One reason the Modesto Bee has lost a lot of preeminence in the community is owing to McClatchy’s liberal spin in reporting news.
I call it dishonest reporting.
Take the story published last week, “Black people in Stanislaus County over-represented in use of force cases by Sheriff’s Office.” The goal of the story was to suggest that Jeff Dirkse’s department harkens the days of Alabama in the 1950s.
The Bee’s story reported: “Since 2016, Stanislaus County Sheriff’s Office deputies have used force against Black individuals at a rate of more than six times their population, according to police data.
“While Black people averaged 1.4% of the county population, they made up nearly 9.4% of use-of-force cases reported by Stanislaus SO personnel in the past eight years.”
It’s the same old trolling out statistics without adding context. It’s like Sheriff Dirkse was quoted: “We have to get this conversation away from just race, and we have to start looking at all of the other factors.”
Let’s quit with the narrative that police are all racist and just accept the fact that black people do crimes just like the rest of the population.Blame it on socio-economic factors or absent dads or the person’s choices but let’s quit making this a race issue.
But as far as use of force goes, YouTube is rife with folks – many of them black – who, in a traffic stop, instantly obstruct and argue and disrespect officers who have pulled them over for legitimate reasons such as vehicle code violations like speeding or cell phone use or failing to wear a seatbelt. Sometimes it’s because they just rolled a cart out of Walmart filled with stolen goods and loss prevention wrote down their license number an called police. A common tactic is to instantaneously insult the officer’s intelligence by arguing, “You only pulled me over because I’m black.” Or they repeat over and over the same question: “Why are you pulling me over?” after they have been repeatedly told why they were pulled over.
No matter what color or gender they happen to be, when a person doesn’t comply with an officer, expect use of force. You can make it easy or yourself or hard on yourself but color, race, or status does not earn you a Get-Out-of-Jail card. Stupid is as stupid does.
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The American people are not stupid but many are waking up and smelling the coffee that their government officials lie to them all the time. They play with numbers all the time, such as under-reporting jobless numbers. Faith in agencies we traditionally respected – like the Secret Service, Justice Department and FBI – are undermined in light of how they have been politicized.
The narrative that crime was down was a lie we now know.
The 2022 violent crime rate reported by the Justice Department was quietly revised upward by 4.9 percent. Initially, the bureau projected that the violent crime rate relative to the population had slipped by 2.1% in 2022 compared to 2021. But the FBI’s adjustment now suggests that the rate of violent crime actually jumped by about 4.5% over the same period.
In October of 2023, the FBI put out a press release unveiling its national crime data for 2022, which found that “national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7% in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates.”
In 2021, the bureau appears to have concluded it over counted violent crime incidents by 55,786 and undercounted them in 2022 by 24,243. Apparently the DOJ failed include many large municipalities. So if you overlook the high crimes rates of major cities, of course that will underreport crime. It’s also dishonest as hell. As Americans for Limited Government President Rick Manning said: “It is absurd that changes in the reporting requirements by the Justice Department for municipalities have rendered annual data unreliable and incomplete and is now being exploited by national, state and local administrations who get to say pay no attention to what you see on the streets, crime is low, trust us. The revisions to the 2022 violent crime data prove that the crime reporting system is failing almost as much as the criminal justice systems in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Baltimore.”
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Well, we are getting closer to the big day – the election. It looks more and more like the Donald will be moving back into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, thank God.
But locally there will be a great deal of anxiety about who wins the Congressional seat and who becomes mayor as well as District 3 councilmember.
If there was a local betting market I would lay my money on Condit becoming the next mayor, but then again I didn’t realize that Latinos would line up for Lopez four years ago merely because he was Latino. Sad way to vote.
This column is the opinion of Jeff Benziger, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of The Ceres Courier or 209 Multimedia Corporation. How do you feel about this? Let Jeff know at jeffb@cerescourier.com
