Study: Up To 95 Percent Of 2020 U.S. Riots Are Linked To Black Lives Matter
A report accompanying the data project, however, reads like an upscale attempt to blame the police for criminals’ decision to steal, kill, and destroy. By Joy Pullmann
September 16, 2020
Contrary to corporate media narratives, up to 95 percent of this summer’s riots are linked to Black Lives Matter activism, according to data collected by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). The data also show that nearly 6 percent — or more than 1 in 20 — of U.S. protests between May 26 and Sept. 5 involved rioting, looting, and similar violence, including 47 fatalities.
ACLED is a nonprofit organization that tracks conflict across the globe. Its U.S. project that collected the summer protest data is supported by Princeton University. The project’s spreadsheet collating tens of thousands of data points documents 12,045 incidents of U.S. civil unrest from May 26, 2020 to Sept. 5, 2020. May 26 is the day after George Floyd’s death in police custody with enough fentanyl in his system to have died of an overdose if police had never touched him.
Of the 633 incidents coded as riots, 88 percent are recorded as involving Black Lives Matter activists. Data for 51 incidents lack information about the perpetrators’ identities. BLM activists were involved in 95 percent of the riots for which there is information about the perpetrators’ affiliation.
Early estimates from insurance agencies say the cost of this summer’s rioting will set a record surpassing that of the 1992 Rodney King riots, which cost an inflation-adjusted $1.2 billion. Much of that will be paid by taxpayers in the form of overtime and hazard pay for police and EMTs, emergency room visits, destruction of public property, and more. Of course, rioters are inflicting these costs during a time governments, and the people who fund them, have fewer resources due to coronavirus shutdowns and pent-up entitlement obligations.
A look at an interactive map illustrating the data shows just how widespread the summer BLM-linked rioting has been. It has not been limited merely to anarchist strongholds such as Portland, Oregon, or locales that saw media-spotlighted violent interactions between police and suspects, but has stretched across both major and minor U.S. cities and included dozens of locales with no violent police incidents this summer.
According to this record, rioting occurred in the United States this summer not just in Portland, New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, and other large U.S. cities, but in small and midsize cities such as Fort Collins, Co. (population 170,000), Cottonwood Heights, Utah (population 33,800), Gilbert, Ariz. (population 258,900), Wichita, Kan. (population 388,800), and Davenport, Iowa (population 382,600). Forty-seven states have seen riots this summer.
A report accompanying the data project, however, reads like an upscale attempt to blame the police for criminals’ decision to steal, kill, and destroy. Several times the report explicitly does so, such as here: “Although federal authorities were purportedly deployed to keep the peace, the move appears to have re-escalated tensions. Prior to the deployment, over 83% of demonstrations in Oregon were non-violent. Post-deployment, the percentage of violent demonstrations has risen from under 17% to over 42% (see graph below), suggesting that the federal response has only aggravated unrest.”
This is a logical fallacy called post hoc, ergo propter hoc: Because one thing happened after another, the first thing caused the second. It’s just plain false. In science, this error is described as the difference between correlation and causation. Social scientists ought to be aware of and refrain from employing it, yet these did not.
The cause of violence is not the police. It is not poverty. It is not one’s race. To say so is in fact a smear against poor people and people of the racial group identified. The cause of violence is the people who have chosen to be violent.
Rather than assigning responsibility for violence to those who engage in it, the report constantly pushes the criminal victimization narrative that the rioters are not to blame for their rioting. This is abuser psychology 101: The abuser is never responsible for his or her abuse. The people who might object to it are. This is also false and manipulative.
The report also attempts to downplay the wave of BLM-linked violence sweeping the nation this summer, even while documenting it…..
https://thefederalist.
com/2020/09/16/study-up-to-95-percent-of-2020-u-s-riots-are-linked-to-black-lives-matter/