MARTHA MACCALLUM (HOST): You listen to President Obama's words and he obviously is trying to calm things down. He's trying to say the right things. He says that the country is not as divided as people think. Do you think he's being effective?
BRIT HUME: So far, no, and I think the thing that I would fault the president on is, he isn't telling the truth about black lives and how they're lost, and where they're lost. I'm not the first one to point out that the streets of Chicago are a killing field in some areas. Black-on-black violence, gun violence mostly, gang violence. The death count out there is tragically high. The president almost never says anything about that. Instead, he is aroused by the these incidents where blacks are killed by white police officers. And at each turn, when one of these episodes occurs, he does not fail to mention the -- what he considers the persistent racism in this country. It feeds the idea upon which the whole Black Lives movement is based that we're in an epidemic of white police violence against black victims, often unarmed, many times innocent, shot down in cold blood, and there's enough video evidence from individual cases to provide some momentum and some impetus for that idea.
But if you drill down into the statistics and you look at the number of whites, Hispanics who are killed, versus the number of blacks who are killed, in the context of crime situations, it turns out that there's nothing disproportionate about the number of blacks who are killed by police, and so I -- and I think that though that that myth, that there's this epidemic of white police violence against blacks, has taken hold in this country. The president has, to some extent, fostered it, and when you see something like what happened in Dallas, I don't draw direct connection between that guy who shot all those people and President Obama. But I think it would be a -- go a long way if he were to use his credibility and his enormous megaphone as president to try to put some of these myths to rest.
