El Paso Democrat Beto O’Rourke launched his longshot campaign against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) this week. The media went into full ‘circle the wagons’ mode almost immediately to cover up two big lies in his announcement speech.
His big lies happen at 2:30 in the video.
He claims El Paso, TX is the safest city in Texas, and in the United States. Both claims are patently false. However, when you Google his announcement, the media coverage, for the most part, does not acknowledge he said these two things. They rewrite his speech to say something to the effect of ‘he noted El Paso was one of the safest cities,’ or other similar revisions. Saying El Paso is the safest city in Texas and the US is very different from saying it is one of the safest cities. Which is a dubious claim on its own anyway.
While local politicians from San Diego to El Paso to the Rio Grande Valley routinely claim that their crime statistics are continuously low, in reality those statistics don’t account for federal crimes that took place in their city such as kidnappings, drug trafficking and other spillover crimes.
Beto, and indeed many others in El Passo, have been using this ‘safest city’ propaganda for a while now. It’s just that, propaganda.
Niche.com’s 2016 rankings have El Paso as the 37th safest city. Not bad, but far from the safest city in the US.
Neighborhood Scout has El Paso in the bottom third for safety. A far cry from safest city.
Rape and assault in El Paso actually outpaces the national average.
Texas Monthly has El Paso ranked 13th for safest city in Texas. Not number 1.
Things are closer to the middle of the pack in El Paso and Laredo, which place at #13 and #10, respectively. The murder rate in each city is low, at 1.4 and 1.5 (Brownsville also comes in at 1.4, which is the second-lowest behind Abilene at 0.6). The numbers in El Paso, Laredo, and McAllen are all slanted heavily toward aggravated assault.
Safewise.com has El Paso as the 77th safest city in Texas. Again, not number 1.
The point is that El Paso isn’t the safest city in Texas, or the United States. Even if it is relatively safe, but the jury is out on that.
So then, why would major media outlets across the country based in places like New York and D.C. go to such lengths to change what Beto O’Rourke said? Where are the ad nauseam fact-checks from those same media outlets on Republicans for Beto’s comments? Where’s the cries from major media of “fake news!,” and the like?
You won’t find them. Beto is a Democrat running against boogieman number two, Ted Cruz. The media wants to bury Cruz, and Trump and their factually correct border narrative. So they chose to cover up Beto’s lies to prevent a gaffe out of the gate.
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.
One of the regular segments of my show is highlighting fake hate. Nearly all of the ‘hate crimes’ over the past several years that go viral have ended up being fabricated hoaxes designed to push a false victim narrative while peddling hate themselves. Real victims rarely seek out publicity, and they almost never set up GoFundMe pages.
Learn the lesson here. If you see a ‘hate crime’ story in the media, don’t automatically believe it.
Also, don’t believe everything in a story that isn’t citing a legitimate source with links. Here’s why …
“LGBT people are the minority group most likely to be targeted for hate crimes, according to FBIstatistics. So there are a lot more real stories than fictional.”
Oh really? That was in the same article. Of course, no citation was made, and my background already tells me it’s bogus. Challenge accepted!
An analysis of data for victims of single-bias hate crime incidents showed that:
48.3 percent of the victims were targeted because of the offenders’ bias against race.
18.7 percent were targeted because of bias against sexual orientation.
17.1 percent were victimized because of bias against religion.
12.3 percent were victimized because of bias against ethnicity.
1.6 percent were victims of gender-identity bias.
1.4 percent were targeted because of bias against disability.
0.6 percent (40 individuals) were victims of gender bias. (Based on Table 1.)
It should be noted that the FBI’s data has some problems with regards to racial bias hate crimes. You see, a lot of hate crimes committed against whites don’t get categorized as hate crimes. There are also very few hate crimes committed in the US, but you wouldn’t no it based on media hype. With that said, we aren’t talking about that necessarily. The author of this article stated FBI data shows LGBT people are the most targeted for hate crimes.
As you can see, hate crimes based on race occur nearly twice as much as those directed towards LGBT victims. So race, not sexual orientation leads the pack in hate crimes.
Many will like say that hate crimes based on race shouldn’t be all inclusive. Each individual race counts as a minority group (minus white people, of course), while LGBT is its own group. They could argue that the LGBT group is targeted more than any other individual group (i.e. Blacks, Hispanics, etc.). However, that still isn’t true.
Among single-bias hate crime incidents in 2014, there were 3,227 victims of racially motivated hate crime.
Of the 1,248 victims targeted due to sexual-orientation bias.
You have to subtract 1.5% from the sexual-orientation bracket because they were hate crimes against heterosexuals, and don’t count as LGBT hate crimes. The new number is 1,229 total victims of anti-LGBT hate crimes in 2014.
Meanwhile, 62.7% of racial hate crimes were committed against blacks. That’s 2,023 of the 3.227 racially motivated hate crimes.
There were 794 more hate crimes just against blacks in 2014 than there were against the entire LGBT community.
Even if you added all 109 gender identity hate crime victims to expand LGBT to LGBTQ you still are well short of the hate crimes experienced by just blacks.
Any way you cut it, the article’s assertion that the LGBT community is the most targeted minority group for hate crimes is patently false.
Exit question: Is this gay guy threatening to shoot Republican Senators a hate crime?
