The Dallas shooting was both tragic and counter-productive, but also inevitable.
It's ridiculous to think that cops can continue to kill hundreds of people every year, year after year, without there eventually being a violent reaction.
Unless real reforms are put into place, and there is no evidence of this happening, this shooting will only be the first of many.

However, that isn't the element of this story that bothers me the most.
It's this part.

The Dallas shooter wasn't representative of BlackLivesMatter, but he was inspired by some of the extreme rhetoric surrounding it.
According to a large percentage of people in the movement, this is about race first and foremost. Specifically, it's about white people killing black people.
If you don't believe me, visit the GOS almost any time of the week and see the daily "I'm sorry for being white" diaries.
It's like being white is to liberals like Original Sin is to Catholics.

The thing is, when you look at the numbers, the reality is that the problem is cops killing people.
That's it. The problem doesn't extend any further than that.

This essay is going to be about numbers.
The disturbing and growing problem that I've seen on the GOS and elsewhere is how hostile liberals have become to these numbers when it doesn't fit into their world view. It's almost like talking to conservatives about global warming.

White People Killing Black People

When you go to the FBI web site and look at the stats for murder, it becomes clear that violent crime is segregated.
Blacks kill black people and whites kill white people. Murder between races isn't common.

Less than 8% of blacks being murdered are done by whites.
Less than 15% of whites being murdered are done by blacks.
This is, of course, outside of police shootings which are almost never called murder. I'll address that shortly.

My point is that outside of people in police uniforms, there is no reasonable evidence of blacks being in danger of being killed by whites. Or visa versa.

White Cops Shooting Black People

There are many different sources and many different numbers, but the patterns remain the same year after year.

Half or more of the people killed by cops are white.
Yes, blacks are killed by a ratio of two to three times more often, and that's important. I'm not saying otherwise.
But I am saying that any examination of an issue that starts by dismissing a majority of the instances as irrelevant is not a serious examination. It's someone looking for a predetermined conclusion.

I got to thinking about this.
There are just short of a million sworn police officers in America.
Roughly 75% of them are white.
There are 223,553,000 white people in America.

Let's say for the sake of argument that every single black killed by a cop was killed by a white cop.
It's ridiculous, but follow my thought for a moment.
If you add together the FBI murder number, and blacks killed by (white) cops, then over 62% of all blacks killed by whites were killed just by cops.

To put it in another way, 62% of blacks killed by whites was done by an organization that only makes up just 0.335% of the white population.

And liberals want to tell us that ALL whites are the problem?!?
That's ridiculous.
It's like saying all whites are responsible for KKK cross-burnings.

The problem is obviously a trigger-happy cops problem.

Now we could go back to my assumption above about all cop shootings being done by white cops and adjust the numbers to be more proportional and realistic. Maybe by saying that 25% of cop shootings were done by minority race cops, but by doing so the entire premise of this being a white people killing black people problem breaks down from a logical contradiction.
Once again we return to the problem being obviously a trigger-happy cops problem.

So why are white liberals so determined to make this into a race problem?
I don't know, but it doesn't appear to be being pushed from the media. It appears that white liberals really want to blame themselves.
My concern is that all their talk of this being about race, instead of cops, is that it's going to cause innocent people to be killed.

Lessons Of Low Expectations

"White Privilege!" liberals will be quick to respond with. Because whites have it soooo good in America.
It's the all-inclusive shaming device for winning arguments with other liberals.

Yeh. Ah no.
Whites don't have it soooo good in America, and all it takes is a quick look overseas to know it.

Let's say that suddenly that problem is "fixed" and that blacks are "only" being killed at the same rate as whites are.
Does BLM no longer have a reason to exist? Mission accomplished? Wrong.

Let’s look at our immediate neighbors to the north, Canada. The total number of citizens killed by law enforcement officers in the year 2014, was 14; that is 78 times less people than the US.

If we look at the United Kingdom, 1 person was killed by police in 2014 and 0 in 2013. English police reportedly fired guns a total of three times in all of 2013, with zero reported fatalities.

