How many more black people
must die under ‘police reform’?
What’s this? We want police to prevent crime? After a decade of demanding police to (in the words of Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes Conway) stand down (and not stand by)? The Associated Press writes:
A new report examining Baltimore’s response to a mass shooting at a neighborhood block party last month says that police ignored multiple warning signs and failed to take pro-active measures in the hours leading up to the shooting.
Pro-active measures? What pro-active measures? !!! (“Playoffs? Playoffs? !!!)
How many police departments are laboring under federal consent decrees? In how many jurisdictions have stop and frisk been outlawed by progressive jurists? A federal judge in New York City in 2013 banned the practice begun by Mayor Giuliani in the 1990s and continued by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Under pressure from the ACLU and other progressives, the practice was deemed racially disproportionate, doncha know.
So, too, are the victims of crime racially disproportionate. People of color bear the brunt of violent crime. “Stop & Frisk helped the city reduce crime more than any other major American city,” law professor and former prosecutor Lawrence Rosenthal writes.
At the peak of New York’s crime wave in 1991, the homicide victimization rate in New York was 58 per 100,000 for people of African ancestry, 44 for Hispanics and 8 for whites. By 2007, the black homicide victimization rate had declined to 15.9, the Hispanic rate to 4.9, and the white rate to 1.55.
By 2013, Bloomberg’s last year as mayor, murders had dropped to a total of 335 in a city of more than 8 million. Chicago, in contrast, with a population less than half that of New York, had 415 homicides in 2013. [In 2022 NYC homicides jumped back up to 433.]
"Thus, the lives saved by New York's policies were disproportionately those of people of color."Targeted stop-and-frisk policing makes a great deal of sense. When undertaken with frequency and carried out at hot spots of drug- and firearms-related crime, stop-and-frisk tactics can alter the perceptions of potential offenders by making apparent the risks of carrying drugs or guns in public. … In contrast, a reactive strategy, which has police appear only when someone calls 911, encourages offenders to intimidate the community so no one calls for help.
— “Crime dropped under stop & frisk“
Police fear the race card
In that 07-02-23 Baltimore mass shooting, 2 people died and 28 were wounded during a “summertime celebration” in a public housing complex. Residents “questioned whether police would have responded differently if the incident unfolded in a more affluent area.”
You mean, … in a white area? You better believe they would respond differently! They wouldn’t be accused of racism!
Baltimore police, of course, were pilloried by the news media and other progressives after the 2015 death in custody of Freddie Gray. “Since then, city leaders have focused on reforming the Baltimore Police Department and repairing public trust, especially within the black community,” the AP reports with a bewildering absence of irony. “Meanwhile the city’s rampant gun violence is heavily concentrated in its poorest neighborhoods.” (Source here.) That sounds (wait for it!) … disproportionate!
→ “Progressives need to have real answers on crime,“ Sarah Abramsky writes in The Nation, without providing any answers on crime, real or not. In California violent crime and property crime increased by 6% last year after increases the previous two years. California’s murder rate remains 24% higher than 2017.
Blaska’s Bottom Line: Police did not make anyone shoot up that summertime celebration in Baltimore. There’s some hope: On July 27, the Oakland branch of the NAACP called on elected leaders to declare a state of emergency.
“Failed leadership,” including the “movement to defund the police, our district attorney’s unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who murder and commit life threatening serious crimes, and the proliferation of anti-police rhetoric have created a heyday for Oakland criminals,” NAACP president Cynthia Adams and Bishop Bob Jackson wrote.
— Heather Mac Donald
26 responses to “So much for ‘over policing’”
“They wouldn’t be accused of RAYcism!” (emphasis added)
Bravo IndigoNovember Golf Oscar!
The Gotch
[…] This post originally appeared at https://davidblaska.com/2023/09/01/so-much-for-over-policing/ […]
“So, too, are the victims of crime racially disproportionate. People of color bear the brunt of violent crime.” Clearly, not all Black lives matter.
“Clearly, not all Black lives matter.”
Not to black people (who commit the most murders AND comprise the highest number/percentage of victims) they don’t.
The Gotch
‘Zactly my point….
You want to reduce crime in Wisconsin? Put first time OWIs in prison for one year.
“You want to reduce crime in Wisconsin? Put first time OWIs in prison for one year.”
All Politics Is Local anon
That said, you want to reduce crime in i>The 77 Square Miles Surrounded By A Sea Of Reality?
Put first time Grand Theft Auto…I mean…Operating A Vehicle Without Owner’s Consent in prison for one year.
Might that approach be more effective…?
The Gotch
Might that approach be more effective?
Not even close. There were almost 23,000 convictions for operating while intoxicated (OWI) driving offenses in Wisconsin in 2022.
13,957 reported Wisconsin motor vehicle thefts in 2021; a 41.5% increase over 2020.
Leading county for this type of behavior? Milwaukee.
In possibly related news: “Of the 50 most populous counties in the US, Milwaukee County has the most prevalent alcohol-impaired driving rates”
A trend emerging**….?
And yes, The Gotch knows it’s the most populous county, he just doesn’t think that’s the only externality which should be considered.
