“Kids don’t end up in jail by magic. Police put them there,”
says Ali Muldrow defender

My friendly progressive-socialist acquaintance Ali Muldrow wanted me to see this article: 

“The Ali Muldrow pile-on was power defending itself.”

Right away, the headline struck us here at Blaska Policy Werkes as typical Leftwing agitprop because — think about it! — Ali Muldrow is in power and Blaska is not. She defeated your genial bloggeur in the April election with a whopping 69.9% of the vote. Nor is the young lady an outlier on the Madison Board of Education. Her running mate Ananda Mirilli was also elected and they appointed the successor (a young black hispanic, since we’re playing identity politics) to white liberal Democrat Mary Burke, who quit (one presumes) after seeing which way the wind was blowing. 

Our school board is majority minority; 6 of 7 members are female; at least one is bi-sexual. None of the seven are Republican. At least four of the seven are or have been Progressive Dane — which is to the Left of even the Dane County Democrat(ic) party.

The author of “power defending itself,” one Dayna Long, takes off after WI State Journal reporter Chris Rickert for his “noxious, inflammatory distortion of her comments.” Ms. Muldrow’s comments being these:

“I think that it’s important to talk about what it is like for the students who are arrested at school and end up in the Dane County Jail. We would not talk about the role of the Nazis and act as if the experiences people had in concentration camps is a separate issue.”

If you can hear the dog whistle …

… you ARE the dog. It is a familiar tactic on the left. Rickert must be destroyed. Dayna Long: 

It’s impossible to ignore Rickert’s own role in how Madisonians talk about race and policing — whatever he may actually believe or understand about the “urban affairs” beat to which he’s assigned, the former opinion columnist doesn’t seem to shy away from a trollish and at worst dog-whistling approach toward left causes and anti-racist activism in particular. Recall his comments on race from earlier this year: “Blacks in Madison aren’t being barred from lunch counters, to put it bluntly.”

Dayna Long, it is a fact: black kids aren’t being barred from lunch counters, if anyone remembers them. (Google it for some history.) The author then revisits the original sin of slavery, as if Ali’s young car thieves were denied admission to West high school and forced to clean the white boys’ latrines. 

She was comparing the connections between Nazis and concentration camps to those between police and youth jails, to illustrate a fundamental weakness in how people talk about the latter. Nazis were responsible for placing people in concentration camps. Similarly, kids don’t end up in jail by magic — police put them there.

“Kids don’t end up in jail by magic. Police put them there.” 

Some history: Nazis played identity politics

That we need to teach remedial history is why America is poised to follow Venezuela into the ash heap of history. Need we remind Dayna and Ali that Nazis filled its concentration camps with hated groups: gypsies, homosexuals, and Jews. Had nothing to do with behavior but with identity politics! Just like you’re doing!

No, kids do not end up in jail by magic. Their actions put them there. Just this today the hated Mr. Rickert reports that 67 of the 99 arrests for the epidemic of car thefts (out of 378 as of August 12) were of kids. Juveniles, often as young as 11 and 12. Taking off from the scene at high rates of speed. Ramming innocent motorists and the odd residential structure. 

Last school year, 15 to 20 middle-school kids — 11, 12 and 13 years old, knocked over book shelves and emptied trash cans at Lakeview branch library. “We don’t have to listen to the police. You can’t touch us,” they taunted. 

Wherever they learned that in the first place they are not unlearning it at Ali Muldrow’s public schools.

A teacher quoted by Dylan Brogan in Isthmus says if she wrote up kids for dropping the F-bomb that’s all she would be doing all day. In school!

Sixty percent of African-Amerian kids in the Madison public schools read and write below basic proficiency. That means they are functionally illiterate in a knowledge-based economy.

Some schools are less safe for all attendees

A study released today by Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty finds that the Madison schools African-American students attend are proportionately less safe than schools where white students are more predominant. Approximately 43% of students in Madison are white. The largest minority is Hispanic students, composing 21% of the students. Black students are about 18% of the population. Nearly one out of every two students in MMSD—about 48%—comes from economically disadvantaged families.

We make the case that, in reality, there are two Madisons: one of the high-income, predominantly white class that attend safe, high quality, public and private schools, and one of the low-income, predominantly minority class, stuck in unsafe public schools that are not meeting their educational needs. 

WILL matched police 911 emergency calls to each MMSD school over the last seven school years and found this:

When in life will you not need self-discipline?

One hopes that some time soon, an elected official, opinion maker, or faith leader will awake and proclaim to our minority youth: “Quit playing the victim and start becoming a victor! Stop being played by victim enablers who are after your votes. Waiting for Big Gummint to solve your problems is like waiting for Godot. (Look it up.) He never comes.

Now hear this: We have the cure for poverty right here in The Emerald City. It is called “Education.” We can teach but only you can learn. Go to school, be on time, listen to your teacher, obey the rules and you will succeed. That is how the real world works beyond your school’s unsupervised, restorative-justice study hall.

Blaska’s Bottom Line: “Keep listening to Ali Muldrow’s excuse-making and blame-shifting, and you will graduate from juvenile detention into big peoples’ prison. Your choice.”