In early July, 2016, I wrote ‘Is The War On Cops Debunked? Not So Fast.’ In that post I basically took the media and Reason.com down on their silly elementary ‘debunking’ of the war on cops. They used old data and applied it to 2015 and 2016. Which is utterly ridiculous and very lazy. You know, modern journalistic standards.
Now we are only two days away from the end of the year, and we have a lot more data. Sadly, I was right, they were wrong. Amazing what happens when you use actual statistics, and aren’t trying to promote your own confirmation bias.
Please note: These numbers reflect total officer fatalities comparing January 1 through December 28, 2016 vs January 1 through December 28, 2015
As you can see, things have been steadily getting worse since mid-2015. This chart only shows preliminary data on police fatalities, not assaults. Assaults have been increasing as well. A lot of the improvements made in police fatalities over the past several years have been a result of advances in life-saving technology, not a reduction in attempts to kill officers.
When the media peddles a false narrative that police are targeting segments of our population for murder (they aren’t), then basic human instinct takes root in the uninformed, angry, and criminal elements of society. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Facebook has banned me yet again. This time it’s not for rabbits eating fruit (no, I’m not joking).
The following picture was posted on Facebook by the Dallas murderer in a black power group.
As you can see, they removed the picture when I posted it. I was also banned for a day from posting on Facebook.
This is all quite ironic since this picture had been reported to Facebook by, at least, dozens of people. Facebook had refused to remove it saying it did not violate their community standards.
The reason I posted the image in the first place is because a Black Lives Matter rally was being held in South Bend, IN on Saturday, July 9. One of the rally organizers posted that picture on the rally’s event page. Naturally, this was concerning. My radio station’s local news partner, ABC 57 News, did a story on it, and confronted him about it … he laughed.
The rally was peaceful, thank God, but arrests were made prior to the rally because people were threatening violence against police, whites, and our community.
Just so we are clear … The Dallas murderer posted this image, numerous BLM activists posted it, a Black Lives Matter rally organizer posted it on the official Facebook event page, and Facebook repeatedly told users across the nation, and many of my listeners, that the photo did not violate community standards. Yet, the moment a conservative radio host posts it, it gets removed, and I’m banned?
Someone needs to ask Glenn Beck (we are an affiliate of his show) if “Facebook is behaving appropriately and trying to do the right thing” in this circumstance.
At the time of the writing of this, I don’t know if I’m the only one being punished by Facebook, or if they’ve started to remove the BLM posts of the same image too. Regardless, banning users for posting something Facebook has publicly indicated was allowable is asinine.
Let’s settle some confusion about violence against cops.
There’s plenty of media outlets out there proclaiming to ‘debunk’ the ‘war on cops’ while claiming violence against police isn’t increasing. People ‘debunking’ that violence against police is increasing are usually citing data that ends in 2014. The 2015 data is still preliminary for most categories. October is usually when we get finalized data from the previous year. 2016 is obviously very new, and won’t be finalized until Fall 2017. We do have some trends for 2016 since media is monitoring it more closely.
These ‘debunkers’ also only cite police deaths, not all violence against cops. This is not how you properly report on statistics.
All data is taken from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, and the National Law Enforcement Officer’s Memorial Fund.
2013 – 49,851 officers were assaulted while performing their duties.
2014 – 48,315 officers were assaulted while performing their duties in 2014.
In 2013, police were 0.5% more likely to be assaulted with a gun than 2014.
In 2014, assaults via hands, knives, or other weapons actually increased.
2015 shows a decline in police officers murdered in preliminary data. There is no assault data available. We don’t know if it is increasing or decreasing.
It is the reduction in firearm related violence against police in 2014 that reduced the overall number of assaults. All other categories increased in 2014.
We have very little for 2016, but we do have some.
Assaults and felonious deaths have been trending down slightly since 2007. Total deaths while on duty (traffic, accident, health, and murder) have been increasing since 2013.
CBS News reports that threats against police, and ambush shootings of police are on the rise for 2016.
