Let me say right away that this is not about how “black lives matter” implies that Hispanic, Native American, or white lives don’t. I believe that even supposedly enlightened white Americans commonly suffer from a genuine version of racism that America needs to address. However, by focusing on accusing police and The System of a form of racism that is, in reality, now very rare, the movement enables the media, The System, and the voting population to have a good time acting righteous while completely ignoring a real and extremely harmful – as well as extremely deadly – form of racism, and indeed encouraging behavior and beliefs that further entrench that form of racism. That form of racism, one that really does involve the belief that black lives essentially don’t matter, is the belief that black people in poor areas are fundamentally different from middle-class white people in terms of their desire for safety and effective law enforcement.
To set the stage for this discussion, one must consider a few statistical truths. Again, bear with me here – many people don’t like these statistics and think that anyone who raises them must have an evil motive. I really don’t. I think policing in minority neighborhoods suffers from major flaws that are special to those neighborhoods and which flow from systemic racism, and I think those flaws impose a tragic and unacceptable burden upon black Americans. I think that more enlightened policies really would create new and good life paths for black youths that would put them on a par with their white co-citizens. I think these statistics show that something in our SYSTEM is screwed up, not that black people are born screwed up, and that we have a moral obligation to fix it. I have a good theory as to what a big part of that something is. So, please view these statistics in light of that goal.
So, first, the number of black people killed by police is proportionate to the percentage of arrests for violent crime that involve black people, and in fact is a little lower than that percentage. I have written on that at more length elsewhere , but the percentage of victims of fatal police shootings who are black is 29.2%, while the percentage of persons arrested for violent crime who are black is 38.5%. (39.8% of the people who murder police officers are black.) That arrest percentage is consistent with the percentage of violent crimes that are committed by black people per the reports of the victims (36% of crimes against persons where the race of the offender is known and 55% of homicides are committed by black people), so the thing in our system that is screwed up results in a disproportionately high percentage of young black people committing violent crimes, which tends to get them (and their victims) killed.
Now, we also have a problem with police misconduct. The Cato Institute has a good website that tracks that sort of thing. One recent incident, for example, involved a middle-aged white woman who was drunk, naked and asleep in her own home when police burst in with guns drawn and excitedly demanded that she get up (still naked) and show them a gun she was reported to have. She understandably first negotiated to be able to put something on, then in response to their repeated shouted demands, guns pointed, she (still drunk, sleepy, and now terrified) reached into the bed and said “here it is!” and held it out for them, at which point they shot her in the face and killed her. There are way too many such incidents involving people of all races, along with officer-perpetrated rapes, assaults, spouse abuse, and other inexcusable acts. All of that should be dealt with as a police problem. But it is not a race problem, it is a police problem. There are undoubtedly some cases even today where a police officer shoots a black person in part because the officer does not like black people, but the incidents that have hit the press are not cases where white officers thought to themselves “I want to go and shoot me a black kid.” The statistics don’t support the idea that any significant proportion of the police shootings are racially motivated. People’s perceptions are influenced by what the media, the preachers and their friends say, and when you have an encounter with a police officer despite being perfectly innocent (I have had several myself) and people tell you that that is because you are black that it must be true, but perceptions should always be checked against cold, hard numbers.
The second important set of statistics relate to the number of black people who are murdered overall, as compared with white people. For white males, about 90% will die of disease, 5.5% in accidents, 2% by suicide or homicide (mostly suicide) and the rest will still be alive at age 100. For black males, 90% will die of disease, 4.5% in accidents, 3.2% by suicide or homicide (mostly homicide), and the rest will survive to 100. White men are relatively likely to kill themselves and have accidents, while black men are relatively likely to be killed by other black men. About 2.4% of black male deaths are by homicide, compared to about 0.23% for white males – less than a tenth as much. More tellingly, homicide is the leading cause of death by far for black males age 21-35, accounting for a third of all deaths in that group, as contrasted to 3% of deaths for white males in the same age group. In all, in 2012 1,940 black persons were murdered, some 92% of those by other black people, while 1,885 white people were murdered, some 84% by other white people. 2,232 murders were committed by black people, and 1,798 by white people. 12,569 black women were officially reported as victims of forcible rape (actual numbers were higher) as were 55,876 white women, with 17,745 of the reported rapists being black and 45,694 being white. Young black people suffer badly from violent crime, most of it committed by other black people, and most of that concentrated into predominantly black urban or rural neighborhoods where shootings are alarmingly common.
