The line between civilization and anarchy

Heather Mac Donald writes in the Wall Street Journal,

For two years American police departments have endured relentless attacks from the Obama administration, its media allies and the Black Lives Matter movement alleging that U.S. law enforcement is a racist, deadly threat to African-Americans. A handful of disturbing videos depicting police shootings helped galvanize widespread hostility to law-enforcement officers, and cops began backing away from the proactive policing that stops crime but has been repeatedly denounced as racial oppression.

...Make no mistake: Assertions about systemic, deadly police racism are false. That has been true throughout the period following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014; recall that the cop involved was ultimately exonerated by the Justice Department. But no number of studies debunking this fiction has penetrated the conventional story line.

...Every year, officers confront tens of thousands of armed felons without using lethal force. According to the Washington Post, police officers fatally shot 987 people in the U.S. last year; the overwhelming majority were armed or threatening deadly force.

Blacks made up a lower percentage of those police-shooting victims—26%—than would be predicted by the higher black involvement in violent crime. Whites made up 50% of police shooting victims, but you would never know it from media coverage. Note also that police officers face an 18.5 times greater chance of being killed by a black male than an unarmed black male has of being killed by a police officer.

...Hillary Clinton has also taken up this warped cause. On CNN Friday, she decried “systemic” and “implicit bias” in police departments. She also called on “white people” to better understand blacks “who fear every time their children go somewhere.”

Mrs. Clinton ought to take a look at Chicago. Through July 9, 2,090 people have been shot this year, including a 3-year-old boy shot on Father’s Day who will be paralyzed for life, an 11-year-old boy wounded on the Fourth of July, and a 4-year-old boy wounded last week. How many of the 2,090 victims in Chicago were shot by cops? Nine.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump emphasized “law and order” in a video released Friday, saying: “We must stand in solidarity with law enforcement, which we must remember is the force between civilization and total chaos.”

Given the nightmarish events of the past several days, Mr. Trump could do worse than making this presidential campaign one about that line between civilization and anarchy.

Read more here.

Facts and research-based

One of my favorite reads each week is Oregon Muse's book thread at the Ace of Spades blog. Today the muse writes about the war on cops, and how the left climbs to power on the backs of the poor.

#BlueLivesMatter

I've always liked Heather MacDonald's articles in The City Journal. Her work is scholarly, erudite, and facts-and-research-based. She's a conservative who I am glad is one my side, doing what she can to fight the good fight. Her latest City Journal piece, Chicago on the Brink is a cautionary tale of what happens to a city when the police back away from pedestrian stops and public-order policing, i.e. reduce their visible presence in a neighborhood to a minimum. What happens is that crime increases, which means that more black people die. And she demonstrates this using facts and logic.

But never mind that. #BlackLivesMatter!

Her new book, The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, is a bestseller.

Violent crime has been rising sharply in many American cities after two decades of decline. Homicides jumped nearly 17 percent in 2015 in the largest 50 cities, the biggest one-year increase since 1993. The reason is what Heather Mac Donald first identified nationally as the “Ferguson effect”: Since the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, officers have been backing off of proactive policing, and criminals are becoming emboldened.

This book expands on Mac Donald’s groundbreaking and controversial reporting on the Ferguson effect and the criminal-justice system. It deconstructs the central narrative of the Black Lives Matter movement: that racist cops are the greatest threat to young black males. On the contrary, it is criminals and gangbangers who are responsible for the high black homicide death rate.
But never mind that. #BlackLivesMatter!

Slogans, not facts!

And for more on #BlackLivesMatter, there's Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry by Taleeb Starkes, who discusses

...a certain black-based industry — which specializes in nurturing comfortable lies while burying uncomfortable truths — propagates a notion that “racism” is the foremost issue facing black Americans, and white cops are blood-thirsty enforcers. Moreover, this cunning, race-peddling entity knows that it's easier to lie to blacks than to convince blacks that they've been lied to. Thus, black "lies" are good for business... black "lives" are good for nothing (except exploitation). And presently, business is booming.
And speaking of bad ideas, Heather MacDonald is also the author of The Burden of Bad Ideas: How Modern Intellectuals Misshape Our Society. What bad ideas? How about:

At a Brooklyn high school, students perfect their graffiti skills for academic credit. An Ivy League law professor urges blacks to steal from their employers. Washington bureaucrats regard theft by drug addicts as evidence of disability, thereby justifying benefits. Public health officials argue that racism and sexism cause women to get AIDS. America's premier monument to knowledge, the Smithsonian Institution, portrays science as white man's religion.
To these I would add the idea that a corrupt, cynical ex-Secretary of State who has peddled influence for cash, ran interference for her husband's sexual predation for at least two decades, and brazenly lied to the public about her carelessness in handling classified documents is qualified to be the next President of the United States.

Anyway:

And while these beliefs have damaged the nation as a whole, she observes, they have hit the poor especially hard.
See, that's thing. Progressives are always proclaiming their great concern for the poor, but all of their end up hurting the poor. The rich always have money and resources to shield themselves from the consequences of their folly. For example, driving while drunk is, generally, a Bad Idea, but if you're Ted Kennedy, your powerful friends will make sure that the authorities will buy your cock-and-bull story about how your abandonment of a drowning woman was not really your fault.

Or, more to the point, who is it exactly who started spreading around the pernicious idea that single motherhood is something to be praised? I don't know, but I have an idea: rich, liberal white women, who can afford to be stupid. If you're poor, though, being a single mom is really tough, and perhaps that kind of living arrangement ought not to be encouraged, wherever possible.

Of course, we know that progressives don't give a damn about the poor, they just want to them to bend over so they can climb up on their backs to reach the levers of power. That's all the poor are good for to the left.

Read more here.
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