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Black Lives Matter
It is true that young black men are being killed disproportionately — killed brutally, ruthlessly, and unjustly. And we need to talk about it if we hope to put an end to it.
We have data, and that data has been studied carefully. We know, based on that, that police are not the ones doing the killing. We know, based on that data, that police do not disproportionately kill young black men.
We also know that, overwhelmingly, young black men are the victims of other young black men — that young black men are both killers and victims at a vastly higher rate than are other groups in the United States.
It isn’t ambiguous. It isn’t even close. It isn’t subject to misinterpretation. It’s simply the truth.
And we have to talk about it.
Because what the activists of BLM and their ilk are saying — that the police are the problem — is simply incorrect: they are speaking out of ignorance, or greed, or some other motive. But they’re wrong, and it’s easy to demonstrate that they’re wrong.
And every day that we spend ignoring the actual, demonstrable problem of violence among black Americans, is a day we can’t spend identifying and solving that problem.
And every day that we spend weakening and marginalizing the police is a day spent making the problem worse, because it is more policing, not less, that is required to reduce crime in our black communities.
We have to be free to talk about everything.
Published in Policing
Maybe these will help in the quest:
BLM are protesting all black deaths. All black deaths are caused by whites racism.
As Venus Flytrap said on WKRP, “As ideas go, that sounds perfectly Iranian.”
Up to date information from Chicago can be found at. https://heyjackass.com/
I went back and forth over what to post but I’ll go ahead and try. I think this is a very interesting topic and I do like the idea of thinking about the trade off in “issue and attention cycles” and policy choices with the final three paragraphs. It’s an important and it’s a very real phenomenon with policy making that needs to be taken seriously with something as serious as policing and race.
I’m generally in agreement– more policing of violent crime would be helpful and blacks would benefit the most from this (turns out, this is hard to do and often turns into broadly “more policing” which, even with petty crimes, isn’t really that helpful on the margins– the major policy important impact of policing is in reducing murder and violent crimes). I am also generally on the side of saying cops are probably more not more likely to kill a similarly situated black person when compared to a similarly situated white person. But that turns out to be surprisingly tough to wade through in the stats.
Even before one gets to police shootings there are so many assumptions and design decisions that have to be made. It is hard to truly trust any specification in this field. Given the ways in which it is commonly studied, I’ve read good studies showing no racial disparities, and I’ve read good studies showing racial disparities. My own feelings leads me to think there are probably no racial disparities given the right controls, and that if there are (above and beyond what can be explained by crime rates), the effect size is small and very small compared to the overall benefits policing provides the black community. I hate to say “the effect size is small” because that’s someones kid/friend/father/brother, but it strikes me as true.
It’s a tough situation. But I like the post because it does point out that there are other real cost-benefit concerns at work and that our general rhetoric about the subject conceals this.
It’s blazingly obvious, but we’re not allowed to talk about it.
Which is quite the accomplishment from an Orwellian “2+2=5” point of view.
But it seems to leave the problem unsolvable.
But also, talking about race won’t solve the problem either.
And none of it makes sense. After all, the head of the Chicago police department is black. Appointed by a black mayor. If it was racial issue, Chicago would be thriving and peaceful.
Which strongly suggests that we’re being distracted from the real problem.
—
So let’s try a little economic analysis… Is there a lot of money to be made by black people for killing other black people? I don’t think so.
Is there a lot of money to be made in political corruption; graft, bribery, fraud, waste, mismanagement, and all? Oh baby, yeah. A ton.
What if a high murder rate was a side effect of really awful political corruption? (“What? In Chicago?”) If so, there would be no incentive to do anything about it, it removes attention from the real problem, and you can always use it as a weapon against the party you’ve branded as “racist”.
So economically, a high murder rate is kind of a win-win for corrupt politicians.
And perhaps instead of “black-on-black crime”, we really have “Chicagoan-on-Chicagoan crime” or “Democrat-on-Democrat crime”.
In other words, while the statistics correlate race with crime, they also correlate specific cities with crime, and Democrats with crime. Of those three, the choice of race would be… uh… racist.
Not bad overall, but I think that right there is a big flashing red neon non-sequitur.
It’s The Culture, Stupid. No black person will admit that the Street Culture is murderous. Black kids without fathers joining gangs. Black women with more than one partner, and kids by many fathers, none of whom helps raise the kids. Etc. Not fixable with any amount of money.
I would be perfectly content to begin talking about the end problem, that there is an enormous amount of per capita violent crime in our urban communities, without leaping to any conclusion about the proximate cause. That seems a first step in understanding the problem.
It’s early in the morning for me and I haven’t really had to deal with this in a while but it is very interesting. Is a high murder rate related to awful corruption? And what is the mechanism? I like that line of reasoning a lot.
I’ll just skip a whole bunch of steps and say that if I’m part of the Chicago machine (competitive authoritarian) I’d actually find it cheaper to provide an efficient amount of protection to my voters than to risk an election. So I’m not sure that Chicago politicians benefit from high homicide rates as a pure externality. Rather, I think it’s a problem that you can get weird equilibriums even assuming people are rational.
