It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

On this, the second anniversary of the death of George Floyd, the evidence is now overwhelming: American elites have blood on their hands for their hysterical response to a local police blotter incident that has since brought about many thousands of incremental dead bodies on the pavement. The Floyd fiasco has been the domestic policy equivalent of the Iraq invasion: a massive, self-inflicted national wound.

{snip}

Here’s a graph I drew up of the monthly per-capita rate of deaths by homicide from 2014 to 2020. {snip}

As you can see, according to the Centers for Disease Control’s WONDER database that tracks the causes of death written on all the death certificates in the country, the chance of an individual black dying violently at the hands of another human being was about 7 to 8 times the chance of a white dying by homicide back in relatively peaceful 2014.

{snip}

Still, in March 2020, blacks were 8.7 times more likely to die by homicide than whites in 2010–2014, then 10.2 times in April, both in the normal range since the Great Awokening. With the huge eruption in violence in late May following Floyd’s death, the ratio hit 12.6 (the first time the black death-by-homicide rate exceeded 12 since 9/11), followed by 14.4 in June, a record 15.5 in July, and remained above 13 for the rest of the year.

But if you plot the CDC’s motor vehicle accident death stats by month (with everybody once again compared to whites from 2010–2014), it’s comparably undeniable:

The black per-capita traffic fatality rate used to be lower than the white rate {snip}

But blacks pulled slightly ahead during the Ferguson Effect. Then in June 2020, the black rate exploded and stayed extreme for the rest of the year. {snip}

{snip}