Author: Black Lives Matter Activists Motivate Police Shootings
Philadelphia (CBS) - Heather Mac Donald, from the Manhattan Institute and the author of the book, The War On Cops, blames Black Lives Matter protesters and activists for the killing of police officers, like the shooting that occurred this week resulting in the death of Officer Miosotis Familia in New York City, telling Dom Giordano on Talk Radio 1210 WPHT that protests encourage violent criminals to act out.
"People have been fed the lie for the last three years by the Black Lives Matter activists and their media and political enablers that we're living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men, a claim that is 100 percent false and, we shouldn't be surprised that kooks and people that have been fed a longstanding hatred of the police act on this. The numbers bear this out. The cops are under attack because of this ideologically fueled and completely unjustified hatred."
She discounted incidents of police shootings that have elicited outrage around the country, saying they are statistically insignificant compared to the number of police killed in black communities.
"A police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer. The percentage of people that are shot by cops is trivial and it is overwhelmingly predicted by violent crime rates. Blacks are shot at a much lower rate than their violent crime rate would predict."
Mac Donald contends that police will stop doing their jobs if Black Lives Matter and similar groups continue to stage protests and demonstrations.
"It's a lot easier to blame the police than to take responsibility for your own community. We're living in a real life experiment here, which is de-policing. Black Lives Matter activists actually say they want the cops out. Well, ok, policing is political and if cops get the message enough times that they are racist for getting out of their car at 1AM and making that stop with somebody who's hitching up his waistband as if he has a gun, they're not going to do it. They don't have to. That's a discretionary activity and we're seeing what happens when cops back off."
