In an Investigative Issues column for RealClearInvestigations, academic Christopher J. Ferguson crunches the numbers on race relations, violent crime, and policing to undercut much conventional wisdom about the forces behind bleak perceptions of race in America today: Race relations are unrelated to actual police shootings, Ferguson concludes, but instead correlate highly with news media coverage about them.
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Media tend to obsess over shootings of black Americans while ignoring shootings of other individuals. That explains calls to defund police as "systemically racist."
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Police killings of unarmed suspects are rare, according to the Washington Post, and they’ve been declining. White suspects are shot more often than black suspects.
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Black suspects are indeed proportionally overrepresented in those numbers, but If we look at victims of homicide, most are the same race as the killers. The overpolicing hypothesis does not fit the data.
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Race itself is not a determinant of violent crime. Rather, class issues, particularly mental health problems in certain communities, better predict reports of excessive police force.
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Progressive theories on race have often made practical situations worse through decreased policing and officer attrition.
In RealClearInvestigations, S.A. McCarthy reports from Limerick that Ireland is on the verge of passing the most aggressive hate crime law in the European Union, including the EU’s first legal protections for transgender individuals.
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Critics say the bill’s vague language could be used to enforce the increasingly progressive Irish government’s increasingly woke agenda and forcibly muzzle critics of unpopular policies.
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The controversy opens a window into how quickly Ireland, which legalized abortion only in 2018, is moving from its long Roman Catholic traditions.
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Leo Varadkar -- the present Taoiseach, or Prime Minister, whom President Biden visited in April -- is openly gay.
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The legislation reflects a wide rift between Ireland’s leaders and many of its people, who during a consultation phase decried it as an unnecessary expansion of the country’s existing hate crimes law.
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The bill treats not just public presentation or dissemination of material deemed hateful, but also private preparation or even storing of material deemed hateful, such as memes on your phone or books on your shelf.
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Legal scholar: The bill’s circular definition of hate “manifestly fails -- for no coherent attempt to define a term ‘X’ can include X in the proposed definition.”
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Last year a schoolteacher was thrown into solitary confinement in Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison after refusing to call a student by they/them pronouns, citing his Christian faith.
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A critic cautions: "George Orwell’s ‘1984’ is not an instruction manual.”
In RealClearInvestigations, Steve Miller reports how, under the Biden administration’s “whole of government” commitment to "diversity, equity and inclusion," federal funding is purposely skewing scientific research:
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A new study finds that while 3% of successfully executed National Science Foundation grants in 1990 gave applicants cues using terms such as “equity,” “inclusion” or “diversity,” the percentage rose to 36% of all executed grants in 2021, the first year of the Biden administration and the latest year such figures are available.
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The NSF’s $10 billion annual budget and 11,000 awards each year set the agenda for academic and corporate research in a wide variety of fields.
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The increasing politicization of NSF grants echoes the embrace of progressive ideology across the medical sector.
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A RealClearInvestigations review of advertised research grants and funded projects over the past three decades finds that while purely scientific research continues, ideology steadily advances.
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New studies examine how artificial intelligence may be biased against “disadvantaged groups”; how to “make diversity, equity, and inclusion a priority in the engineering enterprise”; and how to create “equitable mathematics” by exploring how math instruction “may serve to marginalize students.”
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Researcher: “These types of grants claim diversity is inherently beneficial to scientific progress, but ironically, that statement has not come anywhere close to being validated scientifically."
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Critics argue that the grants tell only part of the story of social justice diktats in research. There is work not executed because it does not fit the prevailing narrative.
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Studies of correlations between race and IQ, for example, are nearly verboten.
In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney uncovers an internal Customs and Immigration Enforcement document showing the worst backlogs in U.S. immigration courts -- reaching as far into the future as next decade. In New York City, new migrants do not have to appear in court until 2032.
Details:
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Behind New York, Florida locations are booked until 2028.
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In Atlanta and San Antonio, a migrant in the system does not have to appear until 2027; and the backlog carries into 2026 in other cities such as Chicago, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Indianapolis.
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The average wait time for a “Notice to Appear” before a judge at one of the nation’s 66 immigration courts is now four and a half years.
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This growing backlog creates an incentive for more people to cross the border and request asylum as each new case pushes assigned court dates further into the future. In the meantime, many migrants are permitted to live and work in the United States.
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And while an estimated 11,000 illegal immigrants could pour into the U.S. each day with the lifting of the pandemic-era restriction Title 42, much smaller totals have clogged the system for years.
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Critics note the disconnect between the estimated 5 million migrants who have crossed the border since Biden became president and the relatively small numbers of people with court dates. One reason: “paroling,” i.e. releasing, many encountered migrants.
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Ex-immigration judge: “It’s well past broken. The courts weren’t set up for this. When you don’t do anything at the front end, the back end just collapses.”