So analyzing citizens’ own beliefs about politicians is important. If you live in a world where you think cops are against you, appealing to the government is sub-optimal. You’ll also value the future less as their capacity to do so increases. Skipping some steps, people who value the future less will probably be more likely to maintain generalized, as opposed specialized, skills and tend to value government involvement in their lives less since even they know it comes with (deadly) regulatory costs. This means the Chicago machine can extractive even while homicides remain high because they are matching Chicagoans’ own strategy. In its own way, the outcome of a high homicide rate is a weird but understandable outcome that satisfies both the city and the relevant electorate.
I skipped the steps because it’s early in the morning and I have a word limit. I told myself I wouldn’t cite stuff because that would feel too much like work but the post really got me thinking: this is Iverson and Soskice ’01 applied to to Venkatesh ’06 (with some imagination.)
Very neat and challenging post.
This is correct. But is the message and action of the activists why the false BLM issue is front and center? I think we are facing another tactic of the progressive Left that in an utterly unexplainable way takes hold. This must be the power of propaganda that those of us old enough to remember were warned about in out schooling on the Communist Party methods over half a century ago.
@henryracette, you have laid it out. The story being told is wrong and we need to talk about it. But, as always, the solution is in the details. Who needs to talk about it? Two big pieces of the puzzle are politicians and media. These two groups are populated by members mostly capable of logical reasoning when faced with indisputable facts. Why are they occupying this false terrain? For those within these two groups who are progressive Left we can see the answer. Others we need to talk over these facts and get them to change. I wonder also about the oligarchs who have such huge power with their money and control of information. They sometimes take on behaviors resembling what one might expect from a Saudi Arabian Shah, just exercising their power because they can.
The verdict on defendant Chauvin may reactivate this talk soon. Of course, it may be more action than talk.
Do we have a lot of people in the middle of this as you describe @dontillman who just have failed to analyze the problem sufficiently to get the proper conclusion or are they all so invested in the overall financial outcome that they don’t care about the truth?
More likely that’s just the way business is done in places with a high crime rate, like Chicago.
Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, and so forth, all have have a homicide rate ten times the national average. Chicago might operate a little differently simply because the city is so large.
What I’m suggesting is consistent with the Curley Effect. (Not named after the famous stooge, but rather after Boston Mayor James Curley.)
Conventional wisdom is that the best way for a city mayor to be reelected is to do a really good job running the city. The Curley Effect suggests a second way, to do a really bad and corrupt job of running a city in such a way that it drives out people who would vote against you.
I get this but the minority population in Chicago is really a victim of this process with little or no benefit beyond bare subsistence and that financing is coerced from outside the city, as we have just witnessed, so their votes are yielding nothing. And they have no exit path.
Of course, it’s bigger than Chicago. And it’s bigger than homicide: there’s an enormous amount of dysfunction out there that can’t be blamed simply on “racism,” however convenient that is.
The post is aimed at people who either assume BLM is telling the truth or think that questioning the narrative may be somehow inappropriate — that this is yet another thing civilized people aren’t allowed to talk about.
Heather Mac Donald has written extensively on this problem. For example:
https://www.city-journal.org/media-silence-on-black-on-black-violence
There’s not going to be a conversation because those at fault do not want there to be a conversation.
Heather is terrific on the topic of policing.
I’m sorry, that’s just a little too defeatist for me. Look, we can make the effort to say uncomfortable things plainly and clearly, but with civility, or we can conclude that it isn’t worth the bother because entrenched interests won’t let us speak and persuade others to our cause.
I posted this same post on Facebook and on MeWe. About a thousand of my Facebook contacts are likely to see it on Facebook, and it is likely to be shared somewhere between ten and fifty times to an unknown number of other people I don’t know. It will be news to some of those people, and they will look at BLM differently the next time they encounter it.
And it sets an example. For people who think any dissent on the topic of race is inappropriate, it’s a signal that one can express concern and skepticism without sounding like the left’s caricature of conservatives.
I think we on the right don’t talk enough to normal, politically disinterested Americans. We don’t work hard enough to counter the left’s ubiquitous narrative. When it comes to speech, I am less concerned about the power of the left than I am by the passivity of the right.
You are right, Henry. The same kind of problem exist on the issue of election processes, security and integrity of voting on one side and voter suppression on the other. The facts are mangled.
This omits the centuries old (at least) problem of local poorer homogeneous communities strictly enforcing a code of silence/ non-cooperation with “outside” authority. Listen to old time radio from the late 1940s and you hear what are now considered “white” ethnic groups refusing to talk, at least openly, to police because of the threat of shunning or violence from their neighbors. No matter what individuals personally believe about police, if they face death or property destruction for “snitching,” they cannot reasonably be expected to cooperate.
The only way to break that set of assumptions is by a sustained and overwhelming application of legal force with severe actual consequences for the thugs and their enablers, such that people come to believe that they will not get “stitches” for daring to report and testify.
