Relatable with Allie Beth Stuckey - Ep 293 | Why Police Shootings Need Context

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Rioters are burning down Kenosha, Wisconsin, where a police shooting occurred this past Sunday. Jacob Blake was shot in the back seven times while reaching into his car, and the video of it has sparked more outrage. Allie Beth Stuckey explains why context is important in any police shooting and whether or not statistics in our country prove that our police forces are systemically racist. Today's Links: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/national/police-shootings-2019/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-full-truth-about-race-and-policing-11591744223 https://www.city-journal.org/reflections-on-race-riots-and-police Today's Sponsors: Shapewear from Shapermint smooths you out, feels comfortable, and helps boost your confidence. Because when you feel confident, you're empowered. Go to https://Shapermint.com/ALLIE to get an "added discount" of an extra 10% on your order.

Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort.

We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. Hey guys, welcome to Relatable. Happy Wednesday. I hope everyone has had a great week so far. If you haven't listened to Monday's episode with Dr. John McArthur, I had the privilege of interviewing him.

And it was such a wonderful short conversation. So make sure that you go back and you listen to that episode. You guys know I am doing an election series every Monday until the election we started last Monday. We talked about abortion. And then this past Monday, we talked about religious liberty. And we are comparing where Republicans and Trump are on these issues and where Democrats and Joe Biden are on these issues.

You guys know I'm coming from a particular perspective. So don't allow me to be the only person that you listen to. Definitely do your own. research. I am trying to give you the most unbiased truth that I possibly can, but you guys know that my worldview is a Christian, biblical, conservative worldview. And so that, of course, is going to characterize the things I talk about and how I talk about them. That doesn't mean that I am trying to be biased or I'm trying to leave out information that is never, ever my goal. But I do encourage you knowing this about me to make sure that you,

listen to other perspectives and other sides. And at the end of the day, you have to do your own research. And most importantly, as a Christian, you have to go back to the word of God. You have to ask yourself, does he care about unborn life? Does he care about things like religious liberty? You need to study the regimes that I talked about on Monday yourself. You need to look at Paul Potts, Cambodia. You need to look at Mao's China, current China. You need to look at Cuba. You need to look at Venezuela and how all of those countries have fared in relation to religious liberty and freedom of speech and freedom of the press when they have gone in the way of socialism. It will make a much bigger impact on you if you do your own research.

Don't allow me to be the only person to shape your views, although I'm so thankful for all of you who listen to the podcast and who reach out to me regularly, email me and message me and tell me about the impact that this podcast has had on you. That really does just humble me and makes me so grateful for the privilege of being able to do that job. today we are going to talk about something that is very controversial. I don't like talking about this. I really wish I could avoid talking about this. We've talked about it. It seems several times over the past few months because of the riots and sometimes the peaceful protests that

have been happening in relation to police brutality and what is called systemic racism. We have talked about this several times. We did a podcast after the George Floyd incident called Does the Truth Matter? We've done another podcast episode, a title which Black Lives Matter. Of course, I've talked about these things with people like Samuel Say and Vody Bakum. And we have really labored to break all of this down from a biblical perspective. I've gotten a lot of negative messages, a lot of negative posts on the internet, a lot of negative reviews, people that are angry that I'm talking about this from a perspective that is different than the mainstream. but more than that, way more than that.

What eclipses that is the number of messages and emails and comments and posts that I've gotten from people who are very grateful for an alternate perspective to everything that is going on. If you're new to the podcast, I've got a lot of new people here because maybe you bought my book, a friend suggested you read my book and you read it and now you know about my podcast and so you're coming on here and you don't know what to expect and maybe you don't aligned with me politically. You're not a conservative. And so maybe you are a little bit nervous and coming into this episode or any of my episodes because you're afraid you might disagree with me.

You might disagree with me. You might understand that my motivation is always truth and compassion. I don't want to sacrifice one for the other. And so when we talk about racialized police brutality, when we talk about, I don't know if we'll get into the accusation of systemic racism today, but when we talk about these very rightfully sensitive subjects, know that that is my heart, that that is my motivation. And maybe I fail when it comes to that because I'm, you know, just a finite, sinful human being just like everyone else. But that is my heart behind talking about these subjects.

But I cannot, I cannot allow people to just be taken down this current of narratives. surrounding police brutality and surrounding racism in the police without talking about the truth, without giving counterfactuals. Because it's important as Christians that we ground our beliefs in objective reality. That doesn't mean that we're not compassionate. That doesn't mean that we're not sympathetic. That doesn't mean that we're not loving. I would argue that it is the most loving thing that we can do to ground our beliefs and to ground our reactions in the truth, in statistical truth, in data-driven truth, and most importantly, in biblical truth. So what does the Bible say about justice? What does the Bible say about murder? What does the Bible say about image barriers

and what people are worth and what our reaction should be? And the reason why we're talking about all of this today is because a black man by the name of Jacob Blake, he's a 29-year-old man, was shot by a police officer, a white police officer seven times on Sunday. And now there are riots and arson that is taking over Kenosha, Wisconsin, where this incident happened. And that is in addition to the riots and the arson and the vandalism and the assault. And in some cases, murder that's going on in the riots that have been taking place in America's major cities for over three months. That started with George Floyd. But I would argue have not been about.

