There are a few more points to make about conservative justice before we move on to show how liberal justice is not biblical either. And is in some senses even worse than conservative justice. However, it is highly probable that this post will take up the entirety of concerns for conservative justice and its marketing as "biblical justice." And apologies in advance, but this will be a longer article than I usually write because of the scope of this particular issue. As I stated in part one of this post, what I have written below is just the tip of the iceberg.
In part one of this post, I summarized some essential conservative beliefs. After which I concluded by saying, "On the face of it, there is nothing inherently sinful about this position. However, the devil is in the details." The reason that sentence is important is so that people can remember that the nature of my concerns aren't necessarily about policy as much as they're about personality. To borrow from a Jonathan Edwards title, "Charity and it's fruits," I am concerned with conservatism and its fruits.
There are other people who focus on policies, and the biblical, or lack thereof, content in them. I am more concerned with the character, and the lack thereof in the application of conservative justice. Especially since many conservative Christians believe their positions to be fundamentally biblical. All this to say, my posts are pointed towards "justice," not if limited government is unbiblical, etc. And by justice I am referring to how conservative justice treats image bearers, particularly those who do not “fit the narrative” of conservative justice.
There are a few areas to consider where conservative justice, though being paraded around by Christians on the “right” as truth, is not biblical justice. Conservative Justice focuses more on penalization than rectification. The loudest voices representing this side seemingly care more about punishment than environment. Again, the most concerning element of conservative justice is not primarily its tenets, but that many Christians see its tenets as biblical, and will sin, seemingly without conviction, when someone opposes them. Let’s begin.
Facts on black crime
It is a well known fact the conservatives are the “law and order” party. From Nixon and Reagan, up to Donald Trump, the “tough on crime” mantra has been a big part of campaign rhetoric. This has “shockingly” allowed for many conservatives to be aloof towards the concerns raised by many in the black community. In a recent American Enterprise Institute journal article entitled, “Conservatives and Criminal Justice, Steven Teles & David Dagan try to explain the history of Conservatives and the evolution of their criminal ideology.
““The opportunity to address the problem of mass incarceration did not arise solely from the genius of activists. It was made possible by the decline of the forces that had once made crime and punishment such a compelling issue, especially for Republicans. Ever since the New Deal, Republicans faced a daunting electoral problem: As long as the Democrats were seen as the party of the working- and middle-classes, the Republicans would be left in the unenviable position of playing the moon to the Democrats' sun. To break that alignment in the minds of voters, Republicans needed to re-orient the American political system around a new class conflict.”
“Their opportunity came in the 1960s and 1970s, as anxiety over civil rights, raucous campus protests, and the march of feminism fueled a sense that the nation's elites were no longer willing to enforce social order. The sense of a society spinning out of control was underscored by the urban riots that followed the Civil Rights movement and by a terrifying increase in the homicide rate, which doubled between 1960 to 1980.”
“Conservative leaders tapped into these anxieties with racially tinged rhetoric that at times conflated political protest with violence and posited a direct link between welfare and crime. Conservatives promised that they would push back against disorder in all of its guises by re-imposing social authority. They promised to take the gloves off the parts of government that defended social order, such as cops and prison guards, while lambasting "elite" liberals who they claimed were weakening the capacity of government to crack down.“
There are various studies that confirm this narrative as the backdrop to the conceptual framework conservatives have on criminal justice. As recent as George H. W. Bush’s “Willie Horton” ad campaign; that for organizations like the History Channel was an “ad that played on racism and fear;” the overtly racial and criminal alliances were formed as talking points for the conservative justice manifesto. Blacks are the dangerous problem, and police, and private prisons, are the solution.
There are, however, a few problems with this “manifesto:”
Crime is associated with skin color and not class color
Global organization Ersi, “the global market leader in GIS,” uses cutting edge software in the geographic sciences to evaluate data analytics, “to help solve some of the world’s most difficult problems.” In a study on the correlation between crime rate and poverty they found:
People living in households in the US that have an income level below the Federal poverty threshold have more than double the rates of violent victimization compared to individuals in high-income households.
For both whites and blacks/African-Americans in the US, the overall pattern of being in poverty with the highest rates of victimization was consistent.