This is a bad thing. While white society tends to dismiss the black homicide rate as being “mere” violence among rival gangs, anyone who has looked into the human beings within gangs has seen that gangs and their affiliates are largely composed of people who would have been decent kids but who, due to living in a dangerous neighborhood, feel compelled to affiliate with a gang for protection. Further, because the young females in such neighborhoods tend to favor males who seem capable of offering protection (which seems to be a basic instinct), young males naturally are drawn to gang power as a means of impressing girls. In short, most gang affiliates are not inherently nasty people, they are people who get into a bad role because they live in a bad area. Of course, many of the other victims of black-on-black homicide are not affiliated with gangs at all, they are pure innocents who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The book Ghettoside makes a good case for the proposition that black-on-black violence stems from a period in the south when the white law enforcement establishment refused to make any effort to prosecute black-on-black crimes, a situation that triggers a seemingly universal human mode of behavior that reverts to informal “law enforcement”, a system of revenge killings, violent posturing, and deadly focus on “honor” and respect that prevails where the state has failed to assert a monopoly on the use of violence. Once such a system starts, it tends to maintain itself until proper state-sponsored law enforcement steps in to stop it and replace it with a system of state-sponsored safety. When black people from the south migrated to northern and western cities, they brought the culture of violence with them, and the police in their new homes failed to stop it. Because American white society has been content to think of black people as somehow fundamentally different, our government has not seen fit to figure out how to break the cycle of violence in predominantly black areas. If similar homicide rates for some reason took hold in a middle-class white suburb, you can bet that there would be a major governmental response to stop the cycle. This lack of response is thus genuine racism.
What should the governmental response be? That is not a simple question, but the basic elements are reasonably obvious. First, we need to back off of a system of “crime prevention” patrolling that, especially linked with the ill-advised war on drugs, has led most urban police forces to adopt patterns of behavior more similar to those of an occupying foreign power than to the traditional policing methods of the English Bobbies. Frustrated by the Exclusionary Rule and eager to look concerned, police departments love “crime prevention”, an active process of interfering with people in which Constitutional restrictions have little practical significance, since the officers are not investigating a crime but are rather just trying to intimidate would-be criminals. Acting like an occupying power tends to encourage people to respond like an occupied population rather than like a cooperative citizenry. That is unhelpful. Perhaps more to the point, it does not in fact shut down crime and it encourages sloppy habits that lead to actual crimes not being properly investigated and solved. There is plenty of evidence in criminology for the proposition that the thing that stops crime is a high degree of certainty that the criminal will be caught and punished quickly. The severity of the punishment is not very relevant (although of course a person in prison cannot commit additional crimes, except against other prisoners), but swiftness and certainty are. Good detective work is far and away the most effective way to reduce crime in any neighborhood. Thus, we should have more foot patrols of the type that become properly acquainted with the people in the neighborhood. In occupying power mode, police tend to regard anyone who does not look like them as a potential threat, just as U.S. soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan have tended to become deeply suspicious of the native population overall. A beat patrol person would learn to see people on the beat as human beings, some good and some not so good. He could even learn to distinguish the degrees of bad. In any gang there is generally a nasty true psychopath who attracts to himself a secondary layer of poorly socialized people who are not inherently bad, but who are attracted to the power and status of the psychopath. If law enforcement could identify, target and remove those core players, far fewer other people would be corrupted. Further, if the beat patrol cop’s colleagues proved that they were just interested in catching the people in the neighborhood who had harmed other people in the neighborhood, and were willing to work hard to succeed at it, the police overall could build trust in the community, which leads to a higher degree of cooperation, which leads to more crimes solved and punished. I went to a heavily black inner city high school where we had a police officer on campus. None of us ever met the man, he did not intervene when students were being beaten bloody by other students, and generally he was a waste of the taxpayers’ money. If he had gotten to know students and had made a real effort to identify and punish the kids who preyed on other kids, he would have gotten the trust and cooperation of students of all races. Instead, even the white kids regarded him as a vaguely hostile object.
We also need to have better mechanisms for suppressing witness intimidation. Intimidation needs to be dealt with comprehensively and severely, and we need to have good, practical and sensitive mechanisms for protecting witnesses and their families without disrupting their lives more than necessary.
