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Professor says Chicago is the next stop for Ferguson-style protests

Brian T. Murphy, an assistant professor (Medicinal Chemistry) at University of Illinois at Chicago, writes that Chicago is now ripe for Ferguson-style protests.

Unfortunately, like too many others in academia and the media, Murphy either ignores or (purposely?) skates over uncomfortable facts regarding (black) crime and incarceration.

Via Reboot Illinois:

There are a few misconceptions as to why citizens are currently fighting for civil rights in Chicago’s streets. The reasons have less to due with the recent deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and 12-year old Tamir Rice at the hands of police. The details of these cases can be debated, but in the bigger picture they are irrelevant. Consider this:

African Americans comprise approximately 12% of the U.S. population, while they make up nearly 44% of our prison population. Roughly 1 of 15 African American males go to prison compared to 1 of 106 white males. Therefore, either 1) African Americans are more prone to crime, or 2) the criminal justice system has in some way become biased toward putting black human beings in prison.

Ironically, Murphy goes on to note that “The main obstacle to achieving equal rights under our law is shifting public opinion on this matter, by teaching that perception is not a substitution for fact.”

Black Americans committing 5,375 murders in 2013 vs. 4,396 for whites isn’t a perception. That is a fact. Police killings of blacks being down seventy percent in last fifty years isn’t perception — it’s also a fact.

Not all Americans believe police are virtuous, nor do all Americans believe that American justice is color-blind, despite Professor Murphy saying that it “appears” otherwise. This is a straw man he sets up, just like the “either-or” premise above that either blacks are more prone to crime or the US justice system is racially biased.

The fact is that both factors play a role. The questions are to what degree, and how best to make them better.

“It is immoral to ignore these statistics …” Murphy says. But it appears he means only some statistics.

Read the full article.

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