[Tweet theme=”basic-full”]CBS News reports that threats against police, and ambush shootings of police are on the rise for 2016.[/Tweet]
7 months into the year, and ambush shootings of cops have surpassed all of 2015. There have been 11 this year. There were 8 in 2015, and 15 in 2014.
[Tweet theme=”basic-full”]7 months into 2016, and ambush shootings of cops have surpassed all of 2015.[/Tweet]
[Tweet theme=”basic-full”]Preliminary data for 2016 is also showing a 44% increase in officers murdered with a gun over 2015[/Tweet]
So, is there an increase in violence against police? In some categories … undeniably yes. 2016 certainly isn’t looking good. The question remains as to whether the overall number of assaults, and killings increases in 2015 and 2016.
The trend of reduced shootings in 2015 may be turning around with the increase in ambush shootings of officers the first half of 2016.
You can’t definitively say that violence against police isn’t increasing while missing a full year and a half of data. Especially when preliminary data shows a potential increase.
Final thought:
The notion of cops declaring ‘open season’ on blacks is pure, undeniable, mythology. I proved that here. What if that myth, peddled by the media daily, makes the other myth of rising violence against police become a reality? How utterly stupid would we be?
New data shows shootings of police up 78% so far in 2016.
I’ve been highlighting sensationalist media coverage my whole career. The media often foregoes facts in order to push a narrative. Sometimes this is to push their own ideology, but often it’s just for ratings. Prominent members of the media individually peddle lies in order to advance their own personal agenda. Katie Couric recently did it by intentionally lying in her anti-gun fauxmentary, and Tom Brokaw recently did it when he lied as commencement speaker about guns and crime.
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As I highlighted in the Tom Brokaw story, the media is often the catalyst for violence, and they certainly were responsible for the violence in Dallas last night.
Studies show that media coverage of certain violent events actually causes violence to occur. When you throw in dishonest media coverage that peddles lies as if they were true, especially when they paint a false narrative of violence against a specific demographic, the powderkeg gets lit. That’s what has been happening for years in the U.S. The media has peddled lies, myths, and distortions of the facts as if they were true to paint a false narrative of police violence, and racism against minorities. They’ve done this with many topics, but we’ll stick to these for today.
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The media has covered nearly every police shooting, and most violent encounters really, involving black suspects as if they were anti-black racist incidents. They have even done this when the officers themselves are black like in the Freddie Gray case. Nearly all of these stories are painted as white supremacist cops using their unfettered power to kill or harm blacks. Even when no white officers were involved. Years of doing this has conditioned the American public to just assume all violent encounters between blacks and police are rooted in anti-black bigotry. The media has also sensationalized these incidents to seem as if they occur far more than they really do.
They do this on a national scale while ignoring similar cases where altercations between whites and police are ignored. If you have three similar stories at the same time involving police killing suspects (as we do now), but you only cover the two cases involving black suspects, how are you not pushing a narrative of anti-black police bigotry? If Dylan Noble were a black unarmed teenager who was killed by police while lying on the ground, there’d be mass media coverage, demonization of police, and protests organized by Black Lives Matter claiming it was yet another example of racist cops killing an innocent unarmed black teen. But Dylan Noble is not black, so the media all but ignores the case in spite of the fact he’s the only suspect who was unarmed.
In the cases of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, we literally don’t have enough evidence to conclude whether police acted inappropriately yet, but everyone just assumes the worst and gets outraged. Why? Because the media has conditioned the population to be overly reactionary in these cases in spite of the fact that most end up being proven that police acted appropriately. Mature reasonable people will look at the Alton Sterling video and see he was resisting arrest, Tasers didn’t work, he had his hand at his right side, he had an illegal gun in his right pocket near where his hand was, and conclude that it was at least plausible the officers acted reasonably. A reasonable person would hold off judgement in this case, as well as the Castile and Noble cases because there’s no evidence to contradict the police’s version of events. Reasonable people would question if the body cameras really fell off, and didn’t record the incident, or wait for the other videos to be released before passing judgement. Reasonable people would know that this is rarely done overnight, and usually only after the investigation is over. We don’t live in a reasonable society now, however. We live in a media sensationalized society, and social media gives us a safe venue to be an asshat peddling lies.