We can’t assume that BLM is anything more than race hustling on a wholesale basis. Nothing more. It’s a lucrative trade, as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Obama have proven. BLM has institutionalized the practice, much as the Clintons institutionalized the charitable foundation business. Both operations are rotten to the core, based entirely on lies and false benevolence. Facts don’t support their appeal, so they manufacture myths, never allowing any possible slight from being reshaped as a confirmation of their founding myths. A sympathetic and compliant press plays along, even reinforcing their dogma and demonizing detractors I’m reminded of the young black shakedown victim in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire, a thug who was quickly elevated to “honor student” after he was killed while attempting to rob an unwary, white Sherman.
Their time will come. Facts are stubborn things, like gravity.
Great discussion on Ricochet podcast on “South of the Border” that is relevant.
I was in St. Louis last weekend. There, it’s easy to infer the racial makeup of a given neighborhood from the yard signs.
The wealthier and whiter the neighborhood, the more BLM (and “in this house”) signs per capita. The poorer and blacker the neighborhood, the fewer. Instead of BLM signs, homes in the decayed and long-impoverished black sections of north St. Louis sport signs which read, “We need to stop killing each other.”
The people who live in these neighborhoods may have strained relationships with the police, but they aren’t idiots. They know what the real problem is — because they live with it. But their self-appointed spokesmen have decided, for whatever reason, that there’s more to be gained from complaining about racism and stoking white guilt than from accurately describing the situation. After all, complaining is easy, but squaring the circle is hard. Nobody — not you, not me, and certainly not Ibram X. Kendi — actually knows how to build social capital where none exists.
And given how willing elite America is to beclown itself and burn its own social capital in vast bonfires, I’d put the chances of anything productive ever happening at precisely . . . zero.
Not necessarily. Such a conversation is unlikely to solve the problem.
If my theory is correct, that the major cause of black people murdering black people in a given city is not due to race, but rather a side effect of terrible city management and corruption where a lot of black people happen to live… then it pretty much describes its own solution, right?
But that terrible city management and corruption often/usually – maybe even just about always – comes from black city management including heads of police departments etc. What’s the solution then, getting non-corrupt city management, which is likely to be white? Good luck with that.
True.
The terrible and corrupt city management is a side effect of single party rule.
So only the Republican Party has the opportunity to do something about it.
Pick one or more of the aforementioned cities, and run a slate of candidates in all available positions. Go in with the common plank of “You’ve seen this crap for 50 years. It’s time to fix this. We can make this city safe and prosperous by taking it back from the crooks.”
But before that you need to set up shop in the city. Create opportunity centers in the neighborhoods, invite the locals in for coffee and bagels, learn about their concerns, help them with city problems, teach civics, groom folks for political office, help with their campaigns, ensure fair voting, etc.
It’s a damn shame the Republican Party didn’t do this.
President Trump actually started some programs along these lines… right before the virus hit.
Well, not due to race per se but the cultural racial isolationism and resentment encouraged by the race baiters which has not been helped at all by the corrupt city and state government. How do you change a culture where just the terms “baby mama” and “baby daddy” so ideally define a whole generation of children without two parent families to encourage the achievement to lift them out of that life? That’s why it seems hopeless to me. I’ve mostly had goodwill and good intentions toward everyone for my entire life. Not any more.
Don,
Your comment confuses me. It seems to suggest that, per JAZ, the conversation can’t happen, OR that, even if it happens, it’s unnecessary and unproductive because the answer is obvious.
But the current reality is that “racism” is being blamed for violence against black Americans. Unless we have some kind of discussion about that, it’s reasonable to assume that racism will continue to be blamed for this.
Where I think some of you are mistaken is in the apparent belief that “the conversation” must necessarily engage the people most responsible for the problems we’re having. I don’t think that’s true. What’s required is that enough people come to understand the actual problem that we’re able to influence, or eject from positions of authority, those people most responsible. We don’t need to talk to them. We need to talk to each other, and agree to throw them out of office.
We can do that.
Certainly.
I believe that a competently run city can experience progress in the form of local businesses providing employment, better schools, safer streets, and all that goes along with that, which can be very uplifting. Especially in a city that hasn’t experienced anything but decay for 50 years.
Any federal funds would be put directly to use, instead of going to some city council member ‘s account.
And the churches would be involved.
But that’s the only way. It certainly won’t reform itself.
I didn’t say the answer was obvious.
Though I do subscribe to the belief that a well-posed problem can often suggest its own solution.
And I emphatically subscribe to the belief that often “It’s not about that. It was never about that.”
“Racism” is the default go-to weapon of the Dems. When “racism” is mentioned they’re not being serious, they’re not acting in good faith, it’s simply a hand grenade over the transom.
Which means that if it wasn’t “racism’, it’d be something else.
Any conversation has to be in good faith.
I’m not so sure. You’d have to convince them to get rid of the corrupt officials who “look like them” and replace them at least for some period of time with people who don’t. The current education system etc isn’t likely to produce non-corrupt officials who “look like them” any time soon. It’s been on a downhill slope for decades/generations. And even when people like Candace Owens manage to pop up, they’re decried as being “not really black.”