Following is a quote from a New York Times Editorial November 26, 2014. I find it outrageous. Focus on the words I highlighted.
“The fact” “Many police officers see black men as expendable.” “Killing of young black men is a common feature of life?” Talk about irresponsible, inflammatory journalism. Just as statements by Holder and Sharpton are inflammatory and designed only to advance their own agendas, this type of journalism reinforces stereotypes within the black community.
No doubt there are some bad, violent racists cops out there and it’s also fair to say, using the Time’s adjective, there are many young black men who are criminals and who would like nothing more than see a cop go down and who routinely place themselves in situations inviting police action.
Don’t like the use of “many?” Neither do I.
The fact is there are about 420 deaths each year caused by police action and it’s also true the probability of those deaths being black men is several times that of whites. But it is also true that black American young men commit crimes at a higher rate than other groups while being about 14% of the total population.
Source:US Department of Justice
You can rationalize the reasons for all this, you can even claim these data are the result of discrimination in arrests. However, my only point is that if you were a cop on the beat and you knew this and more importantly you lived it each day, you would be on your guard, perhaps nervous when approaching certain groups, perhaps tend to overreact as a result, maybe be less inclined to give the benefit of the doubt or even inclined to use force. I’m not a police officer, but human nature is universal and so is the survival instinct.
The case resonated across the country — in New York City, Chicago and Oakland — because the killing of young black men by police is a common feature of African-American life and a source of dread for black parents from coast to coast. This point was underscored last month in a grim report by ProPublica, showing that young black males in recent years were at a far greater risk — 21 times greater — of being shot dead by police than young white men. These statistics reflect the fact that many police officers see black men as expendable figures on the urban landscape, not quite human beings.
We get a flavor of this in Officer Wilson’s grand jury testimony, when he describes Michael Brown, as he was being shot, as a soulless behemoth who was “almost bulking up to run through the shots, like it was making him mad that I’m shooting at him.”
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 
Candidate obama promised greater transparency and better racial relations if elected. Nothing can be further from the truth today. As for the state of journalism and particularly “investigative journalism”, it has all but disappeared !
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The ignorance of this editorial is that the writer is a person who has never been out in the world. The fact be known, they follow the same PIPER as the President. All whites are bad, and the Blacks are oppressed. Want harmony? Not going to happen, the President has failed in every avenue he has traveled. Blacks, unemployment has doubled. That is the biggest one for me.
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