Did Colin Kaepernick do more harm than good for the Black community?

He first knelt 10 years ago today. But was his reason for doing so based in fact?

Look at that image above. It’s in the conversation for most iconic sports photos of the 21st century, and it was shot 10 years ago today.

Colin Kaepernick, former 49ers quarterback, kneeling beside teammate Eric Reid in protest of police brutality against Black Americans — sparking equal parts inspiration and uproar. Some view him as a hero. Others, anti-American.

Me? I don’t see him as either. I see a man whose entire cause... was built on a false premise.

I’m bracing for impact as I write that, because I know what the blowback for such a sentence looks like. Kaepernick is a sacred cow in the eyes of activists and much of the media, and criticism of him does not go unnoticed.

But the reality is this: Unarmed Black people were not being killed by cops en masse while Kaepernick was kneeling. They were more likely to be struck by lightning than die at the hands of a police officer. And well-intentioned as Colin may have been in his protest, the anti-police movement he helped inspire likely made things worse for the most vulnerable members of the Black community. Because when cops can’t properly do their jobs — people die.

There was a poll from 2019 that asked Americans how many unarmed Black people they thought were killed per year. They were given five choices. 1) About 10, 2) About 100, 3) About 1000, 4) About 10,000, 5) More than 10,000.

Here are the results for people who identified themselves as “very liberal,” which I think describes most of the activists who rallied behind this issue. About 10 — 15.7 percent. About 100 — 30.7 percent. About 1,000 — 31.4 percent. About 10,000 — 14.3 percent. More than 10,000 — 7.8 percent.

The actual number of unarmed Black people killed by cops that year, per the Washington Post? Twelve.

My guess is that survey would have yielded similar results if conducted in 2016, when Kaepernick first began his crusade. I say this because I was one of the people who thought the number was in the triple, if not quadruple digits. There was Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, etc. And those deaths — whether it be in mainstream media or social media — were seldom framed as one-offs but rather representative of a system crisis.

I, like millions of other Americans, bought into Kaepernick’s narrative. But then I actually looked into it.

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about their “red pill” moments when it comes to their political outlook. One of mine was a column written by Heather Mac Donald in the New York Post nine years ago entitled “All that kneeling ignores the real cause of soaring Black homicides.”

Mac Donald delved into the gang violence that was responsible for the vast majority of the 7,881 Black people killed via homicide in 2016. She juxtaposed that number with the 16 unarmed Black people that were killed by police that year. More significantly, she pointed out how the 7,881 deaths were a near-900-victim increase from the previous year, marking the the second-biggest uptick in Black murder in U.S. history (the biggest was the year before). The reason, Mac Donald said? The Ferguson Effect.

Black Lives Matter rose to true prominence after the aforementioned Brown was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Brown’s death sparked the famous “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra, and though evidence later revealed that he died after trying to take the officer’s gun, that didn’t stop the first of countless protests that ultimately pulled cops off the streets.

Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer examined this phenomenon in a paper exploring how police departments behave during investigations after a viral event. Examples included Brown being shot in Ferguson, Laquan McDonald being in Chicago and Gray dying in police custody in Baltimore. The effect, Fryer found, was cops dramatically reducing contacts with civilians as homicides in those cities skyrocketed. In short: Police officers didn’t want a split-second decision gone wrong to turn them into a national story. So they backed off. The result?

Well, in 2014, the year Brown was killed, the FBI reported 11,961 murder victims in America, 6,095 of whom were Black. The next year, there was an unprecedented percentage jump in homicides, as Black People comprised 7,039 of the 13,455 victims. The next year, there was another massive murder spike, as Black people made up 7,881 of the 15,070 victims. Can one prove beyond all doubt that these increases were a direct result of cops backing off? I suppose not. But it sure seems like the most logical conclusion.

This is why I had a pit in my stomach after George Floyd’s death in 2020. No doubt the video was horrifying, but I also knew what it would spark: The Minneapolis Effect, which is basically the Ferguson Effect on steroids.

Never in American history had there been such a furor over police conduct. Calls to defund departments abounded while the acronym ACAB — short for All Cops Are Bastards — became a popular slogan in left-wing circles. That’s why I was so drawn to eight-time state-championship-winner Mike Bethea, the Black Rainier Beach High basketball coach who was urging the public not to stereotype cops.

I first met Bethea at a rally days after Floyd’s death at a park in Renton, WA. Several people — including former NBA star Jamal Crawford — spoke, but Bethea was the only one who came to the police’s defense.

“Ninety percent of them, or maybe it’s in the high 90s, are good cops,” said Bethea. “If you were in danger, you would call 9-1-1 and not be afraid of them. You have to understand what the real purpose of this is. It’s not to make it as much about the whole police department, but about holding the right ones accountable.”

I brought up gang violence, and how those Black deaths are never mentioned in the media.

“Nobody wants to talk about that, and this is where I get upset. It’s almost like they say ‘put them over there and let them kill each other’,” said Bethea, who worried that gang units would be the first thing to go if cops were defunded. “It’s just, uh, man, I can’t find the words. It’s something that needs to be addressed.”

As I’ve mentioned before, this was not addressed at my former paper. My Bethea column was one of four that never made it to print. But as we know, thousands of other columns with a different opinion on the matter ran in outlets across the country. And many of them stated that Floyd’s death proved Kaepernick right.

Did it, though? Or was this an extraordinarily rare incident that the masses decided was representative of all cops?

Kaepernick certainly didn’t hold back on how he wanted the public to react. The man who’s worn pig socks and compared cops to slave patrols said on X: “When civility leads to death, revolting is the only logical reaction. The cries for peace will rain down, and when they do, they will land on deaf ears, because your violence has brought this resistance.”

And boy did people revolt. Billions of dollars in property damage ensued, and according to Forbes, 19 people were killed in protests in the first 14 days after Floyd’s death.

But for me, the bigger concern was in the long-term. What happens when cops are vilified in a way we’ve never seen before — when they’re defunded and/or disrespected to the point that they can’t properly police?

Answer: Really bad things.

I mentioned before that 2015 saw the biggest uptick in Black murder in American history — when the number of victims went from 6,095 to 7,039 — a near-1,000 person increase. But in 2020, the year Floyd was killed, the number jumped from 7,484 to 9,913 — a near 2,500-person increase. In other words the Black murder spike from 2019 to 2020 more than doubled the previous record.

I can’t stress enough how significant that is. I also can’t stress enough how absent those numbers were from mainstream media sites. It was too threatening to the narrative. People like Kaepernick and other activists were leading a sacred movement. That such a movement might be counterproductive to the Black community was not something editors could entertain.

One point I think critics of this column will bring up.

Even if it is rare for a cop to kill an unarmed Black person, it still happens more often on a per capita basis than it does with whites. Isn’t that enough to justify Kaepernick’s protest?

That per-capita fact is true. But per the research of Fryer, the aforementioned Harvard economist, unarmed Blacks are no more likely to be killed by cops than unarmed whites on a per interaction basis. Uncomfortable as it is to say, there is more crime in the Black community, hence more police interactions.

I guess what I’m really getting at, though, is this: The idea that the police had declared open season on unarmed Black people last decade was one of the most dishonest narratives the media peddled. And lionizing Kaepernick for his stance while ignoring unprecedented spikes in Black murder was equally irresponsible.

Hopefully people remember all this the next time there’s a high-profile Black death at the hands of police — something that is probably inevitable based on sheer population size. The actions of a few do not reflect the actions of all.

Ten years ago today, Kaepernick chose to kneel in protest of cops. His choice. But I prefer the likes of Bethea, who chose to stand in their support.