Urban poverty increased the risks of violence and crime for US households, but did not change the racial risk factors.
Translation: Wherever poor people are, crime will be higher. Crime isn’t a race issue as much as it’s class issue. Poor white people will be victimized by other poor white people. Poor black people will be victimized by other Poor black people. If there is a color to crime it is not black, it’s green. The lack of money creates a world of problems in a country that prides itself on capital. This is why you never hear of shootouts or violent crimes from street gangs in affluent neighborhoods. When’s the last time you heard of a shootout in Beverly Hills? It is simply a living illustration of Lord of the Flies. Left without certain resources, anytime is susceptible to do the unthinkable.
Statista ranked the top 50 most dangerous cities in the world by murder per 100,000 people. There were four that were American: St. Louis, Missouri (13), Baltimore (21), New Orleans, Louisiana (41), Detroit, Michigan (42). Even if you factor in Cape Town, South Africa (15) and Kingston, Jamaica (16), as “black on black crime,” you have 44 other cities that have to little to no black people in them. You know what you do have in those cities? Very poor people.
Ersi understands this and their soft solution was, “The level of poverty in one area does impact that same area's crime rate. Although there are other factors to committing crime, poverty is a big one. Using our resources and focus to help solving poverty and raising the income levels will lead to positive changes in crime and result in a lower crime rate.”
There is so much more that could be said about this but there’s so much more I need to say about other things.
Black on Black crime
Despite the fact that organizations like the Brennan Center For Justice, Statista’s violent crime rates report, and many other studies show, “violent crime rates have fallen by over 50% in many major U.S. cities since these rates peaked in the early 1990s, often referred to as the "Great Crime Decline;" the notion of “black on black” crime stats stay on the lips of conservative justice advocates. This perspective is “strange” to the perception gap organizations that are trying to figure out what is causing the perception that crime is worse now than 30 years ago. There are some great speculations based on credible data, but I will not be posting them in this article. It is important, though, to ask why black on black crime is regularly brought up?
Naïveté would say, it is brought up out of concern for the black community. Or maybe people are simply trying to discuss the socio-economic conditions within the black community and their adverse effects. Nope. The overwhelming evidence points to black on black crime stats being used to silence the concerns that many in the black community have about excessive force from Law Enforcement. With skilled precision, just after a video of someone black being killed by police, Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, and others, including high profile Christians are quick to highlight that a media narrative/Marxist ideology is at play. It is then, that the attention shifts to the criminal history, and, or the scrutinization of the actions of the one killed, highlighting every imperfect moment.
With the goal of taking away any credibility of the concerns of black people, coupled with a rebuke of what the priorities of black people should be (intraracial conflict, abortion, etc), criminal stats are weaponized as a proverbial, “hush your mouth up” to cries of racism, systemic, or circumstantial.
The conversations usually go something like this:
Black people are 13% of the population but commit 52% of the murders
Black people commit more violent crimes than white people and will have more fatal contact with Law Enforcement
According to the Washington Post 9 black men were shot and killed last year (less than 1%) as opposed to thousands of abortions)
We’re talking about “a few bad apples at best” when discussing the police, the majority of these shootings of unarmed black men happen because black people do not comply with the police
There’s more but you get the point.
There is some tryth (Truth and myth) to each of these arguments but from my limited research, the scales are tipping on the myth side. To prove that, my focus will be on the percentages of crime stats because these are easily remembered, repeated as fact, and shape conservative justice Christians the most.
The crime stats listed above are usually quoted from Table 43 of the FBI Crime in the United States report. A few things to note about this chart:
This targets arrests not convictions. Some of these arrests were found not guilty
Race and ethnicity are calculated separately
Race is listed as:
White
Black or African American
American Indian or Alaskan Native
Asian
Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander
Ethnicity is listed as:
Hispanic or Latino
Not Hispanic or Latino
This means Iraqi’s, Pakistani, Russians, anyone that’s not considered a “race” or Hispanic or Latino that is arrested for a crime
The crime stats totals are not combined. They isolate them by trace or ethnicity
Race is not confused as ethnicity, nor is ethnicity confused with race
This means that black people are not mistaken as an ethnicity. The numbers are what they are
With all of this in mind, let’s take a closer look at how dangerous black people are
Under “race” the FBI arrests numbers are as follows:
Murder 7,964
Whites- 3650
Blacks- 4078 (52%)
At 13% of the population (43,000,000) blacks were arrested for 4,078 murders in 2019
That means that 0.00009484% of black people committed a murder in 2019. Less than 1%.
