CNN host, and brother of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Chris Cuomo thinks that answer to stopping police shootings is for white kids to start getting killed more.
The man Donald Trump used to refer to as Fredo began his show “Cuomo Prime Time” on Friday with a monologue about gun violence and police shootings, Mediaite reported.
“Shootings, gun laws, access to weapons. Oh, I know when they’ll change. Your kids start getting killed, white people’s kids start getting killed,” the host said.
He said this as if white kids were not killed at Sandy Hook, Parkland, Florida, Virginia Tech, Columbine or countless others.
Cuomo talked about the list of recent mass shootings and then began to talk about the recent police killings of Daunte Wright and Adam Toledo.
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“Take the time to consider if there is anything resembling an ‘us’ anymore. Does anyone see America the way you want her to be? Do any of you see a people with a purpose that resembles anything like the dream?” he said.
He then changed his voice to sound like a stereotypical white person and said, “What is going on with these police? Maybe we shouldn’t even have police,” then said, “That kind of mania, that kind of madness, that will be you.”
Cuomo insisted that if black people starting getting guns and forming militias to protect themselves, as if those do not already exist, then changes would happen.
“You’ll see a wave of change, in access and accountability. We saw it in the ’60s, “ he said. “Us and them, us and them. There’s never a solution that doesn’t begin with we. We, the people.”
There are issues with policing that sometimes happen, and they usually begin with a violent criminal resisting arrest, but that does not help Cuomo and CNN to push their narrative.
As The Washington Post reported, on July 11, 2016, more white people are killed by police than black people, though, per capita, black people have a greater chance of being killed by police.
In 2015, The Washington Post launched a real-time database to track fatal police shootings, and the project continues this year. As of Sunday, 1,502 people have been shot and killed by on-duty police officers since Jan. 1, 2015. Of them, 732 were white, and 381 were black (and 382 were of another or unknown race).
But as data scientists and policing experts often note, comparing how many or how often white people are killed by police to how many or how often black people are killed by the police is statistically dubious unless you first adjust for population.
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According to the most recent census data, there are nearly 160 million more white people in America than there are black people. White people make up roughly 62 percent of the U.S. population but only about 49 percent of those who are killed by police officers. African Americans, however, account for 24 percent of those fatally shot and killed by the police despite being just 13 percent of the U.S. population. As The Post noted in a new analysis published last week, that means black Americans are 2.5 times as likely as white Americans to be shot and killed by police officers.
U.S. police officers have shot and killed the exact same number of unarmed white people as they have unarmed black people: 50 each. But because the white population is approximately five times larger than the black population, that means unarmed black Americans were five times as likely as unarmed white Americans to be shot and killed by a police officer.
That is true, but it also does not account for the amount of crime committed by each racial group which leads to greater interaction with police.
And for every Daunte Wright, killed by an incompetent police officer who somehow mistook a gun for a Taser, there is an Adam Toledo who dropped his gun as he spun around to surrender to the officer, giving the officer less than one second to make a decision to protect his life.
You would be hard pressed to find anyone who wants to see anyone killed by police, or anyone else. But someone like Cuomo, who spends his life being protected by police and who has never had to put his life on the line to protect his community, act as if this is simple.
Police reform, in some aspects, could help to curb the number of people killed in interactions with police, but what would assuredly help more is criminal reform and teaching young people to comply.