Huckabee Challenges WaPo Police Shooting Data: ‘Male Lives Matter’

Republican presidential candidate, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee speaks at Golden Grain Energy, an ethanol plant in Mason City, Iowa, Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2016. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)
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Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) on Monday rejected a fact check from the Washington Post that found a comment he made about the number of police shootings involving minorities to be inaccurate.

He argued that the newspaper’s own analysis of police shootings shows America’s attention would be better focused on a “Male Lives Matter” rather than a “Black Lives Matter” movement.

Last week on Fox News, Huckabee said “More white people have been shot by police officers this past year than minorities.” In defense of that statement, Huckabee’s team directed the Post’s fact checkers to the paper’s own Pulitzer-winning database on police shootings.

The fact checkers found Huckabee’s statement to be “correct on the raw numbers” but “not the full picture,” adding that the numbers should be adjusted to the populations where the shootings occurred for proper context. In that context, the fact checkers found, black people are three times more likely to be shot by police than white people.

Huckabee, via a spokesman, gave a thinly-veiled criticism of the Black Lives Matter movement to the Post in response to its findings.

“It’s not me that needs to be ‘fact checked.’ It’s the Post — I only said exactly what YOU reported,” he said in a statement. “My comments were 100 percent factual. The pure facts also reveal that 94 percent of those killed by police are men, so by your ‘proportional’ standards, the real movement in America should be ‘Male Lives Matter.’”

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