2015’s 12% increase in homicides reported to the FBI is the largest one-year homicide increase in nearly half a century

The primary victims have been black. An additional 900 black males were killed in 2015 compared with 2014, resulting in a homicide victimization rate that is now nine times greater for black males than for white males. The brutality of these killings can be shocking. Over the weekend of September 16, 2016 a 15-year-old boy in Chicago was burned alive in a dumpster. More police are being killed in 2016 too. Gun murders of police officers are up 47% nationally through October 21, 2016 compared with the same period in 2015. In Chicago gun assaults on officers are up 100%. In New York City attacks on officers are up 23%. Recently, four California officers have been deliberately murdered. Officers are second-guessing their own justified use of force for fear of being labeled racist and losing their jobs, if not their freedom. On October 5, 2016 a female officer in Chicago was beaten unconscious by a suspect in a car crash, who repeatedly bashed her face into the concrete and tore out chunks of her hair. She refrained from using her gun, she said, because she didn’t want to become the next viral video in the Black Lives Matter narrative. The Chicago Police Department now wants to institutionalize such dangerous second-guessing. Its proposed guidelines for using force would require police to consider the “impact that even a reasonable use of force may have on those who observe” it. The Black Lives Matter narrative about an epidemic of racially biased police shootings is false: Four studies published in 2016 showed that if there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. Officers’ use of lethal force following an arrest for a violent felony is more than twice the rate for white as for black arrestees, according to one study. Another study showed that officers were three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed whites. No government agency is more dedicated to the proposition that black lives matter than the police. If the next administration continues to disregard that truth in favor of a false narrative about systemic law-enforcement racism, the next four years will see more urban violence and race riots, and more dead police officers.