What is the real danger on the streets?

Published July 23, 2016

by Mark Shiver, Capitol Connection, July 22, 2016.

The past few weeks have torn at the heart out of most Americans. Citizens have been killed in incidents with the police; videos in some instances inflaming the situation yet not clearly enlightening as to the reason police pulled the trigger.

Meanwhile, police officers have been targeted, even slaughtered in attacks in Dallas, Texas and Baton Rouge, La. Politicians and the media, in concert with radical groups such as Black Lives Matter, have taken advantage of the tragic events to foment racial tension, and fan the flames of fear and discontent among the black community towards those in blue.

The controversy is rising here in North Carolina. This week, for example, Black Lives Matter on Thursday night tied up downtown Durham with a rally dubbed “Against Police Terror.”

But a recent guest on a Freedom Action Network radio show on put the situation into perspective.

On the July 13 edition of “What Matters in North Carolina,” John Gibbs was on to talk about his recent article on thefederalist.com, “If You Don’t Want Police to Shoot You, Don’t Resist Arrest.” Gibbs is an African-American political commentator and contributor to The Federalist. Gibbs said, “The police are not going around shooting people like me, that’s not what’s happening. They’re not going after law-abiding black folks and just randomly gunning them down like some people in the media would like you to think.”

Asked if he is scared of the police Gibbs said, “To be very honest, no, I am not … The police are not stupid, they have good instincts, they know how to tell what kind of folks are troublemakers and what kind of folks are not, and I somehow believe when the police see me they can tell I’m a regular law-abiding citizen.”

Gibbs added that he has not had negative experiences with the police and that this is one reason that he is “highly skeptical of this narrative that President Obama and the media on down are trying to sell us, that if you’re black it’s open season on you from the police. I just don’t think so, and I think there’s many other black folks like me who don’t have trouble with the police.”

To Gibbs, groups like Black Lives Matter and its willing accomplices in the media intentionally focus on the spectacle of officer-involved shootings involving black people, while ignoring the overwhelming reality that black people are more likely to be killed by other black people than by the police.

To bolster this point, Jay Stalien, a black police officer in Palm Beach, Florida, recently posted on his Facebook page about this reality.

In the post which has gone viral Stalien said, “All of my realizations came to this conclusion. Black Lives do not matter to most black people. Only the lives that make the national news matter to them. Only the lives that are taken at the hands of cops or white people, matter. The other thousands of lives lost, the other black souls that I along with every cop, have seen taken at the hands of other blacks, do not matter. Their deaths are unnoticed, accepted as the ‘norm,’ and swept underneath the rug by the very people who claim and post ‘black lives matter.’”

Is it true that black people are targeted and killed more often that white people or others? Fox News contributor Kevin Jackson said on the July 8 edition of Fox & Friends that nationwide police shootings claim the lives of more white people than black people.

“The facts are very clear – many people in America are unfortunately shot by police officers,” he wrote. “In fact, there have been 561 shootings so far, [and] 275 of those deaths were white folks, 136 were black. And 86 were Hispanic. I would defy anybody that’s paying attention to this stuff to tell me who was the last Hispanic who was killed.”

The choice is stark going forward: accept the media’s portraiture of the police as targeting black people for harm, or believe the challenge of Gibbs to build up the black community, emphasize the need for fathers to be a part of their children’s lives, and “unequivocally call for an end to the welfare, food stamps, and government subsidized housing that have replaced the black father, and thus return the role of family provider to the black man where it belongs, not the government.”

Will politicians, groups like Black Lives Matter and the media choose to realistically address the needs of the black community and actually foster harmony with the police, or continue to pour verbal gasoline on a volatile relationship with law enforcement, enjoying the power, attention and ratings that such volatility brings? Being scared of the police does not have to be a reality for the black community. Even with the tragic incidents that have been captured on smartphones in the past few weeks, the black community has more to fear from those who will use its citizens for their own political and financial gain, than from those in blue.

Mark Shiver is the host of “What Matters in North Carolina.”

http://nccapitolconnection.com/2016/07/22/what-is-the-real-danger-on-streets/

 

July 23, 2016 at 10:04 am
Bruce Stanley says:

I thought the Dallas police chief handled the aftermath down there wonderfully. I just can't figure out how law abiding black citizens can allow Black Lives Matter to divide and disrupt without speaking out against them, similarly to not being able to grasp why peaceful muslims do not speak out stronger against Islamic radicals/terrorists. I think it's illogical to allow radicals to hijack your race or religion. But then again the liberal media is complicit.