This brings me to another point. Media sensationalism is often buried in otherwise appropriate news articles.
I highlighted this recently when the media pushed a false narrative that cell phones cause brain cancer a week after the largest study ever done on the subject found no link between cell phones and cancer. Yet the large, scientific, study was buried in favor of a small, unscientific paper that didn’t even prove the link existed, but hypothesized it may exist. Good journalists would have disregarded the paper that said cell phones are linked to cancer while reporting on the much bigger, more scientific study saying there was no link. That isn’t what happened. Why? Media sensationalism. Cell phones being proven to not cause cancer isn’t going to sell papers. So now you have a bunch of people running around thinking science has concluded cell phones cause brain cancer, when the opposite is actually true.
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Then a gay YouTuber faked a hate crime to push a false narrative that anti-gay violence is prevalent and common in the U.S., it isn’t.
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A pro-gay media outlet rightfully picked up on this fraud, and exposed him as such. That is good journalism, and an appropriate story to cover. However, buried nine paragraphs down, media sensationalism and bias reared its ugly head. The author claimed that the LGBT community was the most likely group to be targeted for hate crimes according to the FBI. I had to debunk that article’s lie with actual FBI statistics. Here’s a gay publication highlighting a fraudulent anti-gay hate crime, but they still had to inject their false narrative into the article just so they reeled people back in to the mythology they push. Now their readers falsely assume hate crimes against the LGBT community are common. This foments hate.
That’s happened with the violence in Dallas last night.
The UK Daily Mirror ran a story today on the black power hate group who’s claimed responsibility for the murders of Dallas police officers last night. Again, good journalism to cover this story in this way. However, 42 paragraphs in, the Mirror sensationalizes police shootings of black suspects with a lie. They wrote:
US police do not publish figures on the number of people shot dead by officers but independent research shows young black men were nine times more likely to be killed by police in 2015.
Not even remotely true without serious statistical gymnastics of a highly dubious nature.
Also, not sure you can call an anti-police website a source of ‘independent research.’ The Daily Mirror’s source is MappingPoliceViolence.org. A website dedicated to highlighting anti-black police violence, and their data is vastly different than official sources, and actual journalism statistics. I’m also not sure where they got the 9x number. The website does say blacks are 3x more likely to be killed than whites. However, that’s a per capita number of the total population for that race. If we want to get into per capita crime numbers, I’m afraid the picture doesn’t look very good considering that blacks commit a highly disproportionate amount of crimes, including murder, than other races. Their ‘solutions’ page is also an intellectually dishonest joke.
The Washington Post and the Guardian have launched their own efforts to track police shootings. Their numbers are similar (Guardian reports slightly higher number of shooting incidents). For the record, these should be tracked better than they are by government officials. I’d also like to see them track the race of the officer.
The Washington Post study for 2015 shows that 87.5% of suspects killed by police were armed with a weapon. Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were armed. Dylan Noble wasn’t. Being unarmed is also irrelevant, and usually cited by the ignorant who don’t know what they are talking about. Especially since ‘unarmed’ suspects are 2.6x more likely to murder someone than someone armed with any rifle.
Their study also showed that in 3/4 of police killings “police were under attack or defending someone who was.”
According to The Guardian, in 2015, whites accounted for 50.7% (581) of all fatal police shootings. Blacks accounted for 26.7% (306). More whites were killed by police, but we are told by the media that the opposite is true. Some disingenuous people will start arguing proportion of population at these numbers, but they must remember that blacks make up 13% of the population, but commit 8x the murders as whites/hispanics. If we are going to measure per capita numbers for police shootings, we need to include per capita crime statistics as well. Police operate where the crime is, and there’s more crime in predominantly black areas. Sorry, not sorry, facts.
