From: George Weinbaum [e-mail him]

Here’s an article I saw in the Houston Chronicle: Data: 40% of unarmed victims in police shootings were black men, December 28, 2015.

My spin: this shows too few black men were "police brutality" victims. About 55% of all violent crime is committed by black men. Therefore, with 40% of "police brutality" victims being black men, black men are underrepresented amongst police brutality victims.

Does this article, originally published in the Washington Post [A year of reckoning: Police fatally shoot nearly 1,000, December 26, 2015] confirm the "Ferguson effect"?

See previous letters from George Weinbaum.

James Fulford writes: I'm always suspicious of claims that the "victim" of a police shooting (generally someone who has failed in the attempted murder of a police officer) was unarmed at all. We've had the unarmed Trayvon Martin (pinning Zimmerman to the ground and trying to grab his gun), the unarmed Mike Brown (290 pounds, tried to grab Officer Wilson's gun) and the unarmed Tamir Rice (the lethal looking firearm he was pointing at people wasn't real.)

I wrote an article on the subject headed “Unarmed” Black Teenagers—Threat, Menace, Or Both?which pointed out that unarmed black teenagers do kill people, and are even described as unarmed when they're behind the wheel of a car, trying to runs someone over,  as in the Devin Brown case in Los Angeles, or the Sean Bell case in Queens.

However, we've repeatedly heard of police who are now afraid to defend themselves, for fear of malicious prosecution by a Minority Occupation Government.