When I was younger, before I obtained my driver's license, my father, a police officer, sat me down. He talked to me about what to do should I ever be pulled over by a police officer while driving.
In other words, he gave me "the talk" — the talk that President Joe Biden said never happens in white households. That was just more misinformation from Biden.
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My father told me to be compliant, never talk back, and always be respectful, even if I felt the officer wasn't. He also mentioned that an officer's job is hazardous. The police have no idea of a person's intentions when approaching a driver in a vehicle.
This is a talk that most parents have with their children before they get a license. It has to do with good parenting and common sense, not race. Yet after listening to Biden's State of the Union speech, he essentially tried to scare every black person in the country into thinking that police are hunting and killing black people and that this doesn't happen to white people.
"Imagine having to worry whether your son or daughter will come home from walking down the street or playing in the park or just driving their car. I've never had to have the talk with my children — Beau, Hunter, and Ashley — that so many black and brown families have had with their children," Biden said. "If a police officer pulls you over, turn on your interior lights. Don't reach for your license. Keep your hands on the steering wheel. Imagine having to worry like that every day in America," Biden added.
As with many things Biden says, his claims about police officers and black people just aren't truthful.
First of all, regardless of race, the killing of unarmed people at the hands of police is exceedingly rare. But also, all the data and statistics show approximately twice as many white people as black people are killed by police officers each year. You wouldn't know it listening to Democratic politicians, left-wing political pundits, Hollywood, or academia, but it's true. The numbers don't lie.
Detractors like to say that the police disproportionately kill black people — the common rebuttal for the rare occasions when acknowledging that more white people are killed annually. And this is true — blacks are only 13.6% of the population, and they account for 23% of people killed by police from 2015 to 2022, according to the Washington Post police shootings database. But note that this disproportion is not nearly as vast as the disproportion when it comes to violent crime — for example, the rate at which blacks are murdered, 54.4% of all victims, or at which black perpetrators commit murders, 54.7% of known offenders between 2011 and 2020 (according to the Heritage Foundation).
One way of putting it is this: If you live in a dangerous neighborhood or you are involved in crime, you will have more interactions with the police, which makes the odds of a bad interaction increase. But these numbers do not at all point to a systematic police effort to persecute or kill black people, and the insinuation loses all of its credibility in cases like the one Biden was citing, in which the officers suspected of killing their victim all happened to be black.
In the 21st century, especially in 2023, contra Biden, black Americans "don't have to worry like that every day." But the real story is not advantageous to Democrats because their party survives by stoking racial resentment. That is why the Left wants black people to think that the police are hunting and killing them.