By Thomas Sowell
Published August 26, 2014
Statisticians have long warned that correlation is not causation, but they have apparently warned in vain.
There is no reason to doubt that heavily armed police in riot gear may be more likely to show
up where outbreaks of violence are expected. But when violence then
breaks out, does that prove that it was the appearance of the police
that caused it?
I strongly suspect that people who travel with armed
guards are more likely to be murdered than people who do not travel
with armed guards. After all, they are not paying to have armed guards
for no reason.
If so, should we conclude from a higher murder rate
among people with armed guards that having armed guards increases your
chances of getting murdered? Shall we also conclude from this that we
the taxpayers should no longer pay to have Secret Service agents
guarding our presidents?
Actually, the history of assassinations of American
presidents could be cited as evidence that armed guards are correlated
with higher murder rates, if we proceed to "reason" the same way the
advocates of weaker police presence seem to be reasoning.
There have been 43 Presidents of the United States,
of whom four — Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy — have been
murdered. That is a murder rate of 9 percent.
If the murder rate in the general population — most
of whom do not have armed guards — were 9 percent, that would mean more
than 27 million Americans murdered today. We haven't quite gotten up to a
murder rate that high, even in Chicago.
Does anyone seriously believe that leaving
presidents unguarded would reduce assassinations? Probably not. But this
is the golden age of talking points, as distinguished from serious
thinking about serious issues.
These talking points are often based on a prevailing
social vision, rather than on hard facts. According to the prevailing
vision, ghetto riots are due to racial injustices — and the way to deal
with them is to make concessions in words and deeds, while severely
restricting the use of force by the police.
Factual evidence cannot make a dent in that vision.
But, for those who are still so old-fashioned as to
rely on facts, here are a few: Back in the 1960s when ghetto riots broke
out in cities across the country, the region with the fewest riots was
the South, where racial discrimination was greatest and police forces
least likely to show restraint.
In Detroit, with a liberal mayor in the city and a
liberal governor in the state, where the police were warned against
shooting during the 1967 riots, there was the largest death toll of any
city during any riot during that whole decade — 43 people dead, 33 of
them black.
Both the New York Times and the Washington Post
expressed astonishment that such a riot could occur in a city with such
liberal policies. But neither of them changed its vision in response to
facts which contradicted that vision.
In Chicago, there were three nights of rioting on
the westside in 1966. These riots were brought to a halt with what a
Chicago correspondent for the Los Angeles Times called an almost
"miraculous" low death rate of two. Yet that same reporter called the
use of both troops and police a "serious over-reaction."
Any force sufficient to prevent riots from getting
out of hand is almost certain to be characterized as "excessive force"
or "over-reaction" by people with zero experience trying to stop riots.
During a later and larger riot in Chicago, Mayor Richard J. Daley went on television
to inform all and sundry that he had given orders to his police to
"shoot to kill" arsonists — provoking outraged denunciations across the
country.
The number of people actually killed during that
riot was less than a third of the number killed in kinder and gentler
Detroit the following year, even though Chicago had a larger population.
