On The O’Reilly Factor, host Eric Bolling and guest Horace Cooper didn’t just deny that the killing of Walter Scott is part of a pattern of police shootings of black men, they actually argued that African Americans are “favored” when they have encounters with the police.
Substitute host Bolling sneered at the beginning of the segment that “the far left” is using Scott’s death “as evidence that police killings of black men are a systemic problem in America.” Bolling falsely claimed, “Police killings of African Americans are down 70% over the last 50 years, so why perpetrate these claims?”
But as Bolling should know, there are no hard statistics on the number of police killings in the past 50 years. However, we do know that blacks make up a disproportionate number of those whom we know are killed by the police. So why did Bolling perpetrate such a claim?
“Blacks are incarcerated at a rate of six to seven times that of whites in America. And unarmed blacks are being killed about the same rate as whites in America,” Bolling continued. Therefore, he concluded, “Whites are being shot at a higher incident rate.”
That set off guest Horace Cooper, of Project 21, who served as what I call the designated African American black attacker role on Fox.
COOPER: In the black community, we need to have a conversation that’s unemcumbered by the radical left and progressives’ agenda that tries to use government coercion to address some problems. Here’s the reality: black Americans, like myself, we have an elevated risk of death that will come – not from law enforcement but that will come from other black Americans.
…According to the CDC, the second most likely contributor to that disparity is homicide. There is no other ethnic group that homicide ranks as high and the statistics actually show it’s black people killing other black people. …If no other ethnic group faces this risk, it is a sign that there’s a disparate amount of criminality happening in this one group.
…The truth is, as Eric has been explaining, if you consider the elevated number of times that black Americans encounter law enforcement versus the actual number of deaths, it turns out that black people are not actually at risk, they’re actually in a favored category.
Watch it above, with Alan Colmes, the other guest, doing a terrific job pushing back in a "fair and balanced" two-against-one discussion.
(cross-posted from Newshounds)
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