Do you ever hear that stat from Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro, or your friendly neighborhood evangelical conservative justinian?
If we factor in the arrests for murder under ethnicity (14,438), arrests for murder attributed to black people drops to 28.2%
From here on out I will be combining race & ethnic crime stats
Rape 30,771 (race & ethnicity combined)
Whites- 11,588
Blacks- 4,427
Robbery 107,010
Whites- 25,143
Blacks- 29,677
Aggravated Assault 517,655
Whites- 169, 467
Blacks- 91,164
Burglary 224,401
Whites- 81,104
Blacks- 34,188
Property Crime 1,439, 367
Whites-517,502
Blacks- 231,087
Sex Offenses (except rape & prostitution 53,451)
Whites- 21,360
Blacks- 5,903
Drug Abuse violations 1,998,885
Whites- 748,874
Blacks- 274,670
Driving under the influence
Whites- 526,928
Blacks- 90,888
All other offenses (except traffic) 4,063, 374
Whites- 1,532,998
Blacks- 577, 689
Out of the 30 crimes listed in the FBI Crime Report black people lead in two categories over white people (murder & robbery). It is absurd to talk as if the overwhelming majority of crime committed is by black people. It is intellectually dishonest, and an assault on image bearers that live with a stigma of being “prone to violence and criminality.” I didn’t even include the exoneration numbers; people who were convicted, sent to prison, and were later (sometimes decades later) released as innocent. The majority of these people are black.
This happens quite a bit because people in poorer communities can’t afford good legal representation. We get the impression from crime shows on TV’s to most criminals are found guilty by a jury trial where their guilt was clearly discernible by 12 jurors. Not quite.
Pew Research Center did a “fact tank” study and released its findings on June 11, 2019. “Nearly 80,000 people were defendants in federal criminal cases in fiscal 2018, but just 2% of them went to trial. The overwhelming majority (90%) pleaded guilty instead, while the remaining 8% had their cases dismissed…Put another way, only 320 of 79,704 total federal defendants – fewer than 1% – went to trial and won their cases, at least in the form of an acquittal, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.”
The innocence project, an organization partly responsible for exonerations of those falsely accused, stated, “Over the last 50 years, defendants chose trial in less than three percent of state and federal criminal cases—compared to 30 years ago when 20 percent of those arrested chose trial. The remaining 97 percent of cases were resolved through plea deals.” Other studies show that 97% of federal cases get a guilty verdict without a trial (plea deal). 94% of state cases, as well, get convictions by plea deal, not by a jury trial.
What does this mean?
Anyone charged with a crime must be given legal representation. That representation is also called a public defender. But they don’t necessarily defend the public. At least not their clients. They work for the state (the people trying to put criminals in prison). Because it costs money to go to trial, a public defender’s real job is to try to get defenders to take a plea deal. Often with the threat that a “criminal trial will guarantee a longer prison sentence if founds guilty,” many defendants opt out and take a plea deal, believing they are being helped by their “lawyer;” whose boss just so happens to be at the table to their right (District Attorney).
Many stories have surfaced to reveal an insidious plot to scare criminals into plea deals, of which some, who already have little confidence in the “just “part of the justice system, fall victim too. I’m not saying innocence is the norm for people facing criminal charges, but that the manipulation to take a deal guarantees victory for the state, quotas for police, and a statistic for the “right.” The narrative has been skewed for a long time, and believers, have been following the lead from conservative justice (CJ) ideologues on how to treat these Image bearers more than Biblical Justice. In the forthcoming book “Will the real Justice please stand up,” I will give more details to demonstrate how serious of a problem this is. All of this is in the backdrop of the narrative of police brutality from one side, and police having “a few bad apples” on the other side.
