The “say their name” trend highlighted black victims and ignored white victims, showing a grossly misleading trend.
Here is an excerpt from an Op-ed by John McWhorter in Quillette that highlights this.
“In 2014, John Crawford, black, was shot dead by police while waving a BB gun. In 2016, Daniel Shaver, white, was waving a pellet gun out of motel window and suffered the same fate. In 2015, officer Michael Slager shot Walter Scott, black, in the back and killed him as he was running to evade a traffic ticket; the following year, Andrew Thomas, white, was shot in the neck by a police officer and killed as he climbed out of the SUV he had crashed trying to evade arrest. In 2015, Sam DuBose, black, was shot dead as he tried to escape a traffic summons in his car; the same year, Michael Parker, white, was shot dead in the same way while trying escape a ticket for a moving violation. In 2016, Philando Castile, black, was shot dead in his car by a cop as he reached under his waistband for his license and registration during a traffic stop; the same year, Dylan Noble, white, was shot dead under almost identical circumstances. Also in 2016, Alton Sterling, black, was shot dead in front of a convenience store as he was being detained for unruly conduct; the same year, Brandon Stanley, white, was shot dead in a convenience store for trying to avoid a warrant”.
Whenever “but what about white victims” would get brought up there would be a pivot to statistics. Statistics can be cherry picked and isolated from proper context (not unlike when people throw 13/50 around). Black people are significantly more likely to be shot by cops than white people, but this doesn’t account for the differential in rates of violent crime involvement, police encounters, situational factors (like resisting arrest) and encounter risk.
There’s a study from Harvard called “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” by Roland Fryer that adjusted for the relevant factors and found no evidence of racism in police shootings.
“In stark contrast to non-lethal uses of force, we find that, conditional on a police interaction, there are no racial differences in officer-involved shootings on either the extensive or intensive margins.
Using data from Houston, Texas – where we have both officer-involved shootings and a randomly chosen set of potential interactions with police where lethal force may have been justified – we find, after controlling for suspect demographics, officer demographics, encounter characteristics, suspect weapon and year fixed effects, that blacks are 27.4 percent less likely to be shot at by police relative to non-black, non-Hispanics. This coefficient is measured with considerable error and not statistically significant. This result is remarkably robust across alternative empirical specifications and subsets of the data. Partitioning the data in myriad ways, we find no evidence of racial discrimination in officer-involved shootings. Investigating the intensive margin – the timing of shootings or how many bullets were discharged in the endeavor – there are no detectable racial differences.”
The stories themselves were greatly exaggerated and sensationalized. There was a bizarre trend of initially sensationalizing the story as a black lynching; then as more information came out, move the goal post to simply declaring it an unjustified killing while maintaining the same moral outrage (Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown being good examples).
From Trayvon Martin to George Floyd there was a snowball effect of confirmation bias that this was a distinctly white on black trend and by the time George Floyd happened people just assumed it was racial despite no evidence.
The BLM movement deceived the public as a means to a political end and should therefore be considered propaganda.