Opinion

Black Lives Matter’s numbers are bogus

If the Black Lives Matter crowd is correct, bloodthirsty, racist cops are blasting black men like clay pigeons at a shooting range. The pace of this alleged slaughter is breathtaking.

“Every 28 hours, a black person is murdered by police,” Black Lives Matter activist Cherno Biko told Fox News Channel’s Megyn Kelly. “It feels like we’re in a war.”

If true, killer cops are rubbing out some 313 innocent, law-abiding blacks annually.

Rise Up October asserts that there are “over 1,000 people a year killed by police.”

Wrong! And more than doubly so.

University of Toledo criminologist Dr. Richard R. Johnson examined the latest data from the FBI and Centers for Disease Control.

From 2003 through 2012, law-enforcement officers killed an average of 429 people per year in “legal interventions.” These include a relatively small number of innocent people killed by cops and many more who died due to reasonable use of force.

When a bank robber thrusts a loaded Glock into a teller’s neck, that’s a really good time for the police to kill him.

Anti-police protesters chant the well-known names of several black males who lately have died at the hands of cops: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice and Walter Scott.

Some cops (such as Darren Wilson, who shot Michael Brown) have been exonerated, even by Obama’s Justice Department. Others face trial — such as Officer Michael Slager, who shot Walter Scott in the back in North Charleston, SC, and the three white and three black Baltimore cops in whose custody Freddie Gray died.

What this controversy sorely needs is a strong dose of facts. Actual crime data reveal that this movement is based on mythology.

Thanks to the Ferguson Effect, blistering anti-law-enforcement rhetoric and sometimes fatal attacks on police have made cops timid, if not terrified. The result? A murder explosion that, ironically, is killing the very black people whom Black Lives Matter claims to champion. Year to date, homicides are up 8.3 percent in New York, 19.2 percent in Chicago, 51.5 percent in St. Louis and 52.5 percent in Baltimore.

On average, 4,472 black men were killed by other black men annually between Jan. 1, 2009, and Dec. 31, 2012, according to the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Reports. Using FBI and CDC statistics, Professor Johnson calculates that 112 black men, on average, suffered both justified and unjustified police-involved deaths annually during this period.

This equals 2.5 percent of these 4,472 yearly deaths. For every black man — criminal or innocent — killed by a cop, 40 black men were murdered by other black men. The, at most, 2.5 percent of the problem generates relentless rage. And, yet, it is rude-to-racist to mention 97.5 percent of the problem.

As America’s largest police force, one would expect the NYPD to be a major player in this alleged mass murder of innocent blacks.

Wrong again!

The supposedly trigger-happy, bigoted NYPD killed a whopping eight people last year, according to its meticulous, 73-page “2014 Annual Firearms Discharge Report.” Of these, four were black. All of them were armed with cutting instruments (scissors, a hatchet, a boxcutter and a knife) and wielded them when they fatally were shot.

Rather than NYPD gunfire, the high-profile Eric Garner case involved a police chokehold that may have given the overweight Garner a lethal coronary.

Still, these five deaths (at least four of them justified) total last year’s NYPD “genocide” against black men. They equal 4.95 percent of Gotham’s 101 black-on-black murders in 2014. Other blacks are 20 times deadlier to black New Yorkers than is the NYPD.

Yes, some police are overzealous, twitchy-fingered and — surely — racist. NYPD Officer James Frascatore’s heavy-handed takedown of tennis player James Blake outside a Manhattan hotel in September confirms that some cops need leashes.

But the notion that America’s cops simply are gunning down innocent black people is one of today’s biggest and deadliest lies.

Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News contributor.