From 2010 through 2014, there were four fatal police shootings in England, which has a population of about 52 million. By contrast, Albuquerque, N.M., with a population 1 percent the size of England’s, had 26 fatal police shootings in that same time period.

China, whose population is 4 and 1/2 times the size of the United States, recorded 12 killings by law enforcement officers in 2014.
Let that sink in. Law enforcement in the US killed 92 times more people than a country with nearly 1.4 billion people.

It doesn’t stop there.

From 2013-2014, German police killed absolutely no one.

In the entire history of Iceland police, they have only killed 1 person ever.

All that would happen if blacks were "only" being killed by cops in this country at the same rate as whites is that blacks would still be getting killed at around 50 times the rate as anyone else in a first world country.

Talk about lowered expectations!
On the other hand, it seems perfect for today's liberal politics, where real world defeats are sold to us as symbolic victories.

Thinking Outside The Box

Every once in a while someone says something so incisive that it causes you to look at an issue in an entirely different way.
Rev. Jesse Jackson managed to do that in 2015.

Police kill more whites than blacks. Of the 700 killings it has recorded, the Guardian reports that 340 were white, 179 black and 101 Hispanic. The Post reports that African-American men were 40 percent of the unarmed deaths, but whites and Hispanics made up the majority. The system has a class bias as well as a race bias. An investigation by Alternet’s Zaid Jilani revealed that in the first five months of this year, 95 percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family incomes under $100,000. There were no killings in neighborhoods with median family incomes of $200,000 or above.
Not surprisingly, lower-income whites are more likely to say police abuse of authority is on the rise than middle- or upper-income whites.
Excessive force puts white lives at risk, as well as those of blacks and Hispanics. But the silence of the white community and of the white church is deafening. The victims of police abuse are left to seek justice on their own.

So I went looking for the Zaid Jilani article Reverand Jackson was referring to and I found it.

For the 441 police killings I researched, the average neighborhood family income where a killing occurred was $57,764. The median family income was $52,907.
Just over five percent of the killings were in neighborhoods with over $100,000 median family income. The richest neighborhood that saw a killing was the 700 block on 14th street in northwest Washington, D.C.
This skews against what the actual income variation in America is. A household income of $100,000 or more puts you in the top 21% of American income earners; this means that incomes below this number are overrepresented by four times compared to the income distribution in how often they are killed by police.

Being black makes you three times as likely to be killed by cops, but being middle-class or poor makes you four times as likely to be killed by cops. In fact, according to this article, "95 percent of reported police killings were in neighborhoods with incomes under $100,000."
Looking at this from face value, the greater determining factor of whether you are going to be shot by the cops is the amount of cash in your pocket and where you live, not the color of your skin.

Then I ran across this article in Mother Jones.

When you ask why such "bad" cops are nevertheless armed and allowed to patrol the streets, one begins to see that lurking beneath this violence is a fiscal menace: police departments forced to assist city officials in raising revenue, in many cases funding their own salaries—redirecting the very concept of keeping the peace into underwriting the budget.

Time and time again, these outrageous police killings start from traffic stops for extremely minor offenses.

But consider: In 2010, this collaboration between the Ferguson police and the courts generated $1.4 million in income for the city. This year, they will more than double that amount—$3.1 million—providing nearly a quarter of the city's $13 million budget, almost all of it extracted from its poorest African American citizens.

Then comes the money quote that links police shootings, Reverand Jackson's concerns, and this article,

In 2014, Ferguson's bottom-line-driven police force issued 16,000 arrest warrants to three-fourths of the town's total population of 21,000. Stop and think about that for a moment: In Ferguson, 75 percent of all residents had active outstanding arrest warrants. Most of the entire city was a virtual plantation of indentured revenue producers.

The problem of police killings goes far, far deeper than just blaming white people.
We have a deeply corrupt criminal justice system, and nothing will be accomplished until that is addressed.
Unfortunately, white liberals will flat out not listen to reason.