The Squire is taking a knee — not, like Colin Kaepernick, to protest police brutality toward black people — but to protest the NFL’s brutality toward football players. (Aaron Hernandez, any one?) And the Left’s brutality toward the black community.

Police and prisons are how whitey has kept the black man in his place ever since the Civil War.

Liberal-progressive-socialist Madison believes this with all of its collectivized, victim-sourcing heart. It is taught by its academicians, preached by its mainline protestant pastors, practiced by its politicians, and promulgated by its press.

It is why vandals could desecrate a memorial to 273 law officers killed in the line of duty and no elected Madison political figure, no news media outlet, no community leader condemns the hate.

For liberal-progressive-socialist Madison is in thrall to Black Lives Matter, founded on the lie of “Hands up! Don’t shoot.”

Typically, the BLM franchise Freedom Inc. demands police out of high schools and race-based behavior standards to “stop the school-to-prison pipeline.”  It excoriated Police Chief Mike Koval’s blue blanket in August as “racist and dangerous”:

This strategy of locking up African American men is not new, and the flaws with this way of thinking are well-documented. Previous attempts in the 1990s to round up Black criminals simply resulted in gross mass incarceration, from which our communities have never recovered. In Madison, we still see the effects in arrest and jail racial disparities. — Freedom Inc.

The “actual causes” of crime are, according to this BLM franchise are “poverty, economic underdevelopment, joblessness, lack of education and healthcare, and other systemic issues that are sustained through racist policies, police, and social structures.”

Less likely to be arrested

The Policy Werkes presents for Madison’s edification four Must Reads.

Must Read #1: Liberals, progressives, and socialists believe with all their hearts that, as Philippe LeMoine writes in National Review, “black men are constantly harassed by the police and routinely brutalized with impunity, even when they have done nothing wrong. … This narrative is false.”

… it’s not true that black men are constantly stopped by the police for no reason. Indeed, black men are less likely than white men to have contact with the police in any given year, though this includes situations where the respondent called the cops himself: 17.5% versus 20.7%.

Similarly, a black man has on average only 0.32 contacts with the police in any given year, compared with 0.35 contacts for a white man.

… Men are vastly more likely to experience police violence than women are, but while bias may explain part of this disparity, nobody doubts that most of it has to do with the fact that men are on average far more violent than women. Similarly, if black men commit violent crimes at much higher rates than white men, that might have a lot to do with the disparity in the use of force by the police.

“Discussions of racial problems almost invariably bring out the cliché of “a legacy of slavery,” economist Thomas Sowell writes elsewhere.

Criminals belong in prison, not in the ‘hood

Must Read #2: “What Criminologists Don’t Say, and Why.” Its two authors, university academics, report that:

… in the eyes of many criminologists, racism has to be the cause of these disparities because recognizing the truth about the huge racial imbalance in crime is politically intolerable.

The theory is that “incarceration took minority men out of their neighborhoods, stripped them of voting rights, destabilized families, and sapped already-paltry economic resources from struggling communities.” Writing for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, they explode that theory for the canard that it is:

Such claims could seem plausible only if one believes — contrary to evidence and common sense — that career criminals contribute positively to their neighborhoods, enjoy stable and functional families, vote, and work. What they did, in reality, was to prey on their neighbors. 

[FBI] Homicide numbers… indicate that young African-American males account for homicide victims at levels that are 10 to 20 times greater than their proportion of the population and account for homicide offenders at levels that are 15 to 35 times greater than their proportion of the population. The black-white gap in armed-robbery offending has historically ranged between 10 to 1 and 15 to 1.

The two academics prescribe more policing …

… focusing on crime hot spots, targeting active offenders for arrest, and helping to solve local problems surrounding disorder and incivility. Putting predatory, recidivistic offenders in jail or in prison remains the best way to protect the public — especially those who live in high-crime neighborhoods.

More Free Stuff

Yet Alders Mo Cheeks and Matt Phair propose still more subsidized housing and treating crime as “a public health issue” instead of more police.

WI State Journal columnist Chris Rickert is an example of the well meaning liberal when he criticized Sen.Ron Johnson for “exemplify[ing] today’s social media-driven politics of division and simple-mindedness when he declared a little more than a week ago that riots in the wake of a fatal police shooting in Milwaukee are proof the “War on Poverty didn’t work.”

Perhaps, my liberal-progressive-socialist acquaintance, it is belief in More Free Stuff that is simple minded.

Must Read #3 belongs to Thomas Sowell in “The Lasting Damage of the Left’s ‘Favors’ to Blacks.”

Many successful political careers have been built on giving blacks “favors” that look good on the surface but do lasting damage in the long run. One of these “favors” was the welfare state. A vastly expanded welfare state in the 1960s destroyed the black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and generations of racial oppression.

In 1960, before this expansion of the welfare state, 22% of black children were raised with only one parent. By 1985, 67% of black children were raised with either one parent or no parent. A big “favor” the Obama administration is offering blacks today is exemption from school behavior rules that have led to a rate of disciplining of black male students that is greater than the rate of disciplining of other categories of students.”

Behavior matters

Which brings us to our Must Read #4, by Heather Mac Donald, also of the Manhattan Institute, but here in the Wall Street Journal:

To the list of forbidden ideas on American college campuses, add “bourgeois norms”—hard work, self-discipline, marriage and respect for authority. Last month, two law professors published an op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer calling for a revival of the “cultural script” that prevailed in the 1950s and still does among affluent Americans:

“Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. . . . Eschew substance abuse and crime.” The weakening of these traditional norms has contributed to today’s low rates of workforce participation, lagging educational levels and widespread opioid abuse, the professors argued.

Mac Donald reports that the dean of the Penn law school responded by playing the race card, noting the “contemporaneous occurrence” of the “cultural script” op-ed and a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

We circled back to Manhattan Institute’s City Journal article, which records:

Liberal criminologists avoid discussing the lifestyles that criminal offenders typically lead. Almost all serious offenders are men, and they usually come from families with long histories of criminal involvement, often spanning generations. They show temperamental differences early in life, begin offending in childhood or early adolescence, and rack up dozens of arrests. Their lives are chaotic and hedonistic, including the constant pursuit of drugs and sex. They produce many children with different women and rarely have the means — or inclination — to support them. Active offenders exploit others for their own benefit, including women, children, churches, and the social-welfare system. They commit many crimes before getting arrested …

Let us conclude with Thomas Sowell:

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large. … Behavior matters.