In 2016, so far, whites account for 49.29% of police killings, blacks account for 24%. Right now, whites are more than 2x as likely to be killed by police.
When the media pushes a false narrative that police officers are hunting down young black men because they are racist on a near daily basis, blacks are being conditioned to be fearful of police. This fear seeds a self-preservation attitude that leads to hate, and ultimately, violence towards police like we saw in Dallas last night. As we’ve seen since Ferguson.
If the media covered alleged police abuse equally, without pushing a racist narrative, perhaps we could focus on eliminating police abuse, and not have racist anti-police militant groups murdering innocent police officers who have nothing do with any alleged abuse.
If the media didn’t cover minorities being killed as racism while ignoring similar cases involving whites, perhaps people wouldn’t have a skewed view of these encounters which are based on mythology. Then, perhaps, radical factions wouldn’t have anger to serve as a launching point for their violent agenda. The nation could stop being divided. If only facts and even handed temperament were pillars of our media, and society instead of inflammatory hyperbole.
I’ve included the response from Indiana State Police to my request for comment at the bottom of this article.
A lot of listeners have been asking me about this story. Many remember my coverage of the Officer Manor tragedy in Las Vegas when I was there, and Michiana listeners have heard me mention the story several times.
The recent tragic accident involving an Indiana state trooper and a motorcyclist was covered here, and has left many questions unanswered.
Why did the trooper, Jathan Rose, make a u-turn on the toll road?
Why did the motorcyclist, Michael M. Damore, 28, impact the passenger side of the patrol car?
What reason would the trooper have for making a right-handed u-turn? (A listener pointed out that if the trooper was heading eastbound and made a U-turn to go back west he would leave the passenger side of his vehicle exposed. I was thinking there was a concrete barrier there.)
How fast was the motorcyclist going?
Was the trooper running code (lights and/or siren)?
Who was at fault?
So far, all the State Police and the media has put out is that the motorcyclist was riding on a suspended license, and the motorcycle was not registered.
Many, including myself, found that to be an interesting, if not suspicious, release of information. Why? Because it doesn’t point to actual cause/fault for the accident. It seems like an attempt to paint the motorcyclist as irresponsible. That may be true, but it doesn’t answer the question of who is at fault. I’ve also seen it before … in the Officer Manor case. In that case, an innocent man was demonized and blamed for a fatal accident in which a police officer died. I was the first member of the media to discover that the accident was actually caused by Officer Manor, and the police attempted to frame an innocent man in his death to cover it up. I hope that isn’t happening here too.
Here’s what I found …
We witnessed this accident and my husband was the first medical person on the scene. This article is completely biased and wrong!
They make it sound like the biker was at fault and even somehow criminal. It was an accident, not on purpose, but it was 100% the officers fault. He did an illegal Uturn between construction cones, at night, without lights or a siren. The biker was driving in his own lane and couldn’t avoid the cop car in time. In fact, there were witnesses on the scene who swore that the cop hit the biker!
After my husband ran over and checked the bikers pulse, he instructed a military person who had also stopped to help to keep the biker awake. He ran to the cop car to check on the officer. The officer was still in the driver seat staring straight ahead, probably in shock. When my husband asked if he was ok he responded,”yes”. When we asked if he had called it in he responded, “no. Is the guy ok?” My husband responded, ” no, he is definitely not ok, you need to call this in right now!”
The officer NEVER did chest compressions. The officer DID NOT help with the injured man at all or offer any medical aid kit. At least five other cop cars and the ambulance arrived fairly quickly, however, they did not acquire witness statements or contact information from either my husband or the military personnel. They simply said, “we got it, you can go”, when asked if they wanted statements the officers repeated, ” no, we got it, you can go”.
There were witnesses on the scene who were telling the newly arrived officers to arrest the offending officer because it was a purposeful act. The officers said no, no, and got in their face (which we did not hear) and shut them up. NO witness statements were taken although there were several eye witnesses who stayed to give statements.
Some are also claiming that Michael M. Damore’s license was suspended, but his bike was registered.