George Floyd for a very long time. And once again, I want to distinguish between the peaceful protesters and these rioters, many of whom have no idea why they're rioting. They desperately want to be a part of something. They desperately want to have purpose and worth and identity, and they're finding it in these anarchist groups. A lot of these people are not protesting against systemic racism, rioting against systemic racism, or what they perceive to be systemic racism. But the peaceful protesters that were peacefully protesting in the beginning, of whom are still having conversations and working for change today are truly working for more transparency in the police and for what they see as major problems in our justice system. And it doesn't

matter whether or not I agree with every single policy position that those peaceful, that those peaceful people are talking about. I commend them for using their First Amendment rights to do that. So I will never condemn a peaceful protester, whether or not I agree with the premise of their protest. I will never disagree or I will never condemn someone who is bringing up, who is bringing up hard and difficult conversations, policy prescriptions, things like that in a peaceful way, even if I disagree with them. That is what this country is about. That is what has helped make America great for so long. I think that is different than the rioting and the destruction that is going on. And as we will talk about today, it is a myth to say that that is

the only way to make change because America has actually changed for the better in so many ways using peaceful democratic processes. So that is a myth. And I believe that the reactions that are happening, if you can even call them reactions, they're simply not justice. And we can, on the one hand, say that, hey, I really don't like it when people die by the hands of the police. And we can also say, but the riots and the destruction that are ruining people's lives, in many cases, black people's lives by burning down their businesses and vandalizing their their homes and places of work, that that is also not right, that that is also injustice. We should be able to, as critically thinking, people hold those two thoughts in our mind at the same time. Okay, so let's talk

about what happened with Jacob Blake. So media reports say that the police were allegedly responding to a call about a domestic disturbance. They reportedly tried to tase Blake and he wouldn't comply. Again, this is reportedly. There's so much that we don't know, and that's what I'm going to emphasize in just a second. There was a video shot of the scene from what looks like across the street, like a phone video. You see Blake going into his car. The police have their guns drawn. It looks like they're telling him to stop. And instead, he keeps going. He reaches into his car. A police officer is holding the back of his shirt. I don't want to play the video. It's very disturbing. some people are saying, well, the video shows that the shooting is justified.

I don't think that the video gives us that information. It is available online. If you want to go watch it online, I would not watch it with your children. It is disturbing. You can hear screaming. Apparently, there were children in the car too, which is just so tragic and so disturbing. But this police officer is yanking at his shirt, obviously trying to get him not to reach into his car. and you see Blake going to reach into his car for something that we don't know.

And then the police officer shoots him seven times in the back. We don't know if it was one police officer or the second police officer that also shot him. We really don't know much else. We really don't. We don't know exactly what happened before this. There are neighbors who were saying that he was trying to break up a fight. We just don't know that. We haven't been able to confirm that yet.

according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. Court documents show that there was a warrant out for his arrest for sexual assault, trespassing and disorderly conduct in connection to domestic abuse. So there was a warrant out for Jacob Blake's arrest for those things, sexual assault and domestic abuse. This was not his first violent run-in with the police in 2015. He pulled a gun at a bar and had to be taken down by a canine. Now, why am I saying that?

Am I saying that that justifies what happens? to him. No, those cases alone, those facts alone do not justify the shooting. And I'm not trying to say that. What I am trying to do is give enough context to take a step back and to reserve our judgment before we know the full story. It is possible that he reached inside his car to get a gun. And maybe the officer saw that he was reaching inside his car to get a gun. And that's why they reacted the way that they did. And they shot him. I don't know. Maybe he was reaching inside his car to get his cell phone to call his lawyer. Maybe he was reaching inside his car to get his license. I don't know. Maybe it was totally unjustified by this police officer. Maybe they did overreact. I mean, I understand seven times. My first

thought was seven times? Was that really necessary? But what I have learned is that it is easy for us in the comfort of our homes to be looking on our iPhones and to judge the conduct of a police officer in a situation that we have never been in where his life is on the line and to say how he or she should have done their jobs. That's very easy for us to do. Maybe there were racial motives behind this shooting. Maybe there was bias, either explicit bias that can be proven by this police officer or implicit bias there, possibly. But we do not know. We don't know that in the same way that we don't know that about Derek Chauvin. Maybe, but we don't know that yet. Social media, as you guys know, I've talked about this many times. Social media awards virtue points based on how quickly and how

emotionally you react to something. And they judge you very harshly if you don't make the statement that they want you to make. But that is not true virtue. Social media selectivists on the left, particularly. Maybe it happens on the right too in different scenarios, but I would say in particular, this is a characteristic of social media slackivists on the left, that they scour your timeline. If you complain about one thing, they scour your timeline and they see they see if you complained about another thing that they want you to complain about. And if you didn't complain about the thing that they want you to complain about, then they judge you unrighteous. They judge you uncompassionate. They say, hey, I see that you didn't talk about XYZ.

