Politics, the saying goes, is downstream from culture. Just as many in Australia are quick to ape the latest cultural trends from America, they’re only too eager to jump on the latest stateside political bandwagon. Case in point: Black Lives Matter.
The fact that BLM is nothing more than a violently white-hating, Marxist conspiracy theory is no barrier to Australia’s copycat political LARPers. If anything, its stupidity, violence and race-baiting are its biggest selling-point for the Australian left. Naturally, George Floyd had barely succumbed to his self-inflicted fentanyl OD than Australia’s leftist parrots were screeching in chorus.
The only problem was finding a local hook to hang their balaclavas on.
So, they dusted off one of their long-forgotten causes which was last a two-day leftist wonder some time back when Kurt Cobain was thoughtfully fingering the trigger of his shotgun.
It should surprise no one that the Antipodean offshoot of BLM is as brainless and fact-free as its American parent.
I heard a lot of slogans and saw the number ‘432‘ — the number of Aborigines estimated to have to died in custody since 1991 — thrown around, but I didn’t see any facts.
Oh, please. Facts, like free speech, are a racist, right-wing conspiracy. Facts only matter if they pander to leftist confirmation bias.
Of the 432 deaths officially listed as ‘deaths in custody’ since 1991, only 146 were actually in police custody.
It also pays to note that “in custody” doesn’t mean what you, you plain English-speaking fool, think it means. You think “in custody” means actually, physically, under police arrest? Ha! That’s why you’re not smart enough to be an academic. The great minds of academia have furrowed their brows and come to the stunning conclusion that “in custody” really means “within 24 hours of being in a watchhouse”. So if a crim is let out of the clink and goes straight home to OD, bingo: “death in custody”.
Even boy racers who’ve successfully evaded pursuit are “in custody”.
Of those 146 deaths in ‘police custody’ 39 resulted from motor vehicle crashes as a result of police pursuits. If police try to intercept a fleeing vehicle and that vehicle is involved in a traffic accident even after pursuit has been terminated, they are technically ‘in police custody’ and the deaths go down as resulting from interaction with police. This is the case even if they are nowhere near a police car and regardless of how much time has expired since the pursuit and attempted intercept were called off.
So what about the avalanche of deaths in “custody” (and for 24 hours thereafter, don’t forget)?
Another 31 deaths were due to natural causes, 28 to suicide, and 38 attributable to accidents and misadventure. That leaves just 10 deaths since 1991 related to police action.
Just like the “unarmed black man”, “black deaths in custody” are a vanishingly rare event. The vast, publicly-funded industry of left-wing criminologists, lawyers and activists have, by some weird coincidence, been singularly unable to ping a single one of those “killer cops” they swear are everywhere.
In nearly 30 years even for the most controversial police homicide, like the death of Cameron Doomadgee on Palm Island, no police officer has been found guilty, despite hyper accountability combined with lawyers, judiciary and human rights bodies that are highly suspicious of police, if not actively anti-police. No one disagrees that the 10 police homicides were awful, but they were all held to be lawful.
As in America, “black deaths in custody” are in reality a grim result of disproportionate black criminality. Aboriginal Australians are almost ten times more likely to be murdered, almost always by one of their own, than to die in loosely-defined “custody”.
In 1991 Aboriginal/Torres Strait Islander Australians accounted for 2 per cent to 3 per cent of Queensland’s population and around 14 per cent of its jail population. There has been an increase nationally, to between 15-28 per cent, depending on the state. This is despite sentencing that unashamedly discriminates, giving reduced sentences to indigenous offenders because of their race. The idea that indigenous people are imprisoned because of systematic racism just isn’t supported by the facts. Indeed, the opposite is true. Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders get lesser sentences because they are indigenous.
Just as in America, the only systemic racism is the “progressive” narrative.
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