If this is true, and I stress ‘if’ since we do not yet know, this is going to be a very big story.
Naturally, there are going to be two trains of thought here. One will blame the rider because he should not have been on road to begin with, and the other will blame the officer if their actions directly led to the accident.
I’ve reached out to the witness about an interview on my show. Stay tuned.
UPDATE:
I’ve made a formal request for comment from Indiana State Police regarding the allegations of the alleged witness. A copy of my email to ISP is below:
To whom it may concern:
My name is Casey Hendrickson from 95.3 MNC in South Bend, IN. I’m formally requesting comment regarding the tragic accident involving Trooper Jathan Rose and motorcyclist Michael M. Damore at 9:30 p.m. on July 1.
An alleged witness has come forward on social media to challenge the official story being covered in the media. This alleged witness claims that Trooper Jathan Rose is at fault in the accident.
Below are some of the claims of the alleged witness:
Trooper Jathan Rose did not lend medical aid as reported.
Trooper Jathan Rose made an illegal u-turn, and did not have his lights or siren on when doing so.
Other first responders who arrived at the scene did not take witness statements.
Witnesses on scene alleged the trooper was at fault for the accident.
Some witnesses on scene demanded Trooper Jathan Rose be arrested for causing the accident.
Michael Damore’s license was suspended, but his motorcycle was registered at the time of the accident.
I’m attempting to get to the truth, and discredit and falsehoods regarding this story. I understand the investigation is still ongoing, but comment from the Indiana State Police on these matters would go a long way in preventing widespread speculation.
Some questions I have:
Why did the trooper, Jathan Rose, make a u-turn on the toll road?
Why did the motorcyclist, Michael M. Damore, 28, impact the passenger side of the patrol car?
What reason would the trooper have for making a right-handed u-turn?
How fast was the motorcyclist going?
Was the trooper running code (lights and/or siren on)?
Who was at fault?
Were witness statements taken at the scene of the accident?
Thank you in advance for your time, and assistance in this matter.
You are also free to call or text me anytime at (702) 217-6390.
All the best,
Casey Hendrickson
Radio Talk Show Host – 95.3 MNC
The following is the response I received from Indiana State Police on July 6, 2016
Mr. Hendrickson,
Your inquiry to the Indiana State Police generic email address was directed to my attention.
While I am not able to reply to your specific questions I can tell you that anytime there is a death of a citizen, be it the result of a police action shooting, traffic crash or other circumstance that also involved a police officer, there is a very detailed and comprehensive investigation. I can also share with you that death investigations can take several weeks or longer to complete as autopsy reports and toxicology results have to be processed for the deceased as well as for our involved trooper.
Once the investigation is completed, it will be submitted to the Porter County Prosecutor’s Office for review and action as deemed appropriate by that office. In the meantime, the involved trooper, as a matter of practice has been placed on administrative duties, which is commonly referred to by the public as desk duty, and will remain in that status until final action related to this investigation has been determined by the Porter County Prosecutor.
The investigation is still very active, and many of the questions you asked in your email are the same points our investigation will be seeking to answer. As for anyone that witnessed the crash and did not have the opportunity to speak with an officer at the scene I can also share with you that the state police detective investigating this case is Det. Mike Robinson. He may be contacted on his department cell phone *REDACTED BY ME* and he looks forward to speaking to any witnesses. You are welcome to share Det. Robinson’s name and cell number with any persons you’ve spoken with that were a witness to the crash.
Any loss of life is tragic and we will work diligently to determine all the facts associated with this fatal crash. Regardless of fault for the crash, our investigation will be complete, thorough and unbiased.
Once the crash report has been finalized, it will become a public record and will be available for a nominal charge at this website.
While we have nothing to hide as an agency, we have a long standing policy of not speaking to ongoing investigations, outside of the initial information, which is provided in the public news release and has been attached with this email.
Thank you for your time reading this reply. Feel free to email or call me as listed in my signature line.
David R. Bursten, Captain
Chief Public Information Officer
Indiana State Police