The “a few bad apples” manifesto
As I explained above, the description of police who go beyond what is necessary, even when killing an unarmed black person, is relegated to being “a few bad apples.” This statement may appear harmless but is most often used, to displace the cry of many black people about police misconduct. The “a few bad apples “ statement is insensitive at best, and sinfully loveless at worst.
Insensitive because it reinforces a narrative that the cries of many black people are merely playing the victim and believing “a leftist narrative.” Surely, black men are not being hunted by police and have no reason to fear being gunned down by them. If there are racist police they are few and far between. Here’s where the bad apples manta is sinfully loveless. Its motive is to prove blacks are lying about their experiences. This creates a further wedge, primarily, between white evangelical conservatives and black Christians who have concerns that law enforcement disproportionately targets the black community.
There are many problems with thinking police just have “a few bad apples.” Below are some of them:
The language doesn’t line up with scripture
Anyone who is Reformed will mostly have a view of humanity as totally depraved. Through God’s common grace, humanity is restrained from being as evil as we could be, but outside of Christ, the unregenerate are not necessarily morally trustworthy. In 2019, there were 697, 195 law enforcement officers in the US. Are we too assume that only a few of these people are bad? And how many is a few? And does anyone care about the damage a bad apple can do? We’ll come back to this in a bit.
Since police kill more white people then black people it is not systemic racism or white supremacy
This logic is the buttered biscuit of conservative justice warriors. In his book “fault lines” Voddie Baucham spends some time making this argument. And while I think most would agree that the vast majority of police are not white supremacist, there are plenty of reasons to say “not so fast,” in seeing the police, as just a few bad apples.
When Candace Owens, Ben Shapiro and others say police aren’t racist because white police kill white people just like they kill black people, they almost always mention whites who were gunned down by police. Tony Timpa gained notoriety after the murder of George Floyd because he was killed by police who kept their knees on his back for 13 minutes. Police, again, shot and killed Daniel Shaver, Andrew Thomas, Michael Parker, Dylan Noble, and Brandon Stanley, but those stories did not get the publicity that people like Philando Castile, Walter Scott, and Alton Sterling got. From CJ’s standpoint this disproves racism and leans more towards media bias. I say bogus, for two reasons.
There are a number of reasons for the disparities of what the media shows. But can someone answer this question for me, when has the media not been biased (more on this in a future post)? Were they unbiased before Mike Brown was killed and now all of a sudden they have a left bias? Aren’t Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro media? So if media is biased, doesn’t that include them? All of the white people listed above that were killed by police were mostly seen by /dashcam police footage. In Tony Tampa’s case. He was killed in 2016. Police told his mom that they found him dead. However, when the police bodycam footage was released three years later in 2019, it shows that they lied to Vicki Timpa’s (Tony’s mom). The police were responsible for Tony Timpa’s death. CNN, Slate, and The New York Times converted the story, but CJA’s are blaming media for people being unaware of his death.
Yet, I didn’t hear outrage from Shapiro, Candace Owens, and others about the story. I didn’t see the traditional character takedown of Tony like we saw with Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd. They’re outraged bcuz the “media” didn’t give him the same coverage as George Floyd. But media includes them. The reality is, Tony Timpa, and the white people who are killed by police are a prop for conservatives. They use them solely to make the point that police aren’t racist. There is no love or concern for the injustice done to that image bearer, or the impact on his mother. If they would’ve brought Tony Timpa’s mom, Vicki, on their shows, she would’ve lit a fire under the Dallas police department. They won’t, though, because it doesn’t “fit their narrative” of a “few bad apples.” The police were wrong, and Vicki Timpa has been saying it to anyone who will listen.
Black people celebrate the worst of our race as heroes
Candace Owens has given George Floyd a couple of eulogies. Her sermons are somewhat repetitive. And they have become a conservative justice favorite, as they focus on the sinful parts of the person that was killed, almost as if to say he got what he deserved what , or that he was a scum bag not worthy of any notoriety. In her most recent sermon, Candace, again, shared these kinds of comments about George Floyd.
