On Wednesday morning, I caught Steve Harvey saying that police only shoot black people. By which I assume he meant unarmed black people. None of his co-workers corrected him or even hinted that Mr. Harvey may be wrong. The epic fail that this represents cannot be overstated. Though Mr. Harvey saw his ratings drop after his visit with Trump, he still has a
massive audience.
He has been syndicated since 2005 and has been on Majic since then. He is heard weekly by an estimated 7 million listeners.
7 million would be half the US black population, including children. If you eliminate minors that would be a rather large proportion of Black people (assuming that's his main audience). Thus when Steve Harvey says something, there are a lot of people who are going to listen and a large portion of whom will agree and pass along the "info". Hence the statement made by Mr. Harvey was not only damaging to his credibility (and the radio stations that let it pass) but served to misinform a large portion of the public. So lets get into this "only black people get shot by police" comment. The only relevant question is: what do the facts say?
From
The Washington Post (accessed 3-29-2018):
As we can see here more white people have been shot by police while running away from police than black people. in fact 50% more white people have been shot by police while fleeing on foot than have black people.
As we can see more white people have been shot by police while fleeing in a vehicle than black people. Once again, 50% more while people have been shot while fleeing in a vehicle than black people.
We see that so far in 2018 the same number of white and black people have been shot by police while unarmed. Clearly these numbers will not go up at the same time since police don't shoot people in racial pairs to "clean up" the numbers.
In general white people have been shot by police 2x more than black people. Keep in mind that black people commit crimes (particularly violent crimes such as homicide)
far more than white people do so that so many white people are being plugged with state lead shows that police are, if anything, shooting and killing white suspects in far disproportion to their threat level to the public.
So having shown that Steve Harvey had no clue of what he was speaking on, the question is why his co-workers let it slide. Why did the stations that carry his show, allow such massive misinformation to go unchecked? And lastly will anyone tell Steve Harvey to apologize and correct the record in the same manner that he lied about it?
