The truth has been out there and largely ignored by the mainstream media. Why? Because the truth goes against the political agenda of the left and more specifically Black Lives Matter.

Let’s see if you have been fooled. Ask yourself one question, and be honest. In your opinion, has police violence against unarmed civilians — specifically Black men — been increasing or decreasing since 2014 when Michael Brown Jr. was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson?

If there was a survey on this question, I believe most Americans would answer “increasing.”

The reason is simple — media coverage. Through Black Lives Matter and their accomplices in the media, we are led to believe that we are in the midst of an epidemic of unarmed Black men being shot and killed by men in blue.

But that is simply wrong. Police killings of African Americans have been declining. The difference is they get more media coverage.

According to a story, from last summer by Matthew Yglesias for the liberal news outlet Vox, “Since the 2014 wave of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, the number of black people killed by the police has gone down, according to data from Mapping Police Violence. So has the number of unarmed people of all races killed by police. And the number of unarmed black people killed by law enforcement has seen a sharper decline.”

Charts from Mapping Police Violence — believe me, this site is not police friendly —  show the number of black people killed by police officers has declined by about 10 percent from 2013 to 2019.

Yglesias almost did not get his story published, due to a backlash from his editors. On his blog site Slow Boring, Yglesias had this to say about progressives in the news media: “If you’re not saying the sky is falling, that shows you don’t really care. A true comrade in the struggle would deny that any progress has been made or insist that any good news is trivial.”

Another writer, Christopher Mitchell, put it this way on his Twitter account, “Basically, the understanding is that whoever can paint the darkest possible portrait of the status quo is the one who is showing the most commitment to the cause.”

Here is some more truth. Black Lives Matter -— and many on the progressive left — want to reduce or eliminate police. That will result in more black lives lost to violence, not less.

A Harvard economist’s study found that after police used deadly force in the cities of Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Ferguson, Missouri, and Riverside, California, there were almost 900 excess homicides and almost 34,000 excess felonies.

The study found that protests and riots which erupted after the  police shootings caused cops to “pullback from discretionary activity.”

The pullback left an opening for criminals.

The study clearly shows that less interaction from the police results in more deaths and violence, not less. Since most criminal activity occurs in black neighborhoods it leads to more violence against them.

In 2020 there was an epidemic of lives lost in America. This epidemic had nothing to do with the color of one’s skin. The number of police officers who died in the line of duty in 2020 jumped 58 percent compared to 2019.

The web site, Officer Down Memorial Page lists 304 total line of duty deaths for 2020 with COVID-19 claiming 186 lives. A total of 50 officers on the honor roll died from gunfire with 13 more attributed to vehicular assault.

This was the highest annual total that the memorial page has listed since 318 deaths were recorded in 1932.

Patrick Yoes, the national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, told Fox News recently, “the demonization of police has made communities and law enforcement jobs less safe. Violence targeting police officers is on the rise,”

We as a nation need to learn to stop letting  political agendas blind us from the truth.

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Correction: I received an email last week from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum  asking for a correction relating to my column from Dec. 30 where I listed the Holocaust as the “death of 6 million Jews and 11 million others.” This information — which I gathered from Wikipedia  — was incorrect. It should have only listed the 6 million Jews who died from the Holocaust.

Column links for website

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/chart-of-the-day-police-shootings-of-unarmed-people-are-down/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/03/police-black-killings-homicide-rates-race-injustice-column/3235072001/

https://www.vox.com/2020/6/2/21276472/police-killing-statistics-african-american

https://www.foxnews.com/us/police-deaths-on-duty-surge-in-2020

https://www.foxnews.com/media/yglesias-uproar-vox-story-police-killings-african-americans

https://www.lawofficer.com/lodd-record-high/

https://www.odmp.org/search/year/2020

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/09/chart-of-the-day-police-shootings-of-unarmed-people-are-down/