“He left a wake of victims. That Is what happened, he had so many victims throughout his life. But right now, the world has decided that he is the most wonderful human being. You’re not allowed to talk about his record. You’re not allowed to talk about any of his—. There are children running around with George Floyd shirts. There are murals that are being constructed, dedicated to George Floyd because his name is now being synonymous with justice. I guess my question, justice for who?”
To be fair, she makes some good points. I can understand why she is saying what she’s saying. But my main concern for her, and those conservative justice advocates, is that they critique the very thing celebrate.
There are:
700 Confederate monuments
300+ in Georgia, Virginia & North Carolina
103 K-12 schools & 3 colleges named after Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, etc.
80 Counties and cities named for Confederates
9 observed state holidays in 5 states
10 US military bases named for confederates
Coffee mugs, tees, and Flags sold across the country, crating enormous revenue for the celebration of racists and slavery
Robert E. Lee killed American soldiers and was a traitor. If we pulled out his rap sheet it would be worse than George Floyd’s. And yet people on the CJ side, until recently, have had no problem honoring him. It is of the highest order of hypocrisy to denigrate George Floyd and to simply reduce justifying the confederacy to History. Building memorials for men who committed treason in the name of preserving slavery is a sad display of how seriously America takes the painful legacy that slavery was for black people. The Lost Cause. Yeah right.
In Germany, there are no nostalgic Nazi memorials. In fact, it is a federal crime in some European countries to brandish a swastika. To go even further, webzine news site UPI, in an article entitled, “Italian Parliament introduces Holocaust denial legislation,” says, “Holocaust denial is already either implicitly or explicitly a crime in 17 countries, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Switzerland and Romania.” It’s a crime to deny the atrocities of the Holocaust. But in America we celebrate the atrocities of chattel slavery, disavowing the pain it has caused many blacks, all for the sake of history. Whose history though?
Police can’t be racist because they kill White people all the same
This is the steak, cooked medium, for the CJ ideology to prove that there is no consistent racist component on the police’s part because they kill white people. While I do not think that most cops are racists, I do think there’s reason to be suspicious. By God's providence, I have a few cops that are members of my church; I love them, those are my dudes. Even they have told me stories that have given them concerns.
There are fundamental problems with the idea that police can't be racist/white supremacist because they kill white people. This kind of logic seems flawless until you realize that white supremacy is not necessarily about pigmentation.
What color were the Jews that Hitler killed?
Charlottesville Va., August 11-12, at the “Unite the Right” march, self proclaimed white supremacist chanted, "The Jews will not replace us! You will not replace!" By the two year anniversary of the Unite the Right march white supremacists committed at least 73 murders since Charlottesville, 39 of which were clearly motivated by hateful, racist ideology. These numbers include the deadly white supremacist shooting rampages in Parkland, Pittsburgh, Poway and El Paso, the deadliest white supremacist attack in more than 50 years. In each of these cities, white supremacist murderers acted on the threat embodied in the chant made famous in Charlottesville: “Jews will not replace us! You will not replace us!”
What color were the Jews that they were worried would replace them? They were white. White Supremacists also kill white people because white supremacy is an ideology as much as it's a skin issue. There is a certain type of white person they care about. White supremacist have no problem letting that ideology become their functional reality.
June, 1, 2019, Buzzfeed covered a story on this very issue. The headline of the article read, "Cops Across The US Have Been Exposed Posting Racist And Violent Things On Facebook. Here's The Proof." The subtitle said, "A review of the Facebook accounts of thousands of officers around the US — the largest database of its kind — found officers endorsing violence against Muslims, women, and criminal defendants."
The rest of the article, borrowing data from "Injustice Watch," the article stated,"Police officers saying bigoted and racist things online has been an issue since the beginning of social media. The behavior was especially scrutinized after the Black Lives Matter movement blasted into the national conversation — and that scrutiny has continued ever after that movement began grappling with its future. What was never really captured was the scope of problematic online posts from police officers. But a new review of police behavior on Facebook documents the systemic nature of the conduct across several departments. The Plain View Project, launched by Philadelphia lawyer Emily Baker-White, examined the accounts of about 2,900 officers from eight departments across the country and an additional 600 retired officers from those same departments. She compiled posts that represented troubling conduct in a database that is replete with racist imagery and memes, and in some cases long, vitriolic exchanges involving multiple officers."
