Blacks and Policing

In my last entry, I showed (or more precisely, the New York Times showed and I merely pulled back the curtain) that black people are being murdered at a rate grossly in excess of their representation in the population. Specifically, while blacks are only an eighth of the population, they are a clear majority of murder victims. (It’s worse even than that in major cities like Chicago — the focus of the Times story — Philadelphia, Baltimore and others). I proposed, based on decades of well-documented experience, that more police and more aggressive policing are an important part of the answer to this scandalous state of affairs and to significantly shrink the murder rate.

But liberals, criminal justice “reformers,” and of course the MSM argue that black people distrust and resent the police, will not cooperate with them, and don’t want them in their neighborhoods.

Is that true? Fortunately, we have a good deal of experience to give us the answer there as well, experience described by another national newspaper similar in some ways to the NYT. Thus I want to tell you about this (somewhat dated but still delicious) piece from none other than the Washington Post.

The article is about black people wanting only to live in peace and safety gathering in one room of a Baltimore church, while at that very moment a group of We-Know-Better Justice Department lawyers were in the room across the hall undermining their hopes.

The irony is more tragic than amusing. The picture would be bleak enough if the citizens of Baltimore were able to decide for themselves what kind of policing suits their needs.  It's that much worse when Justice Department lawyers armed with consent decrees decide the question for them, never having to live with the bloody consequences once they drive their BMW's 35 miles back to Bethesda.

It would be a good thing indeed if black lives actually mattered to DOJ in any operational sense, but it's not going to happen.  The grim, on-the-ground reality black citizens in our major cities confront is certain to take a back seat to the Received Wisdom of the anti-police ideology now ruling the roost at Joe Biden’s DOJ.

Here's how the Washington Post story starts:

BALTIMORE -- They'd come to the same church on the same night to confront the same dilemma facing this city's beleaguered police department. But what they wanted from the police couldn't have been more different.

Eight days had passed since the Justice Department issued a scathing review of the Baltimore Police Department, detailing years of racial discrimination in its law enforcement practices.

Yet the 40 or so longtime residents who gathered in a West Baltimore church basement on this August night -- many of whom were older black women afraid to walk to the store or leave their homes at night -- had come to urge police to clear their corners of miscreants and restore order to their crime-plagued community.

"Please help me," pleaded gas station owner Chaudhry Masood, whose parking lot has been overrun by loiterers and where a 17-year-old was recently shot and killed.

At the same time, in an adjacent church hall, Justice Department civil rights attorneys were discussing how to overhaul the police department with another group of residents intent on curbing the abusive behavior of corner-clearing cops. Those attending included black youths long targeted by police.

Left unmentioned is the reason the "youths" were "long targeted by the police." Having been a DOJ lawyer in nearby DC for a number of years, under administrations of both parties, I can hazard a guess.  It's that they're heat-packing smack dealers.

The organizers of each gathering didn't know the other was taking place. And as people showed up Aug. 18, a priest from St. Peter Claver Catholic Church hurriedly attached paper signs to metal railings to direct the flow. The meeting with the police community relations council to the right, the meeting with Justice Department lawyers to the left.

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[F]or the residents in St. Peter's church basement, the shootings, robberies and assaults they live with are just as pressing as police abuses.

One man wanted to know where the promised foot patrol officers were. Arlene Fisher, a social worker who has lived all her 67 years in West Baltimore, said the corner stores that dot the sullen landscape are petitioning to stay open 24 hours.

"They'll become a gathering place causing problems," Fisher predicted. "We'll need more police to watch it."

Residents don't like to call 911 when the corners fill, but Fisher said without better places for young people to congregate, they have no choice. She looked down and whispered, "We have to."

Upshot: The much heralded “lived experience” of black people is entirely different from what the Left keeps telling you.

Still, I can hear the skeptics saying, sure, but one story is just one story. What’s the overall picture of black attitudes toward policing?

You might notice that this question was nowhere to be heard when the subject was the one story of George Floyd — an awful episode to be sure, but one liberals gleefully exploited to paint the grossly false impression that, overall, the real danger to black people in America is the police.

Is that what black communities actually think?

No, it’s nothing like what they think.

About two months after Floyd’s death — at the height of the roiled national debate about it, policing and police abuses — Gallup polled the question. Here’s what the poll found, verbatim:

When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they currently do in their area, most Black Americans -- 61% -- want the police presence to remain the same. This is similar to the 67% of all U.S. adults preferring the status quo, including 71% of White Americans.

Meanwhile, nearly equal proportions of Black Americans say they would like the police to spend more time in their area (20%) as say they'd like them to spend less time there (19%).

Got that? At the very peak of the George Floyd story, 81% of black people, or slightly more than four-fifths, wanted the same or more police presence in their neighborhoods than they’d been having. Slightly less than a fifth wanted less.

It’s past time for Leftists to stop treating black people, and the rest of the country for that matter, as if we’re all stupid. Especially in this period of accelerating murder, violent crime and tens of thousands of drug overdose deaths, black people understand, as we all should, that cutting back on proactive policing is exactly the wrong move.