I had someone, a Christian pastor who supports Black Lives Matter. He did the same thing to me on social media. I said something about Kenosha, Wisconsin, burning down due to writers. And he said, you know, I haven't seen you condemn this attempted murder. Well, I don't know. I don't know what happened. I don't know what the motivations were. I have no idea what happened before this clip.

and no one else does either. And it actually does not help the dialogue. It does not help the conversation at all for me to contribute an analysis or a commentary that is based on things that I don't know. So today, I just want to tell you what I know and tell you also what I don't know. And also, by the way, what the rest of the world does not know either. We do not know this officer's heart. We do not know his motivation. We don't know the motivation of Jacob Blake. Like I said, He could have been a totally innocent guy in this particular scenario. He could have been reaching for his phone and said, hey, you know, I'm just going to call my lawyer. He could have been totally calm before this for all we know.

We don't know. The police report says that they tried to taste him and it didn't work. I don't know if that's true in the same way that I don't know if the neighbor's report is true, that he was trying to break up a fight. I don't know that and no one else knows that either, at least by the time I'm recording this. Now, this I always recorded the day before, so maybe by the time this comes out, there will be more information that will either at least somewhat exonerate the officer or maybe it will totally exonerate Jacob Blake, possibly. But as of right now, I don't know and no one else does either.

And everyone is assuming that they know. And you get awarded points on social media. If you automatically, quickly, without any reasoning, without any truth, without any facts whatsoever, say the most extreme thing possible about the motivations of this officer, no one will come back and say, hey, you should probably issue a correction. Hey, you should probably wait until the facts come out. It doesn't matter. When it is a left-wing narrative, you can be as speculative as possible and no one on the left will ever check you and say, hey, actually, we should probably wait just a second. No, because apparently the more emotional you

are and the more automatic you are, the more knee-jerk you are when it comes to something like this, claiming racialized motivations, the more virtuous you are. But again, that is not true virtue. That is not how God is judging your compassion. That is not how God is judging your righteousness. I saw Daryl Harrison, the host of the Just Thinking podcast said the other day, you would think that social justice advocates think that anger is a virtue. They love to use Jesus flipping over the tables as an example of that. There was a particular reason why Jesus was. flipping over the tables because they were making the temple into what he called a din of robbers. Yes, I do think righteous anger is often justified and maybe it's justified in this case,

but we don't know yet. And it has to be okay. We have to be humble enough to be able to admit that. You might have your guesses. We might have our assumptions in our minds, but I think it's okay for us to reserve judgment while we can. Now, thankfully, no matter which, side of the issue that you are on here. Thankfully, Jacob Blake is not dead. He is stable. He's in critical condition in the hospital, but he is not dead. And for that, I am so grateful. I am so grateful that he's alive, 29 years old, young guy, about the same age as me. He has four children. I hope to God that God continues to heal him fully, that he makes a full and quick recovery, that God uses this terrible situation, no matter if the shooting was justified or not, no matter

what was going on before this video. It is a terrible situation, no matter of any of those factors. I hope that God uses the situation to draw him and to draw his family to himself and to glorify himself. I hope that God uses this preservation of life to glorify himself and to share the gospel. I am always for the preservation of life where it can be and should be, I am always for redemption where something or someone can be redeemed. And I am praying for Jacob Blake. And I mean that sincerely. I'm praying for his sons who apparently, like I said, tragically witnessed this. I am praying for his friends, for his family. I pray that God would continue to heal him. Jacob Blake, like all people, as we know, was made in God's image.

That means that he, like every other human being, has incredible worth. He is a soul that will live forever in one of two places just like yours and mine. He needs Christ just like you and I do. And praise God that he did not go out in the way that it looked like he was going to. I am sincerely so thankful for that. Do I wish that officers would never have to shoot people? I sincerely do. Yes. Even criminals, I would rather in an ideal world that person who is caught by the police, I would rather that person live and go to prison than be shot and killed by a cop because they're human beings. And as long as that person is alive, Jesus can save them. The thief that was dying on the cross when Jesus assured him, the thief was dying on the

cross when Jesus assured him that today you will be in paradise with me because of your faith. I want that for everyone. And I am willing to advocate for whatever training possible to make it less and less likely for it to happen that a police officer shoots a person, especially in the back. As Vodi Baccom talked about on this show a few weeks ago, proper chokeholds used by police officers actually save lives. They can prevent situations like this from happening when done properly. It is safe and effective. It's a safe and effective way to subdue someone who is resisting arrest without killing them. And yet there are at least 13 states and cities across the country right now that are banning chokeholds are in the process of trying to legislate a ban on

chokeholds according to CNN because it sounds good to do it sounds like the right thing to do in reality more lives will likely be lost by that change than saved by that if all police officers could be trained with Brazilian jiu jitsu uh i think that would be better for everyone like voddy bacham has advocated for but i also understand that it's not always possible for police officers do anything else but use their gun. And I don't know if this situation with Jacob Blake was one of those situations. I do not know. There are several situations where it's obvious, in my personal opinion, that police used disproportionate force. Does that happen? Yes, it is rare, but it happens. Botham Jean is one of those cases. One of the most tragic stories ever where an off-duty police officer

who was a white woman. She came into his apartment that she says she thought was hers and shot him dead. He was 26 years old. Hopefully it was truly an accident. Again, we're never really going to know, but she was convicted of murder sentenced to, I think, just 10 years in prison. And it was Brant Jean, who was Botham Jean's brother, who extended this amazing, amazing speech of forgiveness to Amber Geiger, who was Botham Jeans killer. And it was just an amazing situation where God used a tragic scenario to bring glory to himself. But that was, without a doubt, something wrong that happened, something bad that happened, something unjust that happened.

