“The campaign against the cops is a battle in a larger culture war, in which one camp seeks to redefine the American experience as the continual oppression of an ever-growing number of victim groups.” – The War on Cops
Race riots ignited by anti-police sentiment rocked the summer of 2020 following the death of George Floyd, despite Minnesota’s Democrat Attorney General, Keith Ellison, who is both black and Muslim, stating that there was no evidence that Floyd’s death was related to race. Unfortunately, this wouldn’t be the first time that the national narrative on racism didn’t quite match the facts. A report from the Washington Post showed that in 2019, the last full year before the Floyd killing, 13 unarmed black men were killed by police, compared to an FBI report that showed 15 black men were involved in the killing of 48 police officers that same year. With black-on-black crime and homicide rates, the highest for any group in the country, the campaign against cops does not ring true.
In Heather Mac Donald’s 2016 book, “The War on Cops”, Mac Donald focuses on the media’s fact-free narrative that police are the biggest threat to black men, and high crime rates in black communities are the explicit result of racism. These false assumptions that police are killing thousands of unarmed black men every year, are eroding law and order, and, ironically, putting black communities at risk. There is no lack of proof that police have a greater presence in minority neighborhoods due to high crime, not race. Now, rather than put their own lives and careers at risk, police have taken a reactive role in policing, and the results have been devastating.
For two decades from the mid-1990s through 2014, statistics show that violent crime was cut in half, due largely to proactive policing and the implementation of longer sentences for serious crimes. By confronting misdemeanor behaviors like loitering, drunkenness, and general disorder, police were successful in stopping bigger crimes from occurring. Unfortunately, a new narrative about blacks, crime, and discrimination has led to calls for cities to defund their police departments to help sell their political tale of systemic racism.
Black Lives Matter, a rabidly anti-cop movement, formed following the highly publicized shootings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. In Ferguson, activists placed blame for Brown’s death on a city with a white mayor, a majority-white city council, and a predominantly white police force. But like all poorly thought-out excuses, that theory lasted less than a year. That was until the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, a city with a black mayor, a black city council, and a majority black police force. Still, it is BLM’s wish to rid minority neighborhoods of proactive policing methods. And despite BLM’s claims that a bias against blacks is endemic in the criminal justice system, higher rates of black incarceration are also supported by extensive rap sheets and felony-level crimes.
Activists use population data to imply that arrests and incarcerations that exceed the 14-percentage black population statistic, must be attributed to discrimination. Yet, the percentage of lawbreaking occurring in black urban areas is significantly higher than that of economically developed white neighborhoods. There is clearly more crime in Mott Haven, NY, a highly populated minority neighborhood than in the upper East Side. Recent increases in crime are occurring as legislators decriminalize petty crimes like theft and graffiti along with the early release of prisoners meant to lessen the prison population, the exact opposite tactic used to produce lower crime rates in the past. There is an inverse relationship between proactive policing and lower incarceration rates that cannot be denied.
Academics claim that crime results from poverty, and that rioting, and looting are simply a backlash to racism, poverty, and police brutality. But these elites, sitting in their ivory towers, are blind to the problems of inner-city crime that result from internal rather than external factors. In Charles Murray’s 2012 book “Coming Apart”, Murray states, “over the last half-century, marriage has become the fault line dividing American classes”. This is certainly the case for urban adults where two-thirds opt out of marriage yet continue to have many children. The disappearing traditional family in black neighborhoods creates not only economic disparities but also results in a lack of direction and responsibility. Then when the dispassionate government becomes the father of the children left behind, generational illegitimacy and chronic dependence become the norm.
The thin blue line is the distance between the law-abiding citizens and the criminal elements of a city. What has so successfully separated the two and limited societal descent into chaos is now under attack. Continuing with a false narrative in a feeble attempt to win votes, is only driving police to retreat and leave citizens defenseless.
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