Among whites, car crash deaths were 9% higher in June 2020-December 2023 than in June 2010-December 2013.

Jul 31, 2024

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine on the big New York Times article finally admitting, more than three years after I broke the story on June 8, 2021, that post-George Floyd depolicing contributed to the current huge increase in traffic fatalities.

The journalists continue trying to break it gently to loyal readers that the Times hasn’t been giving them the full story when it kept blaming everything bad that happened in the 2020s on Covid:

In data from this era, it’s hard to separate the effects of the pandemic from the demands for reform, or to know if policing patterns might have bounced back from the first shock had the second never happened.

Well, there are a few obvious steps an analyst can take to disentangle.

First, you can break out who died in traffic accidents during the Ferguson and Floyd Effects.

The CDC tracks the causes of all deaths in the United States with a six-month lag. Today you can look up the demographics of fatal motor vehicle accident victims from 1999 through the end of 2023.

Let’s compare the era of the Floyd Effect—June 2020 to December 2023—to the same 43 months a decade earlier—June 2010 to December 2013—which was before either the Ferguson or Floyd Effects.

Total motor vehicle deaths among non-Hispanic whites went up 9 percent.

That’s bad. Car crash carnage should be falling steadily.

But traffic fatalities among African Americans grew an appalling 78 percent.

There are several reasons for this.

First, these are raw deaths and the black population has grown somewhat faster than the white population.

Second, poor blacks tend to live in inner cities, so during hard times, such as after the 2008 Great Recession, they can can take public transit. In contrast, poor whites tend to live in the sticks, where they need a car to get around.

Third, and more interesting, blacks seem to have become notably worse drivers in recent years. This is partly due to the two recent eras of the triumph of Black Lives Matter over the police, causing the Ferguson Effect and the Floyd Effect. But it’s also due to African-Americans developing a culture of fast cars reminiscent of working class whites a couple of generations ago:

That blacks have become much worse drivers over the past decade seems newsworthy to me, but nobody else will touch the story.

A half century ago, blacks weren’t bad drivers. Street racing was more of a thing among white working-class kids, as in American Graffiti, Grease, and Bruce Springsteen songs.

But in this century, while young whites have lost interest in cars, young blacks have felt a growing need for speed.

This cultural shift might be interesting to readers, but it’s apparently considered in poor taste to mention it because it violates the most sacred rule of the prestige press in this century: Never say anything critical of blacks.

Read my whole column there.