Botham Gene did nothing wrong. Tatiana Jefferson killed in her home by an officer outside her home. Now, she did have a gun, but she was inside her home in the middle of the night. that's your Second Amendment right to have your gun. She probably thought it was an intruder and was probably trying to defend herself. The officer was indicted for murder after shooting and killing her in her own home, exercising her Second Amendment rights. Elijah McLean, he was walking at night, apparently, to get a drink for his brother wearing a ski mask, a 140-pound, very thin, small autistic kid pinned to the ground by the police,

given a sedative by the EMT that apparently, according to the autopsy, killed him. my opinion, he never should have died. He never should have been tackled by the police. This is still being investigated. Justine Damon, a white woman shot by a black police officer. All she did was called the police reporting what she thought was a sexual assault in her alley, came out of her house in pink pajamas to talk to the police. And the officer shot her from his car. For a reason that we do not know, he only got 12 years in prison. Tony Tempa, a white man pressed into the ground until he couldn't breathe, whimpering. We saw a video of this begging for them to stop while officers laughed at him. The criminal charges against the officers in this situation were dropped. Daniel Shaver,

another white man, begging for his life while police officers pointed their guns at him. He apparently reached down to pull up his pants and they shot him dead. So these instances of disproportionate police force do happen. They are tragic and they are always investigated. They are also, thankfully, very rare, increasingly rare. By the way, the vast majority, this is a fact, the vast majority of police interactions end peacefully. And the vast majority of police effectively subdue situations so that force is unnecessary. Police officers don't want to kill people. Do you think they want to be the next headline? Do you think they want to take someone's life? they don't want themselves, they don't want to die.

They want to go home to their families. And so it is always preferable for a police officer not to escalate a situation. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't care and we shouldn't investigate when it looks like the police used force when they shouldn't have. We absolutely should. That is the beautiful thing about due process in this country. I don't want police officers that bully and threaten the populace to just go away unscathed. That's why I actually think we should not have police unions.

It makes it too difficult to fire bad police officers. Derek Chauvin had a record of using disproportionate force, and it was the police union that shielded him. I don't think we should have public unions, period. I don't think that we should have teachers unions. It is not ethical for our tax dollars to go to a union that is then funding politicians that, whether we're on the left or the right, we probably don't support. And unions so often are just about power and not actually representing the either teachers or the police

or the postal workers that they claim to represent. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself. On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality.

We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts. I hope you'll join us. If we could all agree, if we could just all agree that every instance of disproportionate force,

perceived disproportionate force or actual disproportionate force by a police officer should be investigating. the officers should be held accountable, that there should be transparency, that there should be good training. I think we would all agree. I think most police officers would agree. I don't, like I said, I don't want bad police officers. I don't think other police officers want bad police officers. But unfortunately, we can't seem to agree on these common sense measures as soon as it comes out that a black person is killed by a white police officer, the immediate and viral reaction. an assumption is that A, it is racist, that it's a racist motivation, and B, that this happens all the time, that there is an epidemic of white officers killing unarmed black men. And this is the

most controversial thing to say, but it is not true. It is not true. And it is loving to say that it is not true. Isn't that good news that that is not actually true, that it is not factual, that that epidemic exists. Coleman Hughes, who is black and he is also a liberal. He is an admitted Biden voter. He wrote an article for City Journal a few months ago called Stories and Data. I'll link it in the description. You can see for yourself. He also links a lot of other studies in the article that you can click on. And again, please research this for yourself. Do not take my word for it. But I'll make it easy for you. You can go and you can look at this article and you you can look at the studies that he included. So in this article, Stories and Data in City Journal,

Coleman Hughes talked about how he at one point was fully on board of Black Lives Matter. He was all in on the narrative that racialized police shootings, that it was an epidemic, until he actually started to do the research for himself. Here's what he said. The basic, quote, the basic premise of Black Lives Matter that racist cops are killing unarmed black people, Coleman Hughes says, is false. For every black person killed by the police, there is at least one white person, usually many, killed it a similar way.

The day before cops in Louisville barged into Brianna Taylor's home and killed her, cops barged into the home of a white man named Duncan Limp, killed him and wounded his girlfriend. Even George Floyd, whose death was particularly brutal, has a white counterpart, Tony Tempa. We already read that story. He talks about how the police officers were cracking jokes in the criminal charges that were brought against them were later dropped. He says, you might agree that the police kill plenty of unarmed. white people, but you might object that they are more likely to kill unarmed black people, Coleman Hughes says, relative to their share of the population. That's where the data comes in.

