Data Scientist DESTROYS Racist Police Narrative with Real Data | The Larry Elder Show

My guest is a data scientist formerly with Thomson Reuter. He's also an economist and a lawyer. If I'm not mistaken, he went to Harvard. I believe Harvard is still accredited. I'll pause while the laughter dies down. Please welcome back to the program, Zach Craigman. Zach, stirring up trouble again. Zach, you already got canned from Thomson Reuters for casting doubt on the validity of Black Lives Matter. You did this long paper and you show because of the influence of Black Lives Matter that cops are pulling back and you documented how many so-called excess deaths were taking place in cities all around the country. And most of these excess deaths were the very black and brown people that Black Lives Matter claimed that they care about all because of the lie that they've been pushing that the police are engaging in systemic racism against black people. You did the paper, you got canned. I thought maybe you'd lay low for a little while, lick your wounds, but not Zach Craigman. Now you come back with another paper talking about a couple of newspaper articles that supposedly were competing against each other when in fact they weren't. But I wanna talk first of all about the truth. The truth about black motorists being pulled over more than white motorists. A, is it true? And B, if it is true, is it because of racism? Yes, it's absolutely true. Black motorists are pulled over more often than white motorists. But the evidence seems very clear at this point that at least in Massachusetts, it's not due to bias or discrimination. So there was a big study out of Massachusetts, Massachusetts Public Safety Office of some kind did this big study where they looked at all the arrest records, and they used this clever design where they look at the same period of time at different parts of the year. So you have similar drivers at different parts of the year, sometimes in darkness, sometimes in light. In dark, the police officers can basically never make out the race of the driver. And during the daytime, sometimes they can. So this is a test to see whether or not bias could be playing any role. And what they discovered was that during the daytime, when police may be able to make out the race of the driver, white drivers were stopped more often, black drivers were stopped less often than at nighttime when police could not make out the race. So are you saying... So this is very compelling evidence. So you're saying are the police racist against white people? This is very... Well, I think they're scared of pulling over black drivers would be my guess. I mean, I don't really know the reasons. Whatever the reasons are, they're biased towards not pulling over black people. You know, that would be my guess that there's, you know, there's certain costs associated. There's certain, you know, being accused of being a racist, potentially having, you know, a situation where people are videotaping them and so forth. I don't really know all the reasons, but the evidence is very clear that they're biased against pulling over black drivers. Interestingly, that study also showed... Yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead. Well, I was gonna say that study also showed that police give more citations and are more likely to search the cars of black and Hispanic drivers. Now, this suffers from exactly the same issue as police stops, right? It could be bias or it could be purely a difference in violation rates that, you know, police... The study itself showed that police are not biased and it's actually a difference in violation rates when police pull over black drivers, but it could be the same thing for the stops and the violations. But, you know, our newspapers like the Boston Globe don't care, and the study actually said that, right? It said, we found these differences in citation and search rates, but there's no evidence that it's due to bias, essentially. The study, the Massachusetts, the original Massachusetts study said that. And, of course, newspapers like the Boston Globe just report that it's evidence of this persistent bias. So, in summary, in the daytime when the cops are more likely to be able to see the driver, they're more likely to pull over white drivers than black drivers. At night when they can't tell, they pull over more black drivers, which suggests that black drivers are violating the law more than white drivers are when the cop is essentially colorblind because of the nightfall. Now, you point out that black motorists violate traffic laws more, more likely to speed, more likely to drive with a headlight out, more likely to drive without a seatbelt, more likely to drive with expired tag. You name the offense, a black driver is more likely to commit the offense. And rather than say, we got a problem with black drivers who imperil black passengers and other black safe drivers, the issue is systemic racism, imbalance, unfairness. Exactly. So then this new study comes out, which is sort of amazing. It's actually not really a study. It's more of a policy report by this group called VERA. VERA is basically an anti-law enforcement activist group that partnered with the Suffolk District Attorney's Office in Massachusetts to produce this paper, basically calling for police officers to stop enforcing traffic laws because they found that black drivers were violating those traffic laws more often, essentially. So yeah, it's just like amazing. And when you look at the, I mean, I don't wanna jump ahead too much here, but when you look at the numbers of who's really hurt by this kind of