This is all a whataboutism. You don't like the slogan because you want it to be about one thing, but the movement is focused on another thing.

But, would you believe that the two things are related? Black people have been subject to overpolicing since, well, police forces were formed expressly to recapture escaped slaves. The police have had an enduring impact on black populations, ensuring that black people are significantly overrepresented in prisons. Poverty is a spiral, and folks with a criminal history can't get honest work so they return to crime. Kids without good role models are apt to end up in jail before they're adults. Extreme levels of black on black crime are a natural, I'd say unavoidable consequence of the circumstances. And the police, the courts, the prisons, maintain the hedges of that spiral into poverty.

If you've been listening to BLM activists and have only heard anti-police rhetoric, and missed the points about systemic poverty, and the entire remainder of the criminal justice system, then either you haven't been listening very carefully, or you've been getting your information from a biased source that's filtering the message down to what they want you to hear.

Black on black crime is absolutely, horribly, heartwrenchingly, problematic. It harms our entire society. But you don't fix that with a stronger police force. We've tried that. You fix that by addressing the inequities across the board, starting with the criminal justice system.

If you want to dig past the abstract, crime is far more predictable by poverty rate than it is, or ever has been, by race. In fact, crime rates among poor whites are virtually indistinguishable from those among poor blacks. But the racially segmented crime rates are higher because black poverty rates are higher.

And why is that? Ask any sociologist and they'll have the same answer: systemic racism. This shows up in hundreds of different ways: redlining, wage gaps, resource availability, etc.. The criminal justice system as a whole, and cops in particular, are a huge part of this. Cops Terry Stop black people at higher rates than white people. Cops detain black motorists at higher rates than white people. Cops arrest black people at higher rates than white people for the same crimes. They are prosecuted at higher rates than white people for the same crimes. They receive longer sentences than white people for the same crimes. And they get wrongfully convicted (as evidenced by exonerations) at higher rates than white people. And we have an extremely ugly history of making laws that are intentionally targeted at criminalizing black people...giving cops more ammunition to continue this oppression.

Black people being murdered in cold blood by police officers is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to black oppression by the police. World War I wasn't started because people really cared about Austrian Archdukes...the explosion into full on war was a long time coming, and Franz Ferdinand was just the trigger. Just as well, BLM activists absolutely care about black people being killed by black people. But when a cop, who represents a daily oppressive force against black people trying to make their way out of poverty, brutally murders someone in cold blood, in broad daylight, and with dozens of witnesses begging him to relent, and then continues to choke a dead body for several minutes after he gave up the ghost....yeah, protesters have every right to make a big fucking deal about it.

BLM absolutely cares about black violence and crime. They know what the solution is: black economic mobility. And contrary to the experience of poor white people that also experience violence and crime problems, cops are a part of the problem, not the solution.

Just to be clear, to all the downvoters, this is an actual earnest conversation. I don't think any participant of this thread deserves the downvotes that it is getting. I do believe there is subtle racism here, but it isn't malicious racism, just the typical sort of everyday biases that present themselves in all people from time to time. We don't solve systemic racism by taking sides and lobbing pot shot insults. That does more damage than good.

> In fact, crime rates among poor whites are virtually indistinguishable from those among poor blacks.

This is untrue. From my prior research, virtually every analysis concludes the opposite - that income alone cannot explain the difference in crime rate between black and white Americans. Most studies show income as 30-60% of that regression, which is huge, but when comparing similar income brackets, African Americans have a higher crime rate than whites in almost all of them under $100k. To cover the full difference, it's necessary to bring in other factors (in particular, the rate of single parent households). Please cite a source for the claim you have made or retract it.

Are population density factored in? My guess would be that a higher proportion of poor white people live in rural areas, compared with poor black people, and out in the sticks crimes are more likely to go unnoticed (you're less likely to get picked up painting or even shooting stop signs than tagging walls in a city, I expect) or to not happen due to lack of opportunity (what, you gonna go on a pick-pocketing spree at the Piggly Wiggly checkout line?)

(I'm not saying that's definitely what causes the difference to persist when income-adjusted, I'm just curious if you found that to be factored in, somehow, in the research you've seen)

[EDIT] I guess for international readers or US readers who haven't spent much time in the country, I should clarify that shooting street signs, mostly stop signs, is a (perhaps surprisingly) common activity in the rural US. You'll see lots of bullet-holes in signs if you drive around a bit in that kind of area. It's the rural equivalent of putting bumper stickers on the back of them, I guess.

I don't doubt that you've found those statistics, as sociology is an incredibly difficult field from a methodology standpoint. Unfortunately there are problems with nearly all methodologies. There are two potential sources of the discrepancy in information here: how do you define crime, and how do you define poverty.

The definition of crime has a lot of data collection problems. Official crime rates are compiled by police reports, and if there is a bias in policing or prosecution, there will be a bias in reporting as well. There are methodologies that are used (all of which with their own problems that make them suitable for some analyses but not others) to allow for better analyses to be made. It is through these alternative methodologies that we can even make claims like "black people are twice as likely to be arrested than white people for possession of marijuana": pure collection biases hide the fact that black people and white people are consuming marijuana at similar rates.

The definition of poverty is also fraught, though not for systemic racism reasons. Poverty can be defined in relative terms or absolute terms. It can be based off of wealth, or it can be based off of income. It can be based on household income/wealth or individual income/wealth. It can be defined in terms economic mobility (the ability to change wealth over time), or point in time measurements. It can include social capital as well: some definitions of poverty take into account education availability, parental education levels, etc.

In fact, you mention single parent households, which is deeply tied to poverty. child abandonment rates have a strong inter-causal link with poverty: high poverty causes income earners to abandon their children, and children without income earners in the household not only live in higher poverty as a result, but are likely to perpetuate the poverty. And disparate policing certainly has its own contributors to poverty, because it takes parents away from children.

A good overview of the various methodologies and existing literature can be found here:

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226952/Sampson_...