Dan Abrams Shreds ‘Stunningly Misleading’ NYT Report on Post-George Floyd Police Killings
Dan Abrams, the founder and owner of Mediaite, dissected a recent New York Times analysis on police killings in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, criticizing the data in the article as “stunningly misleading.”
The May 24 article, headlined “Since George Floyd’s Murder, Police Killings Keep Rising, Not Falling,” reported that five years after Floyd’s death, despite all the protests and “a wave of measures to improve training and hold officers more accountable, the number of people killed by the police continues to rise each year, and Black Americans still die in disproportionate numbers.”
Abrams said he was initially surprised by that headline and the graph at the top of the article, because he had expected the opposite.
“But then you read the article,” he continued, “and the headline is totally, totally misleading.”
Abrams read from the article that the Times analysis pulled data “compiled by The Washington Post and the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence” to find that “[l]ast year, the police killed at least 1,226 people, an 18 percent increase over 2019.”
“The vast majority of such cases have been shootings, and the vast majority of the people killed were reported to be armed,” Abrams quoted the article and paused.
“But wait — they were armed?” he asked. “Doesn’t that change the story a little bit?”
When the article finally gets to the “actual data,” Abrams said, the facts are revealed.
“Even as police killings have risen in the years since the killing of Mr. Floyd, killings of unarmed people have become less frequent,” he quoted the article again, emphasizing the key words. “The numbers have fluctuated over the years, but have dropped significantly since 2015, when 152 people killed by the police were unarmed.”
“Why isn’t that the headline?!” Abrams asked incredulously.
The article also noted that “[t]he number of people killed while wielding replica weapons, fake guns that look like the real thing, has also dropped.”
“So the killing of unarmed people by police goes from 152 to 53,” said Abrams, “and the headline is more people are being killed by police?”
A situation where someone was “armed” and “pointing [a weapon] at the police,” Abrams continued, was totally different, because “most of the time, it’s not going to be the fault of the police officer, if someone is resisting in any way with a weapon.”
“The premise that they have been using to sell this story doesn’t really work,” he said, laughing as he read another quote about experts being “split on why the drop may have occurred and how much weight to give the data.”
“This is real — it’s in The New York Times, how much weight to give the data,” Abrams chuckled. “Why are you doing the story then?”
After reviewing the rest of the article, Abrams called it “stunningly misleading” for the reporters to have buried the fact that police killings of unarmed people have “plummeted” over the past ten years, instead framing with a headline and first paragraph focusing on overall killings rising.
Watch the video above via YouTube.
Tune into The Dan Abrams Show live on SiriusXM at 2pm-3pm ET on POTUS 124.