thing, right? We've got pedestrians, black pedestrians are more than three times more likely to be killed in a hit and run accident than white pedestrians, right? So this is basically a direct result of the fact that there's more traffic violations in black neighborhoods, more people who are getting behind the wheel after their third or their fourth DUI offense, right? Even though their license has been revoked, more people who are getting behind the wheel after the license has been revoked for a hit and run accident, right? And then that's the result. So. Yeah, I mean, these laws are there for a reason, and the reason is to increase public safety, both for passengers and for drivers. I remember, Zach, some years ago, cops at the Turnpike in New Jersey were accused of pulling over black motorists more than white motorists. So the then governor ordered a study. Study came back, same thing. In the daytime, often because of the sun hitting on the windshield, you can't tell who's the race of the people driving in the car, and at night you couldn't tell at all, and black drivers were pulled over more often because they were more likely to drive fast, and the faster the speed, the more likely it is that the driver was black. Well, she didn't like the study the governor did. Christy Todd Whitman threw it out, hired another group of people using a different methodology, same result. Sorry. Now, aren't you concerned about the safety, the peril to safety that black drivers are posing as opposed to chastising these troopers for doing their jobs? I mean, it's just really disturbing, and it's the same pattern you see over and over again in all of these attempts, this movement to racialize all of our public policy, right? It's the same issue that you see with, like you were pointing out, the Black Lives Matter movement, where we spread these lies about police hunting black people, and who is hurt? It's the black communities where we're de-policing as a result of these lies. We're reducing funding for policing or making police so scared of actually confronting suspects that we have soaring violent crime and thousands of new murders. It's the same thing with affirmative action, where basically these institutions, which demand these really high level of preparedness from their students, specifically lower their students' standards just to admit black students who are under-prepared, right? These are students, in a lot of cases, who are very promising students, but they just haven't received the same preparation as their peers in these institutions, and then they go on to do much worse, become demoralized, drop out. When Obama... I was gonna say... Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Right. When Obama was in office, the National Institutes of Justice, which is the research arm of the DOJ, did a study on racing traffic stops, same inclusion that your article talks about as to Massachusetts. Black motorists were more likely to violate the law. You name what it was, whether it was speeding, whether it was driving while intoxicated, whether it was driving without a child safety seat in the back, without a seatbelt, you name it, a black motorist was more likely to commit the offense than a white motorist, and the NIJ said that the reason for the excess stoppages of blacks was because of legitimate factors. The story came out, virtually no newspaper published it because it did not fit the script. Yeah. I mean, it's just... What I'm trying to figure out is how do I break these things out of the... I mean, I'm sure you've been trying to figure this out for decades now, but how do you break this out of the red bubble? Like, my story has been covered extensively in conservative media, right? But it's completely not covered... Sorry, my son just came in. Tell him I said hi. But it's completely not covered in the blue media. There's like two completely different universes, and it seems impossible to actually get this alternative reality, to get truth into this alternative reality that so many people are living in, and it just becomes demoralizing. But I'm just trying to figure out if there's any way to sneak in there. What was that, Zach? The problem is that truth is not in their best interest. Their whole rationale, I don't know if you heard my segment before you came on, is all about systemic racism, about unfairness, and we, the left of the country, the Democratic Party, we wear the white hat. Those dastardly Republicans over there, they wear the black hat. I'll give you an example. I'm in California, which is a liberal state. About 25, 30 years ago, Californians passed something called Proposition 209 that forbade the use of race as a criteria in admissions in the colleges and universities, in contracting, and in hiring. And they were told that, well, now that you've done this, the student body population that's black at the more competitive campuses, UC Berkeley, UCLA, was gonna go down, and it did. However, the percentage that got into the lesser competitive campuses, UC Riverside, UC Irvine, went up. Overall, Zach, the graduation on time rates for these minority students, black and brown, went up. They were matched at a better school. So fast forward, there's a proposition called 16 to overturn 209. LA Times voted, endorsed Proposition 16, opposed 209. They wanted race-based purposes back in, and again, this overwhelmingly left-wing state voted not to put race-based purposes back in. That said, a couple years ago, there's a high school in California called Lowell High, L-O-W-E-L-L. It's probably the best public high school in the state. They've always had an admissions