We also need to rethink the war on drugs. Urban black parents don’t like having a crack house or a heroin dealer on the block any more than anyone else does, and we need to improve efforts to shut down the drug supply lines (following the money and stopping CIA-affiliated international drug rings would help) and be intolerant of narcotics dealers, but giving people criminal records for possessing small amounts of drugs does not help anything. We need to isolate the violent criminals, which means not criminalizing a substantial swath of society for actions that are not particularly harmful to others. If a drug user gets robbed, he should not have to feel shy about explaining the circumstances of the robbery, so that he can be an ally of the police. If a drug user wants to seek help in breaking the habit, he should not have to be afraid of admitting his problem.
We need to make better use of mechanisms in the criminal justice system that divert young people from jail and focus on rehabilitation. Prostitutes should not be afraid to call the police to report an assault, and assaults on prostitutes should be investigated as vigorously as assaults on anyone else. Human trafficking should be dealt with harshly and prostitutes should be given a viable chance to escape that life with a clean record and real help shedding addictions and getting on their feet.
We need to take real steps to ensure that illegal activity is not the best economic option for young men in poor neighborhoods. Substantial efforts at targeted job training, targeted employment programs including neighborhood improvement programs, neighborhood patrol work armed with a cell phone, and suchlike are needed. We should be imaginative. For instance, it is a characteristic of our society today that a large percentage of home-improvement and landscaping work is done by Hispanic immigrants who lack adequate training in the crafts they are attempting to perform and lack adequate English to communicate with homeowners. What if poor black youths were given professional training in carpentry, tiling, landscaping, etc. and were taught Spanish, and then were made available to serve as crew bosses? Many a homeowner would be in favor of that improvement. We also need to make real improvements in poor-neighborhood schools. As a society we have become way too fond of the expensive and time-wasting practice of busing for integration, rather than using money to make urban schools safe and superior and providing programs to make up for disinterested parenting, programs that are best done through neighborhood schools that can have real contact with the parents. (There are many good and involved parents in the inner city, but there are also many too-young and troubled parents.)
What could we get from such efforts? Ending the racist attitude that accepts such high rates of black-on-black violence in poor neighborhoods would be reward enough in itself, but we would get much more. In general, poor Americans today would not be considered poor by the people in many countries around the world. The worst thing about their situation is having to live amidst crime and fear. A place like the Bronx has good food, good music, good culture, and many nice and decent people, but it suffers from the fact that the people who should be visiting and spending money in its establishments are afraid to enter. Poor neighborhoods often have attractive housing that would be extremely valuable if it was located a mile or two away. End the crime, and many of the neighborhood’s citizens will find themselves with valuable property. New businesses would enter, providing new jobs. Better stores with better prices would enter. Taxis would start being willing to pick up black men at night even if they weren’t wearing suits. America would be better and greater.
If, on the other hand, we focus on treating what is a police problem as being a race problem, if we discourage police from engaging with black men who have in fact robbed convenience stores, if we encourage black youths to disobey and challenge police officers, if we encourage people to think that the police are out to hurt them out of racial hatred, if we cheer for riots that burn down black neighborhoods and wipe out black business owners, then we will just encourage the images, beliefs and behaviors that permit white liberals to think that they don’t need to pay any attention to helping solve black-on-black crime. The media love this sort of thing, because it serves their agenda of distraction. Reading about the fact that white society has, in fact, let down our fellow citizens and that we can and should do something about it is complicated, takes a lot of reporter time, and is not entertaining. Reading about racial tension and shootings on video and riots sells papers and fills the hours on CNN. The media loves to listen to designated spokespeople for black Americans. Think about that one. If Fox News wanted to interview a self-proclaimed spokesman for white Americans, can you picture what that person would be like? Would that person be at all likely to represent the views of the average white American? I sure wouldn’t want a person who labelled himself as a spokesperson for white Americans to be viewed as speaking for me.
Black people, like all people, have a wide variety of interests. The only thing they have in common as black people is not wanting to be taken advantage of by non-black people, just as a “white spokesman” could only speak to a common interest in not being taken advantage of by non-whites. Let’s drop the racist categorization. Let’s think about people in high-crime neighborhoods and what they have a right to expect from our enlightened society. Then let’s act on that, interacting with the residents of such neighborhoods as a collection of individual people, most of whom are peaceful, honest and good and who want to raise their families in safety. All lives matter. Our Constitution is based on the notion that the best way to protect a minority is by refusing to allow classifications based on race, ethnicity, or religion, to require that everyone be treated as people with the same basic desires and the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Americans in certain neighborhoods are not experiencing those basic rights, and we need to fix that, no matter what color they are. That is what Americans are supposed to do.
matthewnfortunato 