OPINION:
Colin Kaepernick is riding high, having just won the Sports Illustrated Muhammad Ali Legacy Award as well as the American Civil Liberties Union’s Eason Monroe Courageous Advocate Award — honors bestowed, respectively, for sportsmanship and bravery.
But Kaepernick is possessed of neither.
He’s more a tool — a tool of false leftist beliefs, the kind fueled by Black Lives Matter and Eric Holder, the former Barack Obama-era attorney general who never met a race-tied social justice cause he didn’t like.
What has Kaepernick done besides bending a knee on the football field, and wearing socks emblazoned with police pigs?
He’s interrupted the field. He’s torn apart the NFL’s fan base. He’s distracted from the game — you know, the actual reason he was supposed to be on the field in the first place. How’s that for sportsmanship?
And courage? Come on, now. Kaepernick’s hardly the Rosa Parks of the civil rights era. Parks protested something real. Kaepernick, on the other hand, protested something fabricated — the idea that police officers around the nation were basically targeting innocent blacks to brutalize and kill.
Fact is: In 2016, police shot and killed 963 people of all races, according to statistics compiled by The Washington Post. For comparison purposes, the fatality statistic stood at 995 in 2015 — and stands at 903 so far, for 2017.
Of those 963 in 2016, only about a quarter were black.
“In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous,” the New York Post reported, citing The Washington Post’s database. The Guardian put the figure at 258.
Still, most were killed because they refused to surrender peaceably to police.
“The paper categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as ’unarmed,’ ” the New York Post went on. “That classification masks assaults against officers, and violent resistance to arrest.”
Listen to Black Lives Matter, though — as Kaepernick and his fellow NFL kneelers apparently did and do — and it’s as if police had declared open season on black males.
What’s more outlandish is that while all this tall-tale-telling about blacks as police victims has been going on, the real story — the far sadder, sorrier story of police killed at the hands of black males — has been largely ignored.
“More Than 250 Black People Were Killed By Police In 2016,” the Huffington Post blasted, in a Jan. 1, 2017, headline.
The number is significant because blacks make up a little more than 13 percent of America’s population, according to the most recent Census Bureau counts. Police? The Department of Justice estimated the number employed by state and local law enforcement agencies at around 1.1 million in 2008, about 765,000 of whom were the sworn officers. The remainder were office and administrative staffers, and others without arrest powers.
As of 2017, the Census Bureau estimated the population of America at just over 325 million — meaning police make up about 1 percent of the population.
Mind you — that’s police of all races.
So when the country’s 13 percent black male population shoot and kill the country’s 1 percent of police population, it’s a big deal. An underreported big deal.
An overlooked big deal — mostly, because it doesn’t meet the left’s messaging of police as racist pigs, and as racist pigs on the hunt for unsuspecting blacks.
Where’s the NFL kneeling for the courageous police?
“We all have an obligation no matter the risk, and regardless of reward, to stand up for our fellow men and women who are being oppressed with the understanding that human rights cannot be compromised,” Kaepernick said, during acceptance of his award at the ACLU of Southern California’s annual Bill of Rights Dinner in Beverly Hills.
Nice.
It’s a sorry state of affairs when we reward lies and showmanship, and shrug off truth and true bravery. But that’s the left for you, honoring the bogus heroes everywhere.
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