Philippe Lemoine collects his supportive evidence from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and includes specific data from multiple public surveys. The first source he uses is the Police-Public Contact Survey, which provides detailed information from confrontations between police and the public. The data reveals that 17.5 percent of black men had contact with police in a given year, or about 0.32 contacts per black man. However, 20.7 percent of white men had experienced police contact, or 0.35 contacts per white man. When it comes to multiple encounters, black men do experience slightly more with 1.5 percent of black men having over three police contacts within a year, as compared to a similar 1.2 percent of white men. The same survey reveals that 0.8 percent of black men are injured by police each year, which is about the same percentage of white men. When we look at the facts that the author uses to support his perspective, they appear to be extremely one-sided, with almost all of the statistics being used in support of his opinion. That is, until he mentions that three times the percentage of black men experience violence than white men; 0.6 percent to 0.2 respectively. Lemoine attempts to justify this by stating this is because black men are more likely to commit crime than whites. While his verdict is disputed, his bias is clear that he is more likely to …show more content…
From Lemoine’s perspective, the poll data provided by the is able to accurately represent the experiences of the entire American population. This can cause the author to lean towards the bias that the information invalidates the legitimacy entire controversy, while in reality it cannot. This bias is also conveyed when the author’s intellectual thinking disregards the opinions of others. Lemoine seems to lack the ability to be open to the perspectives of different ideas than his own. This stubborn characteristic prevents the author from being unbiased, as they unconsciously move to defend and reinforce their position, while attacking the opposing viewpoint. This bias can be seen on both sides of the argument, as minorities often believe that police violence exists much more commonly among minorities than whites. While movements across the nation have called upon minorities to separate themselves from majorities to protest this, Lemoine favors a different approach. The author feels that examples of racial injustice and police brutality, in cases such as the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, set an example of the treatment that all black men can expect from police across the nation. He sees this idea to be dangerous for society, and that “The media’s acceptance of the false