The Twilight Zone of the Twilight Zone By Charles Taylor

     Last night my son got me to watch and episode of the 2019 remake (actually the third remake) of the Rod Sterling 1960s The Twilight Zone TV series. The episode I watched, “Replay,” and I missed the beginning, going to the toilet, has this summary from Wiki, so I want to be accurate before hammering it:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Twilight_Zone_(2019_TV_series)

     Nope I can’t quote it as the box summary goes over the page. But what happens is that Nina Harrison, mixed race, has a much darker son. She has her father’s old cam recorder, that allows her to wind back time. She had a falling out with the father, so this is all deeply symbolic stuff. The pair are off to take the son to a Black university, but they are prevented by a white racist cop, who wants to kill the son, for being Black; you know, whites prevent Blacks from going to university.  We go through a number of these events, with Nina truing back time. Then she goes back to the old family home, sees her brother who know how to deal with white racists, they take a secret passage to the school, but while there are confronted by racist police who want to kill them, but all the other Black folk take a stand, get out their phones and record, and the demonic whites retreat, to  go back to “hell.”

     The entire episode was based on a “Black Lives matter” ideology, even having that very sign in one scene. The over-the-top message was that white racists, symbolised by the top cop Lasky, are the only people holding Blacks back from walking into college. This is one of the furthest departures from reality that I have seen for a while. Nothing about the Black cops and Hispanic ones that have shot Blacks, who were not college kids, but actually committing crimes. Nothing about Black on Black killings in Chicago and Baltimore. But, that is not the liberal way is it?
  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2018/04/10/facebooks-most-popular-black-lives-matter-page-was-a-scam-run-by-a-white-australian-report-says/
  https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2019/the-truth-behind-racial-disparities-in-fatal-police-shootings/

“Reports of racially motivated, fatal shootings by police officers have garnered extensive public attention and sparked activism across the nation. New research from Michigan State University and University of Maryland reveals findings that flip many of these reports on their heads – white police officers are not more likely to have shot minority citizens than non-white officers. “Until now, there’s never been a systematic, nationwide study to determine the characteristics of police involved in fatal officer-involved shootings,” said Joseph Cesario, co-author and professor of psychology at MSU. “There are so many examples of people saying that when black citizens are shot by police, it’s white officers shooting them. In fact, our findings show no support that black citizens are more likely to be shot by white officers." The findings – published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS – are based on an independent database Cesario and his team created that catalogued each police shooting from 2015. The team – led also by co-author David Johnson from University of Maryland – contacted every police department that had a fatal police shooting to get the race, sex and years of experience for every officer involved in each incident. The team also leveraged data from police shooting databases by The Washington Post and The Guardian.

“We found that the race of the officer doesn’t matter when it comes to predicting whether black or white citizens are shot," Cesario said. "If anything, black citizens are more likely to have been shot by black officers, but this is because black officers are drawn from the same population that they police. So, the more black citizens there are in a community, the more black police officers there are.” The data show that it’s not racial bias on behalf of white officers relative to black officers when it comes to fatal shootings, and that’s good news. The bad news, Cesario said, is that internal policy changes, such as diversifying police forces, may not reduce shootings of minority citizens. Beyond officer race, the team drew other conclusions about details related to racial disparities in fatal officer shootings. “Many people ask whether black or white citizens are more likely to be shot and why. We found that violent crime rates are the driving force behind fatal shootings,” Cesario said. “Our data show that the rate of crime by each racial group correlates with the likelihood of citizens from that racial group being shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of white people committing crimes, white people are more likely to be shot. If you live in a county that has a lot of black people committing crimes, black people are more likely to be shot. It is the best predictor we have of fatal police shootings.”

     The truth, however, would not make a politically correct TV show.

 

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Friday, 19 April 2024

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