Racism, cops and crime

We learn a great deal about contemporary political discourse by considering what is left out of it; the important things that might help explain certain outcomes and relationships which we nevertheless avoid talking about.

In the case of relations between young Black males and police officers, it is the fact that young Black males commit so many violent crimes.

Black Americans make up only about 13% of the U.S. population but account for roughly 55 percent of those arrested for murder (according to FBI data), with young males comprising the vast majority of those arrestees.

Unless we assume that most Blacks convicted of violent crimes are actually innocent and/or that huge numbers of whites are routinely committing such crimes and going unpunished, neither of which seems plausible, we are left with the conclusion that violent crime in America is disproportionately concentrated where large numbers of

Black Americans are concentrated, which means America’s inner cities. And that those most often victimized by such crime in such places also happen to be Black.

Any logical assessment would suggest that Black criminals are a vastly greater threat to the safety of Black Americans than white police officers; indeed, given the staggeringly disproportionate share of violent crimes committed by young Black males it is surprising that the number shot by those who “serve and protect” is actually and thankfully as low as data from sources like The Washington Post tell us.

We don’t talk much about any of this, however, because it complicates the post-George Floyd narrative of Blacks as victims of systemic white racism and police brutality, which means that it also threatens the “anti-racism” movement around which so much of the contemporary left is built.

The “defund the police” push is, of course, the most obvious consequence of this entrenched if erroneous narrative, even if certain Democratic political candidates would prefer to pretend that it isn’t happening in Democrat-run cities like Los Angeles, Seattle, Minneapolis, Portland, and New York at the same time violent-crime rates soar in such places. We are thus witnessing the testing of some peculiar hypotheses, including that the best way to combat racism is to move police out of the way and allow criminals to kill more law-abiding Black men, women, and children.

The extent to which public officials in some of our most left-leaning urban areas are willing to go to signal virtue on racial issues, and thereby strip away whatever remains of the veneer of civilization, was perhaps most depressingly captured in Los Angeles last week when new District Attorney George Gascon ordered, on the grounds of combating racism, an end to prosecutions for, among other offenses, trespass, disturbing the peace, public intoxication, and driving without a license or with a suspended license.

Implicit in Gascon’s initiative is thus the removal of incentives for acquiring a driver’s license (since no one will be prosecuted for not having one), for driving on a suspended license (presumably for some previous offense while driving) or for setting up a squatter’s tent in the backyard of the swank homes of Gascon and other progressives (since trespassing in its various manifestations is now accepted).

In progressive LA it will now apparently be possible to hold loud, drunken parties in your front yard at 3 a.m. because the police won’t show up to stop it, even if the neighbors call them.

Worse still was Gascon’s order to halt prosecution on charges of resisting arrest, thereby dangerously undermining police authority and encouraging precisely the behavior that has been at the heart of many of the most high-profile police shootings of recent years.

Doing anything other than what a police officer tells you to is always a bad idea and it is hard to see how encouraging suspects to resist arrest will reduce the number of police shootings or enhance public safety.

If racial “disparities” exist in criminal convictions, and are taken, however illogically, as definitive evidence of systemic racism in law enforcement (rather than the inevitable consequence of problems within Black communities involving illegitimacy and educational failure), we could simply identify crimes for which Black people are disproportionately charged and no longer classify them as such.

Or do what LA is now doing and stop arresting and prosecuting those who commit them.

If a particular racial group enjoying “victim” status within the progressive worldview is more prone to committing crimes, then culpability for criminal behavior must somehow be shifted to the all-purpose scapegoat of white racism, even in cases of Black-on-Black or Black-on-white crime, or no longer considered criminal.

In any event, the result is the same — to redefine and incentivize criminal conduct by removing the likelihood of punishment for it.

Law enforcement is the most basic pillar of civilization because the desire to protect life and property is the primary motive for its establishment, for making that crucial transition from life in an insecure “state of nature” to one under government and laws.

When you stop enforcing the law, the law ceases to protect the law-abiding, leaving them to their own devices.

Law under such circumstances doesn’t cease to exist; it just becomes the law of the jungle.