Injustice Watch had some troubling conclusions about racist police after reviewing significant data to present their concerns to law enforcement agencies across the country. "The project was able to identify about 1 in 5 of the roughly 14,400 officers on the rosters through a combination of profile name, URLs, photographs, badge numbers, and other identifying information. Many officers could not be included because they had common names or used nicknames, their profiles were private, or they did not have a Facebook profile...In Philadelphia, which has roughly 6,600 officers, the Plain View Project identified 1,073 on Facebook, about a third of whom had made troubling posts or comments. The Plain View Project shared its research with Injustice Watch, a Chicago-based nonprofit newsroom, which discovered many officers who made offensive posts were also accused of brutality or civil rights violations. Of 327 officers in Philadelphia who posted troubling content, more than a third — 138 officers — appeared to have had one or more federal civil rights lawsuits filed against them, based on name, badge number, and other corroborating details. Of that group, 99 ended in settlements or verdicts against them or the city."
On April 16, 2021, The Washington Post, reported, "Fairfax County prosecutors are moving to throw out more than 400 criminal convictions based on the testimony or work of a former patrol officer who is accused of stealing drugs from the police property room, planting drugs on innocent people and stopping motorists without legal basis, court filings show. In a hearing Friday, a Fairfax judge said he was inclined to vacate felony drug and gun convictions against a former D.C. firefighter and order him released from prison next week after serving nearly two years because of the actions of former officer Jonathan A. Freitag...Fairfax prosecutors said Freitag had been involved in 932 total cases during his three years as an officer, mostly traffic and misdemeanors, resulting in about 400 convictions. Seven were felonies, prosecution spokesman Ben Shnider said. Prosecutors have dismissed at least 21 cases which were pending, including a case where a man was charged with felony assault on Freitag, but the former D.C. firefighter Elon Wilson is the only defendant currently incarcerated. Wilson’s case would be the first conviction to be vacated as a result of Freitag’s actions. Freitag has not been charged with any crimes, but prosecutors said a criminal investigation of him is ongoing."
As you can see, a few bad apples can damage a lot of people's lives. Please remember that the next time you hear "a few bad apples..."
Again, this is just the tip of the iceberg.
A darker secret
The National Center for Women and Policing noted in two comprehensive studies in 2014, "Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general." Cops "typically handle cases of police family violence informally, often without an official report, investigation, or even check of the victim's safety," the summary continues. "This 'informal' method is often in direct contradiction to legislative mandates and departmental policies regarding the appropriate response to domestic violence crimes." Finally, "even officers who are found guilty of domestic violence are unlikely to be fired, arrested, or referred for prosecution."
An article in The Atlantic reporting on a NY Times article further explained, "In some instances, researchers have resorted to asking officers to confess how often they had committed abuse. One such study, published in 2000, said one in 10 officers at seven police agencies admitted that they had “slapped, punched or otherwise injured” a spouse or domestic partner. A broader view emerges in Florida, which has one of the nation’s most robust open records laws. An analysis by The Times of more than 29,000 credible complaints of misconduct against police and corrections officers there strongly suggests that domestic abuse had been underreported to the state for years. After reporting requirements were tightened in 2007, requiring fingerprints of arrested officers to be automatically reported to the agency that licenses them, the number of domestic abuse cases more than doubled—from 293 in the previous five years to 775 over the next five. The analysis also found that complaints of domestic violence lead to job loss less often than most other accusations of misconduct."
What does all of this mean?
One, there are more than just a few bad apples in law enforcement. That rhetoric is dismissive of a deeper darker reality. Ask Dottie Davis, a former deputy police chief of Fort Wayne, Ind., who was battered by her domestic partner, also an officer, if she thinks there's just a few bad apples. Two, if it's difficult for some officers to restrain themselves with their own wives and children, what confidence should we have that they will restrain themselves with anyone else? Especially in highly pressurized situations. I'm sorry but police have not attained a level of sanctification that they are so above the complaints of many in the black community, that the only possibility is that black people are believing a "leftist narrative," because there are only "a few bad apples." Three, I'm not saying that this proves white supremacy is the main cause, or even the cause of police shootings. What I am saying is, don't pee on me and tell me it's raining.
