Obviously, what is going on in Baltimore is cause for a National Conversation. Of course, what gets left out of that Nation Conversation are realities and root causes. Instead, we get excuses and hand wringing each and every time. The Washington Post is reporting that Freddie Gray was attempting to injure himself in the police van (this doesn’t excuse the slow response time by the police). Other media sources have heard the same information. But, hey, National Conversation. The NY Times features many National Conversations. Nicholas Kristof’s highlights just how bad liberal cities are
Conservatives have sometimes been too quick to excuse police violence. And liberals have sometimes been too quick to excuse rioter violence.
Point of fact: Conservatives aren’t excusing unwarranted police violence.
It’s outrageous when officers use excessive force against young, unarmed African-American men, who are 21 times as likely to be shot dead by the police as young white men. It’s also outrageous when rioters loot shops or attack officers.
In reality, Black males aged 15-19, which is the study group, are only killed 2.3 times more than for Whites. Because they are also 9 times more likely to commit murder. We also learn from that article
Can we still conclude that police singles out black teenagers?  As ProPublica acknowledges, the data on justifiable police killings are “terribly incomplete,†and “vast numbers of the country’s 17,000 police departments don’t file fatal police shooting reports at all.â€
But there is an additional problem. The numbers aren’t random.  It so happens that urban areas, that are 50 percent more heavily black than the rest of the US, are the ones that report justifiable police killings. That means police probably kill whites more often than these incomplete statistics indicate.
Huh. Strange how Kristof throws out a statistic that is “terribly incomplete”.
Yet as Obama, Anthony and other leaders also noted, there are crucial underlying inequities that demand attention. The rioting distracts from those inequities, which are the far larger burden on America’s cities.
That also represents a failure on our part in the American news media. We focus television cameras on the drama of a burning CVS store but ignore the systemic catastrophe of broken schools, joblessness, fatherless kids, heroin, oppressive policing — and, maybe the worst kind of poverty of all, hopelessness.
Well, that’s strange. Here you have a majority-minority city (65% Black) which is overwhelmingly Democrat, and has been for quite some time (the last Republican mayor served 1963-1967), and it has lots and lots of problems, and then you add in that the media, which also seems to be largely White and liberal, ignores the problems.
In Gray’s neighborhood, one-third of adults lack a high school degree. A majority of those aged 16 to 64 are unemployed.
Hooray for Democrat policies!
And Baltimore’s African-American residents have often encountered not only crime and insecurity but also law enforcement that is unjust and racist. Michael A. Fletcher, an African-American reporter who lived for many years in the city, wrote in The Washington Post that when his wife’s car was stolen, a Baltimore policeman bluntly explained the department’s strategy for recovering vehicles: “If we see a group of young black guys in a car, we pull them over.â€
Eric Holder famously scolded America, saying we were cowards when it comes to discussing race. Well, here’s the ugly truth: cops go where the crime is. They see patterns. They are often familiar with the players in neighborhoods. And if a city is majority-minority, Blacks are going to see the police a lot more. And, another ugly truth is that crime is going to be much more rampant within a Black city than a white one. Often thanks the very same Liberal policies that keep them “poor, fatherless, uneducated, and hopeless”, all while liberals wring their hands and patronize Blacks. The very very liberal city of Portland, Oregon, which is 70% white, has a crime rate of 6.09, with a 1 in 164 chance of being a crime victim (Portland is often ranked very high in the best places to live). Baltimore has a crime rate of 14.28, with a 1 in 70 chance of being a crime victim. If we want to take Eric Holder up, we have to wonder exactly what the differences are between the two cities, and why Baltimore spends huge sums of their budget on law enforcement and the criminal justice system, and Portland instead has large sums to piss away on “climate change” initiatives
Likewise, the Baltimore jail was notorious for corruption and gang rule. A federal investigation found that one gang leader in the jail fathered five children by four female guards.
Again, this is all very strange that this happens in the Very Liberal City Of Baltimore.
We’ve had months of police incidents touching on a delicate subtext of race, but it’s not clear that we’re learning lessons. Once again, I suggest that it’s time for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to step back and explore racial inequity in America.
Yes, let’s do that. I doubt Liberals will be very happy with the realities it would expose, such as liberal cities being Very Bad for Blacks.
The real crisis isn’t one night of young men in the street rioting. It’s something perhaps even more inexcusable — our own complacency at the systematic long-term denial of equal opportunity to people based on their skin color and ZIP code.
Liberal cities.
Crossed at Right Wing News.
