The NFL and the Bonfire of Political Correctness

Given that it is fast losing its audience, the National Football League has decided no longer to allow players to disrespect the National Anthem or the American flag on the sidelines before their games.

True enough and fair enough, players have a right to protest. They even have a right to insult the nation. They do not, of course, have a right to do as they please when in uniform and on the job. Also true, the same players have asserted that they do not intend to insult the nation with their actions. They are only trying to bring attention to a grievous social problem: white police brutality.

We should be clear about one point. You do not own the meaning of your gestures. Any more than you own the meaning of your words. If you discover that many people consider your gesture to be insulting, you should stop doing it. If you persist, you are insulting people, attacking their patriotism and demeaning the nation.

Otherwise, you are claiming the right to play by  your own rules, rules that do not pertain to other people. For professional football players the claim to such a right is absurd, on its face.

Naturally, one does not have the right to say it, but the protest against white police officers, especially against those who commit acts of violence against blacks, ignores the simple fact that the problem of violent crime in black communities is not the fault of white police officers. It is the problem of those who commit the crimes. Shifting the blame to white police officers exonerates and even cheers the perpetrators for drawing attention to what they consider to be a larger social issue. The result is: more protests against white police and more crime by blacks against blacks. Never in the course of these debates does anyone summon up the courage to note the gross disparity between black-on-black crime and white police on black crime.

As it happens, the increased national awareness of police shootings has produced… more violence against white police officers. Ought the protesting players to claim responsibility for this grievous outcome? Of course, no one will dare hold them to account.

Secondly, as Jason Riley explains in the Wall Street Journal today, the players have been promoting a false narrative. There is no epidemic of white police officers committing crimes against black citizens. And yet, the media hawks the narrative as a higher truth, producing more crime against the police. One might also call it media incitement:

But the protests have been more than an annoying distraction for sports fans. On a more substantive level, they have been used by political progressives and the mainstream media to advance a dangerous antipolice narrative at odds with the available empirical data. An increase in the coverage of police shootings, thanks to social media and cable news, has been presented as evidence of an increase in the number of police shootings. Statistically rare and isolated incidents are offered as evidence of an epidemic.

In fact, police use of lethal force has been falling for decades. Police shootings in New York City are down by more than 90% since the early 1970s. In Chicago, shootings involving police fell by more than half—to 44 from 107—between 2011 and 2015, according to a database compiled by the Chicago Tribune. That means police-involved shootings represented just over 1% of total shootings in the Windy City in 2015. Over the same five-year period, police in other major cities with sizable minority populations, including Los Angeles, Houston and Philadelphia, resorted to lethal force less frequently than Chicago police officers.

A recent study published in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Surgery assessed more than a million service calls to police departments in North Carolina, Louisiana and Arizona and found that cops used physical force in the course of arrests less than 1% of the time.

So, Roger Goodell has finally done the right thing. Hopefully, he has done it in time to prevent the National Football League by incinerating itself on the bonfire of political correctness.