Last month a report “found that 93% of BLM protests over the summer were “peaceful,” notes Gerald Baker in the WSJ.
The report by an organization called US in Crisis was taken by most of the media as proof that their claims of “mostly peaceful” protests were correct. Only a small minority had been marred by violence.
Now 93% may sound like a big number, Mr. Baker points out. Your child comes home with 93% on a math test, for example. “You’d be glowing with pride.”
Most Wouldn’t Make It to 5th Birthday
But there are other contexts. If we avoided getting hit by a car only 93% of the times we crossed the road, most of us wouldn’t make it to our fifth birthday.
And of course 93% is a much smaller percentage than 99.9%. Or, shall we say 7% is a much larger percentage than 0.1%—which is the proportion of black homicide victims last year who were unarmed and killed by police.
And yet the media tells that the latter number represents a culture of systemic police brutality …
Or, in the words of Naomi Osaka, the newly crowned U.S. Open women’s tennis champion, the “continued genocide of black people.”