The objection is true as far as it goes, but it is also misleading. To demonstrate the existence of a racial bias, it is not enough, and this is what is so important. It is not enough to cite the fact that black people comprise 14% of the population, but about 35% of unarmed Americans shot dead by the police. That is the statistic that you will see in the New York Times and the Washington Post and every Instagram infographic out there saying, look, this is an epidemic. This is happening a lot more to the black community than it is the white community. They say this, that black people comprise 14% of the population, but about 35% of unarmed Americans shot dead by the police. That is misleading and he explains why. He says, by that logic, you could prove that police shootings were extremely

sexist by pointing out that men comprise 50% of the population, but 93% of unarmed Americans shot by cops. But of course, you don't say that. You say, well, men commit the majority of the crimes. They have the majority of interactions with the police. So it makes sense proportionally that they would be, tragically, usually the victims of this. And so that logic to just use population size doesn't work. Coleman Hughes goes on. Instead, you must do what all good social scientists do. Control for confounding variables to isolate the effect that one variable has upon another. In this case, the effect of a suspect's race on a cop's decision to pull the trigger. At least four careful studies have done this. One by Harvard economist Roland Friar, one by a group of

public health researchers, one by economist Sindil Mulanathan, and one by David Johnson at all. None of these studies has found a racial bias in deadly shootings. Of course, that hardly settles the issue for all time. As always, more research is needed. I agree with Coleman Hughes on that. But given the study's already done, it seems unlikely that future work will ever uncover anything close to the amount of racial bias that BLM protesters in America and around the world believe exists. So when you control for all factors, when you control for a number of police interactions between white and black people, when you control, when you control for the factor of the crimes committed between the black community and the white community.

there is no from the data that we have from these studies that he cited there is no racial bias there is no disproportionate victimization of black people by the police we just do not see that according to the data and there has been study after study showing this and actually the roland uh the roland fryer study he is a black man and he did this study um for harvard university and he actually went into it thinking that he was going to to be able to prove racial bias and he just didn't find it. Again, read this article for yourself. Look at the studies for yourself when you control for all factors, which the people who just use the sheer population proportion of the black community do not control for all factors. When you control for all factors, you do not find, according to the status, there is a racialization, there is a racial aspect to these police shootings. And as Coleman Hughes said, studies actually do show the same role in Friar study shows that it does seem that non-white people are more likely to be

roughed up by the police, maybe not white police officers, but by the police in general than white people. We don't know if that's, you know, if there are racial motives there, but that does seem to show that. And we could certainly say that that's a problem. But as far as fatal force, we do not see, according to data set after data set, that there is a racialized aspect to this and that this is happening at epidemic levels or disproportionate rates at all in the black community versus the white community. And we have people like Sean King tweeting out, you know what? You guys deserve these riots.

You deserve the unrest. You deserve the arson. You deserve the violence. He tweeted that, you know, that's the only language that y'all hear. We tried peace and it just didn't work. And that's what we keep hearing that riots are the language of the unheard, that this is what people have to do. They have to loot.

They have to burn down. They have to steal. They have to assault. They have to kill. They have to block roadways. They have to ruin people's lives and livelihoods. They have to burn down a car shop in Minneapolis with a minority man that was inside that got burnt alive.

They have to do these things. They say in order for people to take them seriously. That is a myth. That's just not true. That is to say that we haven't made any progress since the civil rights area toward black Americans, toward non-white Americans. that is just not true. And Coleman Hughes talks about this in his article.

He says the case for violence rests on the false notion that without it, little progress can be made. Recent history tells a different story. In 2018, the NYPD killed five people down from 93 people in 1971. Since 2001, the national incarceration rate for black men ages 18 to 29 has gone down by more than half. Put simply, we know progress through normal democratic means is possible because we have already done it. And yes, there's no way that you can look throughout history over the past 50 years

and say that we have made no progress. Guys, in a single lifetime, in less than a lifetime, we went from segregation. We went from absolute institutionalized racism to having a black president two times in a row elected overwhelmingly. And no, that doesn't prove once and for all that America is not racist, that alone doesn't prove once and for all. But as John McWhorter said, who is also a black academic, that it does mean something. It does mean something that America overwhelmingly elected a black man to the highest office in our land. Just a few decades after America was provably, demonstrably, an institutionally racist country in many cases. I mean, we have made a lot of progress, guys. A lot of progress. Guys, a lot of progress.

through peaceful, democratic, and social means. Yes, we have. And so the idea that, oh, no, we need violence and we need arson to do this, I guarantee you it will be counterproductive. I guarantee you it will take us backwards, not forwards. And that is what Coleman Hughes argues as well. Now, he says, which of course I agree with in this article, in a perfect world, I would like to see the yearly number of unarmed Americans killed by police decreased from 55 to zero. But the more I think about how we would achieve this, the less optimistic I am at a glance copying the policies of nations with very few police shootings seems like a promising path. But on closer inspection, one realizes how uniquely challenging the American situation is. He says, he goes on to say, the only way

out of this conundrum, it seems to me, is for millions of Americans on the left to realize that deadly police shootings happen to blacks and whites alike. As long as a critical mass of people view this as a race issue, they will see every new video of a black person, being killed is yet another injustice and a long chain dating back to the middle passage. That sentiment, which is felt deeply and earnestly, will reliably produce large protests and destructive riots. But he says, if we can elevate the national discourse, if we can actually have that honest and uncomfortable conversation about race that people have been claiming to want for years, we might have a chance. And I agree. We have to be. We have to be. We have to be.