Roland Fryer, a professor of economics at Harvard, has the most quoted study on policing by the "right." In a Wall Street Journal article published on June 22, 2020, he made it clear what his study does and does not say. "To my dismay, this work has been widely misrepresented and misused by people on both sides of the ideological aisle. It has been wrongly cited as evidence that there is no racism in policing, that football players have no right to kneel during the national anthem, and that the police should shoot black people more often."
He also listed with statistical proof these findings:
There are large racial differences in police use of nonlethal force. My research team analyzed nearly five million police encounters from New York City. We found that when police reported the incidents, they were 53% more likely to use physical force on a black civilian than a white one.
Compliance by civilians doesn’t eliminate racial differences in police use of force. Black civilians who were recorded as compliant by police were 21% more likely to suffer police aggression than compliant whites. We also found that the benefits of compliance differed significantly by race. This was perhaps our most upsetting result, for two reasons: The inequity in spite of compliance clashed with the notion that the difference in police treatment of blacks and whites was a rational response to danger. And it complicates what we tell our kids: Compliance does make you less likely to endure a beat-down—but the benefit is larger if you are white
We didn’t find racial differences in officer-involved shootings. No matter how we analyzed the data, we found no racial differences in shootings overall, in any city in particular, or in any subset of the data. I have grappled with these results for years as I witnessed videos of unmistakable police brutality against black men. How can the data tell a story so different from what we see with our eyes? Our analysis tells us what happens on average. It isn’t average when a police officer casually kneels on someone’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Are there racial differences in the most extreme forms of police violence? The Southern boy in me says yes; the economist says we don’t know.
In response to people using his study to disprove racism by police Roland Fryer said this, "People who invoke our work to argue that systemic police racism is a myth conveniently ignore these statistics (the first two bullets above). Racism may explain the findings, but the statistical evidence doesn’t prove it. As economists, we don’t get to label unexplained racial disparities “racism.” Conservative Justice Advocates need to stop cherry picking their data. At best the issue is complicated. And there are credible studies that rival the "bad apples" mantra conservatives use.
Conclusion
Having said all of this, here in lies a major problem for conservative justice advocates, Biblical justice is not measured simply by what a person believes, but by what a person does. Jesus made it clear when he said, "These people honor me with their lips but their hearts are far from me." And based on what I'm seeing among the evangelical landscape, he is talking about a lot us who profess to believe, but can't muster up the courage to love those we disagree with. Nor humbly acknowledge that there are significant problems on both sides of the application of justice, and are willing to point them out in lieu of Ephesians 5:11 and other verses.
If Proverbs 18:17 is going to be the measuring ground for truth, then you have to make sure that your conclusion isn't merely a mental ascent to what you heard first, as opposed to investigating other claims to see if there is truth in them. While it is true that there are some playing the victim, and casting their crowns at the feet of CRT, and other frameworks, it is certainly not the case for all. This is a complicated issue. Much more than people being woke, Marxists, believing a "a leftist narrative," and whatever else that is used to release people's consciences.
Contending for the faith has made many contentious in the faith. And my concern is that we are seeing the vestiges of biblical faith, and are at the cusp of the "Great Falling Away;" not because people are verbally denouncing Christ, but that they are morally walking away from the love that is commanded by Him. We must never forget that loving one another is a sign of genuine conversion (1 John 4:20). Contending for the faith, eh, not so much. We are called to be people who love image bearers, treating them as we ourselves would like ti be treated (Matt. 7:12). Can you honestly say that God approves of the way you have carried yourself towards those you disagree with on matters related to justice? Do you think it's going to matter that you contended for the faith against CRT, but you lost your soul in being bitter and demeaning towards those who believed in it?
There is so much that could be said. And it will be in the book. This post was really concerned with one component of Conservative Justice masking itself as biblical justice. Again, this is the tip of the iceberg but I need to address Liberal Justice in the next post. From my vantage point it is not biblical at all, and believers are lining up beside it, creating division for something that God is ultimately going to judge them for. until we meet again!
You can’t handle the truth! But thanks for reading and hopefully sharing this article with others.
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