Jack Kelly Sunday

I guess Jack learned nothing from this column from last September.

Then, he was repugnant regarding the echoes of slavery.  This time it's Black Lives Matter.

Hm, I'm wondering if there's a common thread here triggering Jack's disgust.  Something that connects or otherwise overlaps those two issues - the first regarding the current effects of the past enslavement of African-Americans (aka "black people") here in Amurika and the second a movement formed to protest (among other things) police brutality called Black Lives Matter.

Hm.  Thinking.  Pondering.  Wondering.  WHAT COULD THOSE TWO ISSUES POSSIBLY HAVE IN COMMON THAT JUST MIGHT HAPPEN TO BOTHER POST-GAZETTE COLUMNIST JACK KELLY SO MUCH??

I think I know but I won't say because I could be wrong (but I don't think I am - in fact, I doubt even Wendy Bell could miss it).

Jack begins:

To assign the actions of one person to an entire movement is dangerous and irresponsible,” said Black Lives Matter after five Dallas police officers were killed during a BLM protest by a black man who was upset over recent incidents in which police officers killed black men.

BLM doesn’t practice what it preaches. Neither do President Barack Obama or most in the news media. It’s also dangerous and irresponsible to jump to conclusions when black men are shot by police.

The shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota “are symptomatic of …the racial disparities that appear across the [criminal justice] system year after year,” Mr. Obama said. But the more we learn about those shootings, the less it appears they were racially motivated.

Too bad, Jack didn't follow up on Obama's statement of July 7.  Had he, Jack would've seen this:

If communities are mistrustful of the police, that makes those law enforcement officers who are doing a great job and are doing the right thing, it makes their lives harder. So when people say “Black Lives Matter,” that doesn’t mean blue lives don’t matter; it just means all lives matter, but right now the big concern is the fact that the data shows black folks are more vulnerable to these kinds of incidents. [Emphasis added.]

Interestingly Jack tries to dance the data-dance, too!

Let's see how he does:

In what he said was “the most surprising result of my career,” Harvard professor Roland Fryer, who is black, found no evidence of racial bias in his study of shootings in 10 major police departments, although he did find that blacks were more likely to be cuffed or roughed up.

Here's that Harvard prof's study that Jack almost gets right.  Note what he tucks into the last phrase of that paragraph.  Professor Fryer describes what Jack rhymes into that phrase this way (this is from the intro to the paper Jack may or may not have read):

The results obtained using these data are informative and, in some cases, startling. Using data on NYC's Stop and Frisk program, we demonstrate that on non-lethal uses of force -   putting hands on civilians (which includes slapping or grabbing) or pushing individuals into a wall or onto the ground, there are large racial differences. In the raw data, blacks and Hispanics are more than fifty percent more likely to have an interaction with police which involves any use of force. Accounting for baseline demographics such as age and gender, encounter characteristics such as whether individuals supplied identification or whether the interaction occurred in a high- or low- crime area, or civilian behaviors does little to alter the race coefficient. Adding precinct and year fixed effects, which estimates racial differences in police use of force by restricting to variation within a given police precinct in a given year reduces the black coefficient by 19.4 percent and the Hispanic coefficient by 26 percent, though both are still statistically larger than zero. Including more than 125 controls available in the data, the odds-ratio on black (resp. Hispanic) is 1.173 (resp. 1.120).

To Jack, that was worth 10 words.

Jack also omits this part from the study:

Our results have several important caveats. First, all but one data set was provided by a select group of police departments. It is possible that these departments only supplied the data because they are either enlightened or were not concerned about what the analysis would reveal. In essence, this is equivalent to analyzing labor market discrimination on a set of firms willing to supply a researcher with their Human Resources data! There may be important selection in who was willing to share their data. The Police-Public contact survey partially sidesteps this issue by including a nationally representative sample of civilians, but it does not contain data on officer-involved shootings.

Relatedly, even police departments willing to supply data may contain police officers who present contextual factors at that time of an incident in a biased manner - making it difficult to interpret regression coefficients in the standard way.

So the data used might be accurate but (maybe) not indicative of the whole picture OR it might not be reliable.

Or as is stated at Slate:

Fryer was quite explicit about the fact that his data were specific to Houston and more data are needed in order to understand whether police shootings are racially biased in other parts of the country.

Did Jack tell you any of that?

No, he didn't.  It could've put some nuance and context in this us-versus-them, black-and-white column.  He could have put it there, but he didn't.  He doesn't want nuance.  He doesn't want context.  And now you should ask yourself why.

Then look at these paragraphs from Jack Kelly's column:

When Mr. Obama was elected, the silver lining in the cloud I saw descending on America was that the election of the first (half) black president might promote racial healing. But he’s been the most racist president since Woodrow Wilson.

For every black person killed by a white cop, 71 blacks are killed by other blacks. The real tragedy is that so many blacks must live in inner-city neighborhoods where gangs run riot, schools are terrible, jobs are scarce.

Whites aren’t to blame for the terrible conditions in which so many blacks live. Those at fault are local government officials (Democrats mostly), politicians in Washington whose policies hurt black families (Democrats mostly), and blacks themselves.

Problem solved!  Racism in this country isn't the fault of anyone other than the Democrats who run things locally and nationwide AND blacks themselves!  And the (half) black president is also to blame for not cleaning up 600 years the mess in a measly 8!

Can Jack Kelly be any more of an embarrassment to the P-G?

I'll give the president the penultimate word:

And so when African Americans from all walks of life, from different communities across the country, voice a growing despair over what they perceive to be unequal treatment; when study after study shows that whites and people of color experience the criminal justice system differently, so that if you’re black you’re more likely to be pulled over or searched or arrested, more likely to get longer sentences, more likely to get the death penalty for the same crime; when mothers and fathers raise their kids right and have “the talk” about how to respond if stopped by a police officer -- “yes, sir,” “no, sir” -- but still fear that something terrible may happen when their child walks out the door, still fear that kids being stupid and not quite doing things right might end in tragedy -- when all this takes place more than 50 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we cannot simply turn away and dismiss those in peaceful protest as troublemakers or paranoid. (Applause.) We can’t simply dismiss it as a symptom of political correctness or reverse racism. To have your experience denied like that, dismissed by those in authority, dismissed perhaps even by your white friends and coworkers and fellow church members again and again and again -- it hurts. Surely we can see that, all of us.

And Roland Fryer the last:

Black Dignity Matters.