honest about these conversations, not just about policing and possibly racialized policing and police brutality, but about the whole idea of institutional and systemic racism in general. Because people don't seem to be able to define that, except in this intangible sense that the feeling of white supremacy still reigns. They point to disparities between blacks and whites. And for every disparity that they see, they see discrimination. For the millionth time, redistrimination and disparities by Thomas Sol, who also have. happens to be black, by the way, and you will see that disparities do not necessarily equal discrimination. And when you say, without a doubt, that they equal discrimination and therefore systemic racism,

you actually end up prescribing faulty solutions to a faulty problem when there actually might be a variety of factors for the disparate outcomes between the two groups. As I've said, many times, the most successful by a variety of factors groups in this country as far as median income, as far as average graduation rates, as far as family togetherness. So the rate of divorce, as far as all those factors go for family cohesiveness and general success and lack of poverty and high graduation rates and high test scores, those are the most successful people, according to those factors, are not white people in this country. It's East Asian Americans and Indian Asian Americans.

And so if there is a gap in success between the Asian. Americans and the white Americans where the white Americans, on average, aren't doing as well as the Indian and Asian Americans. Are you going to say that that disparity also means their systemic discrimination against white people? Of course you won't. And so you see the faulty reasoning for saying that all disparities between two groups equals automatically discrimination. It might in many cases, but it doesn't always. And so we have to be able to have those honest conversations. But so often when we're talking about police brutality, we're talking about race. Of course, racism does exist. Someone said the other day that, oh, you guys don't believe that racism

exists. I've said probably a million thousand hundred and seven times that, of course, racism exists because isms exist because hate exists in the human heart. And the Bible says you cannot love God and hate your brother. So racism is a sin, just like other isms. If you hate someone because of their skin color, if you hate someone because of their nationality, if you hate someone because of their age or their ability, whatever it is, that is all hate and that is condemned by God and it is a sin. Of course, racism exists. Racism is a sin. The question of whether or not we have an epidemic of police racism or whether or not America today in 2020 is institutionally racist, that is a different question and we have to start with the facts and we have to have an honest

conversation about it. But when we don't, when we immediately jump to conclusions, when we automatically slap the label of racism on something without knowing the facts, we raise the temperature in this country and we start justifying violence. We start justifying chaos and it doesn't help anyone. Disproportionately, the chaos, the riots, the burning down of buildings, the vandalism that is going on in this country in Portland, in Seattle, now in Kenosha, in places like Denver, New York City, the other democratically held cities, is disproportionately hurting other black people and other poor people that live in these inner cities. You are not hurting. In most cases, the rich and the powerful and the white people that

you claim are the ones who are holding up this oppressive system. So in Kenosha, when they are burning down these churches, when they are burning down car lots, when they are burning down buildings, you are not, you are not enacting justice. That is not justice. You are punishing innocent people who did nothing to Jacob Blake, who did nothing to George Floyd, who did nothing to any black person in America for the sake of anarchy. And they believe that this is the only language that is going, that they're going to hear and that is going to cause change, I guarantee you it will go backwards. And so what we have to do in order to lower the temperature and actually advance change if we want positive change to happen is to start with honesty.

We have to start with a truthful premise. We have to look at the statistics. For example, according to the Washington Post and their database, 14 in 2019, 14 on armed black men. Now, it used to be nine a few weeks ago. So I don't know how this changed. But 14 unarmed black people killed by the police in 2019. Their definition, by the way, Washington Post of unarmed is very almost inaccurate. Like we don't know for sure that this unarmed person, white or black, truly didn't have any kind of weapon. We don't know if they were fighting the police. We don't know if they were trying to run the police over with their car.

We don't know. All they're saying is that they didn't have like a knife or a gun on them. They could have been resisting arrest in another way. We just don't know. I'm not saying that justifies the police. shooting, but just know that even the definition of unarmed by Washington Post is a little bit, I don't want to say sketchy, but it's a little bit liberal. But according to their database, 14 unarmed black people were killed by the police in 2019,

25 unarmed white people killed by the police in 2019. And again, you can't make the argument. Well, that is, you know, black people only got 13% of the population and yet 35% of the unarmed police shootings. Again, you have to control for all. actors. Number of police interactions among each group, number of crimes committed among each group as the studies that we already cited do. We don't even know in these cases. So 14 unarmed black people killed by the police in 2019. We don't know if the officers in all of those cases were

white, probably not. Other studies show I think it's also the Roland Fryer study that shows that it's usually, it's typically black police officers that are policing. Black, communities. It is typically Hispanic police officers that are policing Hispanic communities. I think that's a good thing. I think that's how it should be. But we don't even know if all of these 14 unarmed black people killed by the police in 2019 were by white police officers. So that is the number, 25 unarmed white people killed by the police in 2019. Jason Riley, who is also black, says this in the Wall Street Journal. And I understand this is controversial. This is what he says. This happens to be a fact. and this is his analysis.

