RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/police-reform-and-the-making-of-a-racism-narrative/

This narrative is driving the nation to ruin.

Have you seen that mountain of evidence that Derek Chauvin is a racist? Me neither.

In that regard, I’m like the Wall Street Journal’s fearlessly fact-driven Jason Riley. Did some shred of racial animus motivate the since-fired Minneapolis police officer’s killing of George Floyd? For the moment, we have no proof of that — just a racialist narrative built on the happenstance (no reason to believe it’s more than that right now) that Chauvin is white and Floyd was black.

These days, alas, mere happenstance is enough to tear this nation asunder.

As an old investigator, I am intrigued by the fact that Minnesota attorney general Keith Ellison has refused to disclose police body-cam video of the moments leading up to Chauvin’s disturbing neck hold. Ditto the fact — highlighted in my analyses of the charges filed against the arresting officers (here and here) — that the state’s minute-by-minute recitation of probable cause omits whatever went on between Floyd and police inside the squad-car. Surely, if they helped the prosecution’s police-brutality allegations, those gaps in the complaint would have been filled.

Similarly, the fact that Minnesota police procedures permitted the use of neck holds for suspects resisting arrest has disappeared from the reporting. No chatter permitted, either, about the facts that Floyd (a) had a significant criminal record (though no new charges in recent years), (b) was suspected of passing a small amount of counterfeit money at the time of his arrest, and (c) was high on fentanyl and methamphetamine — a toxic combination whose ingestion was particularly dangerous for a person with his heart conditions.

Silence on these matters is partially explained by the admirably widespread desire not to besmirch a tragic victim, as well as the Left’s more-narrow determination to martyr Floyd for purposes of their police-racism narrative. The subject is also verboten, though, because the police were inconveniently recorded discussing their fear that Floyd might be experiencing excited-delirium syndrome. When police suspect that dangerous condition, their training calls for restraining the arrestee until emergency medical personnel arrive.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/understating-black-on-black-murders/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

About three weeks ago, we published my column, “The ‘Institutional Racism’ Canard.” In it, I made a point about black-on-black murders, drawing on FBI statistics from 2016. Though the data I drew from the published stats was accurate, there are caveats that I did not explain. When additional information is factored in, the problem is even worse than I suggested.

Specifically, I noted that Powerline’s Paul Mirengoff had drawn on FBI crime statistics for 2016 in support of the proposition that “of 776 black-white homicides, blacks committed 533 and whites 243.” I ended the paragraph with my own observation: “Neither of these numbers, by the way, nor their combined total, comes anywhere close to the number of blacks killed by blacks: a staggering 2,570 — the overwhelming majority male.”

We are going to remove that sentence, with a reference to this Corner post. As noted above, it accurately reflects what is set forth in the relevant table of the FBI’s 2016 crime statistics (Expanded Homicide Data Table 3), but it could be misleading. As an explanatory note explains, Table 3 “is based on incidents where some information about the offender is known by law enforcement.” That is, it “excludes data when the offender, age, sex, race, and ethnicity are all reported as unknown.” Moreover, Table 3 includes only murders where a single offender is known to have killed a single victim; that, too, omits a significant number of murders from the chart. Consequently, Table 3 breaks down only 6,676 murders that occurred in 2016.

As the FBI explains elsewhere in its compilation, however, there were an estimated 17,250 murders in the United States that year. In 7,881 of these, the victim was black.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/why-is-andrew-cuomo-bragging/

New York’s governor surveys the smoldering wreckage of the hardest-hit state and declares victory.

Andrew Cuomo is spiking the football, dunking the basketball, and dashing around the soccer field taking off his shirt. He’s spraying champagne all over Albany. He’s Muhammad Ali standing over the crumpled form of Sonny Liston in 1965: Boom, take that, coronavirus. Woo-hoo! Victory! Only 31,000 deaths. New York suffered through the equivalent of 9/11 times 11 but . . . yay?

“You played politics with this virus and you lost,” Cuomo said in an interview Thursday, referring to Florida governor Ron DeSantis, with whom Cuomo is engaging in a bizarre feud to rival his utterly nonsensical ongoing war with fellow liberal Democrat and New York City mayor Bill de Blasio. “It’s now undeniable this country paid a terrible price,” Cuomo continued, suggesting . . . what? That other states lacked the sage wisdom of Andrew Cuomo, slayer of the coronavirus? Thirty-one thousand New York families would like a word.

Last week, Cuomo saluted himself as he celebrated several weeks of encouraging coronavirus trends in his state by saying there was no longer a need for his daily press briefings, a habit for 111 days. “We showed that in the end, love does win. Love does conquer all — that no matter how dark the day, love brings the light,” he said. “That is what I will take from the past 111 days. And it inspires me and energizes me and excites me.”

https://nypost.com/2020/06/25/getting-realistic-about-the-coronavirus-death-rate/

With coronavirus infections rising again across the nation, the question of just how lethal the ­virus is has become more crucial than ever.

Early in the epidemic, public-health experts feared the virus might kill up to 2 percent of those infected, potentially causing millions of deaths in the United States and tens of millions worldwide. Those terrifying estimates prompted the lockdowns that have done incalculable harm to the economy, shattered small businesses and left children traumatized and untold numbers suffering from brutal isolation.

But we now know much more about the virus. And we know its lethality is lower than we originally feared — and highly concentrated in the very elderly and people with serious health problems.

In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ­esti­mated in May that the coronavirus kills about 0.26 percent of the people it infects, about 1 in 400 people. New estimates from Sweden suggest that only 1 in 10,000 people under 50 will die from the virus, compared to 1 in 14 of people over 80 and 1 in 6 of those over 90.

Estimates for the coronavirus’ lethality have fallen so sharply because calculating the ­so-called infection fatality rate requires scientists and physicians to know both the total number of deaths and the total number of people infected.