administrative position. PNAS editorialized that Messrs. Cesario and Johnson had “poorly framed” their article—the one that got through the journal’s three levels of editorial and peer review.”
“Mr. Cesario told this page that Mr. Hsu’s dismissal could narrow the “kinds of topics people can talk about, or what kinds of conclusions people can come to.”
The “scholars”, However, Retracted their Own Paper…because it was “misused” (to refute a ‘Black lives Matter’ Position)
“Now he and Mr. Johnson have themselves jeopardized the possibility of politically neutral scholarship. On Monday they retracted their paper. They say they stand behind its conclusion and statistical approach but complain about its “misuse,” specifically mentioning my op-eds.”
“The authors don’t say how I misused their work. Instead, they attribute to me a position I have never taken: that the “probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans.” To the contrary, I have, like them, stressed that racial disparities in policing reflect differences in violent crime rates.”
Again, the study merely showed that the probability of fatal police shootings was not based on the race of the person, but rather on the disparity of crime rates of the different races (If blacks commit violent crimes at a greater rate than other races, the likelihood is that police shootings of blacks is statistically more likely.)
Local Republican organizations ought to back the badge. V’PAC
