Black Lives or Black Lies?

Here are some facts about race and crime in America from Heather Mac Donald:

* Blacks constituted 62% of all robbery defendants in America's 75 largest counties in 2009, 57% of all murder defendants and 45% of all assault defendants, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, even though blacks comprise only 15% of the population in those counties.

* In New York City, where blacks make up 23% of the city's population, blacks commit three-quarters of all shootings and 70% of all robberies, according to victims and witnesses in their reports to the New York Police Department. Whites, by contrast, commit less than 2% of all shootings and 4% of all robberies, though they are nearly 34% of the city's population.

* In Chicago, 80% of all known murder suspects were black in 2015, as were 80% of all known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are a little less than a third of the population. Whites made up 0.9% of known murder suspects in Chicago in 2015 and 1.4% of known nonfatal shooting suspects, though they are about a third of the city's residents.

* Police shootings are responsible for a lower percentage of black homicide deaths than white and Hispanic homicide deaths. Twelve percent of all whites and Hispanics who die of homicide are killed by police officers, compared to 4% of black homicide victims.

* More blacks die each year from homicide, more than 6,000, than homicide victims of all other races combined. Their killers are not the police, and not whites, but other blacks.

* Blacks commit homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined.

* Black males between the ages of 14-17 commit gun homicide at nearly 10 times the rate of white and Hispanic male teens combined.

* The most sophisticated lab study of police shoot-don't-shoot decisions to date found that officers were three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects and took significantly longer to decide to shoot armed black suspects than armed white suspects.

* Harvard economist Roland Fryer found that police officers in Houston were nearly 24% less likely to shoot blacks than whites. In a data set comprising officer shootings from Dallas, Austin, Houston, Los Angeles and six Florida counties, he found that officers were 47% less likely to discharge their weapon without first being attacked if the suspect was black than if the suspect was white, and that black and white victims of police shootings were equally likely to have been armed. Overall, Fryer found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings.

* An analysis of police use of force by the Center for Policing Equity concluded that whites were disadvantaged compared to blacks when it comes to lethal force. Officers' use of lethal force following an arrest for a violent felony was over twice the rate for white arrestees than for black arrestees.

* Police officers are far more likely to be killed by a black person than vice versa. Over the past decade, black males comprised 40% of all cop killers, though they are 6% of the population. That means that an officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

* Violent crime is rising in cities with large black populations. Homicides in 2015 rose anywhere from 54% in Washington, D.C., to 90% in Cleveland. In the nation's 56 largest cities, homicides rose 17% in 2015, a nearly unprecedented one-year spike. In the first half of 2016, homicides in 51 large cities were up another 15% compared to the same period last year.