Jason Riley says this. So long as blacks are committing more than half of all murders and robberies while only making up 13% of the population and so long as almost all of their victims are their neighbors, these communities will draw the lion's share of police attention. Defunding the police are making it easier to prosecute officers while only result in more lives lost in those neighborhoods that need protecting. And of course we're seeing this right now.

There's a surge in violence in these inner cities that are mostly comprised of non-white people, of minority people in New York City, in places like Chicago, that crime is through the roof. Homicides are through the roof in numbers that we have not seen in decades. The majority of these victims are black young men, and it is because of the neutering of the police. In New York, they decided to divert a billion dollars, I believe, away from the NYPD. the same thing is happening in LA, the same thing is happening in San Francisco, the same thing is happening in Minneapolis, the same thing is happening in Austin.

I put this on my Instagram stories. There's a highlight on my Instagram that talks about all these and links the articles to all these situations where these cities that are led by Democrats have decided that they are going to neutered their police. They are going to weaken their police, take money away from their police, and they are seeing the effects of that right now. violent crime homicides, which are predominantly killing and affecting young black men. And I understand that people say, well, it's racist to point that out. It's racist to point out what Jason Riley said. But it's not. It doesn't say anything about black people in general or inherently. It is just a statistic.

It's just true that there is a disproportionate number of violent crimes and homicides. Unfortunately, in the black community. And we can talk about what causes. that. Yes, I believe that we can look at root causes, but that is a fact and that leads to a higher number of police interactions. That is the factor, again, that when we look at these police interactions, that has to be controlled for. And Jason Riley is also right in this Wall Street Journal article. Defunding the police are telling the police to stand down will only make things worse. That is why, according to Gallup, that the majority of black people, the vast majority of black people,

either want to maintain the level of policing that they have traditionally had or they want to increase the level of policing because it is law abiding, innocent and often vulnerable black people, women, children, the elderly, the disabled in these inner cities that cannot protect themselves that need the police to keep them safe. And they don't have the money to leave these inner cities when the police, because of their absence, have left them vulnerable. And so again, they are the ones that are disproportionately and negatively affected by these riots and this surge in crime because the Democrat's decision to take away a police presence. It hurts them. So again, this is another example of like what Thomas Sol calls Cosmic Justice in his book Quest for Cosmic Justice.

Social justice is very often really what they mean by that is cosmic justice, this intangible thing that can't actually be achieved because they want to accomplish. some kind of completely equal utopia where there are no disparities between people or between groups whatsoever and it's never accomplishable. And he argues that social justice actually very often is anti-social justice because what is disregarded in social justice initiatives is the cost to society. So a social justice initiative would be defunding the police or telling the police to stand down because you want there to be fewer cases of police brutality. You want the number of 15 unarmed black people to go down in this country.

And so you want to defund the police and get rid of the police altogether. Okay. Well, what's the other side of that equation? The other side of that equation is that crime goes up. And now there are dozens and dozens of young black men that are being killed by the hands of other black men. Is that better? So do we not care about, do we not care about black lives?

actually dying, do we only care about how they die? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me if you truly believe that Black Lives Matter. The fact of the matter is, is that the number one and two killers of young Black people in America's abortion and homicide. They are disproportionately represented in both categories. And again, we can talk about the reasons why this is the case. But we have to be factual about this. We do. In order to have an honest and a good conversation to take the temperature down and to try to move forward. We cannot jump to racism when we do not know. And that, of course, is what Joe Biden did. He sent out a statement saying this is another example of systemic racism. This is, this is racism. Of course, he doesn't put out any statement when the

races are exchanged, when they are different when it's a white person killed by a white police officer, a white person killed by a black police officer. This is the only instance in which he says something. This is not what brings people together. This is what divides people. This is what raises the temperature in this country. When you assume the motives of people without knowing, when you spin a narrative that is not based on fact. I am not denying that we have problems. I am not denying that prejudice exists. I am not denying that injustices in this country exists. Some of them exist in our justice system. I agree with you. But we have to start at a factual premise. And yes, Christians are bound to factual.

premises. Like we have to be. We are bound to objective truth. We are not bound to what the media says. We are not bound to a narrative on the left or the right. We are, we do not pledge allegiance to the police. We do not defend the police no matter what. And also we don't defend the other side no matter what. We say, I don't know what happened in the situation. I am going to look at the truth. I am going to look at the data. And then I am going to look at the word of God for what biblical justice looks like. This is what, according to God's word, justice. when it comes to due process in the court of law, this is what justice looks like. Yes, there are other kinds of justice in the Bible, like caring for the poor, caring for the least of these.