exam, and as a result, the student body has been between 60 and 70% Asian American. Well, that's not diverse enough. The school board voted to go to a lottery system, had it for the last two years. The percentage of students who got Ds or Fs went from 7% to 24%. They couldn't do the work. What's the point? All you've done is put students on a faster track than they could keep up. They're demoralized. They drop out. They're mad at the world. They believe that systemic racism is a problem, but for that, they wouldn't have put me here and set me up for failure. So they're angry. It doesn't do anybody any good. That's unfortunately exactly what we're doing in Boston. We just basically radically reduced the role of the exam in admission for our exam schools because black students were typically doing much worse because they were much worse prepared. So rather than address the under-preparedness of our black students, which would be addressing the root causes of the lower proportion in exam schools, we're just lowering the standards so that we can admit lots of unprepared students. It's just like, it's mind boggling how anti-common sense some of this stuff is. And it also just like racist. It's like people have given up. They're like, well, we're never gonna prepare our black students properly for these schools. So the only thing that we can do is to lower the standards. I mean, that's just, I mean, it's just amazing that they've, and they'll call you racist if you point out the craziness of that idea. But it's amazing how it's all flipped around. It's like Alice in Wonderland. Everything's on its head. Well, they'll call you racist. They call me the black face of white supremacy. So count your blessings. Denzel Washington received an Oscar for best actor for a movie called Training Day. And it was based upon the real world situation now here in Los Angeles, when the LAPD, because they wanted to diversify the police force, hired a whole bunch of people that they otherwise wouldn't have hired. These are people that had quote, low level criminal records. And many of them who got hired ended up involved in what's called the Rampart scandal. It involved only 1% of the police department, but 1% of 700, 7,000 can do a lot of damage. And many of them were basically drug dealers. And they would not have been hired in earlier years because they would not have been able to pass the test because they had a zero tolerance for people with drug offenses, even if it was just smoking marijuana. Yeah, and then, yeah, so I mean, I haven't looked into as much how, you know, how common these police tests are. But I mean, that's one of the, you know, one of the examples I mentioned in my article was how we eliminated the test for police promotions because a lot of the black people who are up for promotions, black police officers up for promotions performed worse on average than the white police officers. As if, you know, like not knowing the, like knowing the laws, knowing the police procedures isn't important to doing your job as a police officers or not important enough to actually, you know, make the test. I mean, it's just sort of, it's just across the board we're being told, you know, basically that the problem is that we have standards and accountability. That's the problem. Right, can't have that, can't have that. You know, Zach, let's leave it like this. Let's apply the same formula to the NBA where 75, 80% of the players are black. That's not diverse enough. It's not fair. We are not being sufficiently inclusive and we ought to go to some sort of lottery system so that we can make sure we have more white players and Asian American players and Hispanic players to the exclusion of all these black players who dominate the NBA. Obviously there's something unfair going on here. And then when those white players and Asian players who are much worse basketball players do really poorly, it will be because of racism. Right. You know, you're laughing, you're laughing, Zach, but you just reminded me of something. I want to leave you with this. I'm from LA, but I lived in Cleveland from 1977 to 1994. So I arrive in Cleveland and I'm reading the sports page and there's this guy named Ted Stepien. He's an advertising executive, very wealthy, and he wants to buy the Cleveland Cavaliers that are not performing very well on the court. They're not drawing very many people. And he says the reason they're not drawing very many people is that the stadium at the time was in a suburb of Cleveland called Richfield, predominantly white, and the white patrons wanted to watch white basketball players. And he said, I'm going to buy the team. When I buy the team, I'm going to put more white starting players on the court. He bought the team and did just that. You ever heard of somebody named Mike Bratz? No, you haven't. Ever heard of somebody named Scotty Webman? No, you haven't. These were two of the white players who were of the four white starting players. The team performed worse than they did the year before. They drew fewer fans in the year before. Surprise, surprise. White people didn't like watching white people lose anymore. They wanted to watch black people lose. Yeah, I mean, it's just like the lack of common sense and the lack of just like ability, willingness to just think these lessons through, just think these points through. It's just amazing. And instead they just have to block it out entirely. Just, we won't talk about these things in half of the media. It's just bad. Zach Krigman, data scientist, lawyer, economist. Zach, as always, thank you very much for taking the time. God bless. Riding me on.