But when we're talking about justice of proving innocent or guilt, we don't assign those things according to people's skin color or socioeconomic status as Marxism does. We assign them according to the facts at hand. That is a biblical principle. Exodus 23-1-3, you shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. you shall not fall in with the many to do evil, nor shall you bear witness in a lawsuit, citing with the many so as to pervert justice,

nor shall you be partial to a poor man in his lawsuit. That's what Exodus 23, 1 through 3 says. Leviticus 1915, you shall do no injustice in court. You shall not be partial to the poor nor defer to the great. But in righteousness shall you judge your neighbor. And so God is very clear. You don't pick this eye, of the real oppressed or the perceived oppressed simply because they are poor,

and you don't side with the rich man or the great man or the famous man or the white man, whoever it is, just because they have those characteristics. But in righteousness and in truth, we judge our neighbor. Go read those passages, Exodus 23, 1 through 3, Leviticus, 1915. And no, we are not ancient Israel, but the principles of justice still apply. They're still good ideas. Listen to Deuteronomy 1915 through 21. I won't read the whole thing.

A single witness shall not suffice against a person for any crime or in any wrong in connection with any offense that he has committed only on the evidence of two witnesses or if three witnesses shall a charge be established. And so he talks again about not partially judging someone, not assuming the motives of someone, not incriminating someone just based on what you think or based on what an narrative is, but based on what actual truth is. The New Testament makes clear that God's judgment and therefore his definition of justice is impartial. Acts 1034, Peter preaching the gospel to the Gentiles, says this. So Peter opened his mouth and said, truly, I understand that God shows no

partiality, but in every nation, anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. James 28 through 9 says, if you really fulfill the royal law according to scripture, you shall love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. So God's justice is truthful, impartial, proportional, and direct. So that means if a police officer or anyone does target someone because of their skin color, does target someone because of their socioeconomic status, that is also unjust, according to God. But also, if we incriminate someone based on something that we assume, based on a popular narrative, that is also unjust, according to God.

It is also unjust for us to punish people, for activists to punish people who actually did not commit the crime by burning down their cities. That is not justice. And as I've already talked about, that actually is not an effective means of change. We've had very effective means of change. We have progressed so much as a country in this way through peaceful and democratic meets. So it is a myth to say, this is the only language that people hear. It is false.

It is just anarchy based on a faulty worldview, based on a postmodern godless worldview, that Christians should have no problem condemning in the same way that we should be condemning all forms of injustice, by the way. So the truth is important. The truth matters. The Bible, the biblical worldview matters. And this is another reason why I could not vote for Joe Biden, because he just like Barack Obama did it every chance he got.

He racialized something that we just didn't know. It might be racialized. It might have a racial motive, but we just didn't know, whether it was. was racial or not. And to make that assumption to spend that narrative to only put our attention on something that happens when it's a white person versus a black person raises the temperature. It raises the tensions. It makes the likelihood of violence higher. I'm not blaming Joe Biden for the violence. I'm not. But it exacerbates the tensions and the divisions that are going on. Everyone says that President Trump is the most divisive president out there. And they don't see how Barack Obama

that ignited these tensions so much while he was president just in the subtle way that he made everything that didn't have to do with race about race. Some things do have to do with race, but a lot of things don't. And again, for us to make that assumption without looking at the facts, for us to abandon biblical justice and biblical truth in exchange for a social justice narrative that only creates bitterness and anger and resentment rather than reconciliation, the thing that we all say that we want, then we are in sin. And that is not good. We can disagree on the subject, but we've got to start with honest and truthful premises. Okay, that's all I have time for today. I really want to talk about the RNC. The RNC has been

pretty good, y'all. It's been pretty good. Like, I'm very impressed. I underestimated the RNC, to be perfectly honest. Now, I thought their DNC had a lot of good parts, too, if I were a Democrat. I obviously think that the DNC is a Trojan horse for extremism for the things that we're seeing in our major cities right now. But I thought they did a pretty good job. I thought Michelle Obama, for example, gave a compelling address to the Democratic voters. But in my opinion, you've got doom and gloom of the DNC who truly believe that America is this horrible on the inside, just a rotting place. And then you've got the RNC who is saying, look, we have our flaws, we have our problems, we have our injustices. But America is a good country where people of all kinds can thrive by living their life according to certain principles.

And they've had a diverse range of people speak. And I'm very, I'm very impressed. I'm very impressed by that. I don't know if it's going to make a dent in the voting. Who knows? That's going to be a bunch of craziness. Anyway, I understand controversial episode. It's going to make some people mad.

You can reach out to me. You can let me know if it is. I'm happy to hear your perspective. You can send me counterfex. You can send me links. It's okay to have emotions in regard to this conversation. It is emotional. That's fine.

Emotions aren't bad. But again, we have to have a truthful premise. Okay. That's all for today. We'll see you guys back here on Friday. Hey, this is Steve Day. If you're listening to Allie, you already understand that the biggest issues facing our country aren't just political. They're moral, spiritual, and rooted in what we believe is true about God, humanity, and reality itself.

On the Steve Day show, we take the news of the day and tested against first principles, faith, truth, and objective reality. We don't just chase narratives and we don't offer false comfort. We ask the hard questions and follow the answers wherever they leave, even when it's unpopular. This is a show for people who want to be. on honesty over hype and clarity over chaos. If you're looking for commentary grounded in conviction and unwilling to lie to you about where we are or where we're headed, you can watch this D-Day show right here on Blaze TV or listen wherever you get podcasts.

I hope you'll join us.