The Gotch
No one on earth has more African American blood on his hands than George Soros.
The rhetoric – Black Lives Matter, etc – is a smokescreen that enables people who don’t want to look more closely believe they are doing something for the benefit of humanity. Along with the psyop that was and is covid, this is the greatest PR achievement of my lifetime. Liberals now support the most illiberal policies – War, censorship, surveillance, the xxx-Industrial complexes, etc.
For me anyway, it’s much easier to make sense of these policies and non-actions as an intentional takedown of society; up to and including our 77 square miles.
Beware of anyone claiming to act for “the benefit of humanity.” Pledging allegiance to a noble-sounding abstraction allows one to overlook the human carnage that allegiance often entails (as in, for example during the French Revolution when all you had to do was endorse Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity while watching your fellow citizen’s head being chopped off, and your conscience was salved).
Both the left and the right are calling for defunding the police. Essentially, whenever anyone perceives police overreach they want to defund them.
Police don’t by-and-large prevent crime no matter which tactic they use. This is a lie that police administrators use to get more funding and take credit when crime rates happen to lower under their watch. When crime rates rise under their watch they will pivot and turn to other causal factors – but still ask for more money 🙂 (This game isn’t reserved for schools and educators!). Judging police performance by crime rates is literally theater.
The correct role for police under US law is to solve crime. We will be far better served if we measured police performance by this metric and this metric only. Solving more criminal cases is the best long term crime prevention strategy, but far too few people use clearance rates as a measure of police performance (and this performance evaluation needs to extend even further up the chain to DAs, judges, prison wardens, probation agents, etc).
For as much money as this system sucks up and for as much societal impact it has, we have remarkably little accountability. Contrast this with our public education system, which has been relentlessly examined and measured and evaluated – to the point that we have publicly funded parallel charter institutions and disbanded their employee unions! One would think that a similar approach would happen with criminal justice, but instead the answer is always, forever, no questions, no strings, increase upon increase in funding. Which political party is beholden to unionized special interests again?
Aside: Stop and frisk proponents cherry pick stats. The most obvious and yet ignored crime-correlating statistic is income. People with more money commit less crime. If we want less crime we need to make sure poor people can make more money legally. Stop and frisk also has a small problem called the US Constitution. I don’t care what kind of legal headstands you want to throw back to me, unreasonable searches are illegal. Searching someone when there is no probable cause that they have committed a crime should be illegal. Too many so called supporters of the constitution only care when a violation is happening to them – but a true supporter of freedom will say something when it happens to anyone.
“The correct role for police under US law is to solve crime.”
You don’t consider Law Enforcement part of that correct role?
The Gotch
Law enforcement is not crime prevention. You enforce violations of the law. You don’t enforce theoretical future violations.
Yes, you do. To argue as you do, Rollie, would argue that posting a traffic speed sign is not law enforcement — only arresting the speeder is.
You want police to be only the intake system for the criminal justice system. Mop up the blood on the sidewalk after the drive-by. You are the problem, Rollie.
I’m just being real. State-centered crime prevention is literally unconstitutional. If you want big brother to prevent all crime, that’s a fine opinion I suppose, but it will quickly butt up against freedom. Too many conservatives want freedom from themselves but not others. People who have yet to commit a crime are by definition innocent. Do you want the state looking over the shoulder of every innocent person in hopes of preventing them from committing a crime? Or maybe you just want that for poor/minority individuals who have a higher “likelihood”?
“People who have yet to commit a crime are by definition innocent.”
No $#!t, Sherlock; but there’s a tad more to it than just that.
People who have been charged with committing a crime are by definition innocent**…until they’ve been tried and convicted in a court of law.
**Apparently not to despicable Lefty SanFranNan, who shockingly believes you must <a href="https://mynbc15.com/news/nation-world/twitter-fact-checks-nancy-pelosi-for-saying-trump-can-prove-innocence-at-trial-donald-president-speaker-house-indictment-stormy-daniels-innocent-proven-guiltyProve_Your_Innocence”>, rather than benefit from the constitutionally protected presumption of it.
The Gotch
Fair point.
Get out of the heat, Rollie! It is frying your brain! YES police higher crime neighborhoods! Of course! People who have yet to commit a crime are criminals in waiting. Tell the fire department to do no inspections until the fire burns the house down. Tell the health department to inspect no restaurants until the food poisonings. Take the State Patrol cars off the highways until the fatal accident. You, sir, are a piece of progressive work!
Blaska, you bring up straw man arguments, and I hope it was a joke when you assert that “People who have yet to commit a crime are criminals in waiting.” That’s a seriously dystopian position.
The constitution protects us against unreasonable searches. Walking down the street doesn’t (yet) require a permit from the city in exchange for an agreement to allow random searches of your property (like, say, a restaurant license might; from your examples).
But I’ll take you up on the fire prevention comparison. I’d be perfectly fine with a police department crime prevention strategy that is similar to fire department fire prevention. If there is an increase in fires, we don’t blame the fire chief, and if there’s a decrease we don’t congratulate the fire chief. They do some basic public education on prevention, some basic code compliance checks, and we only evaluate them on things they control. That’s what I want for police.
Even if I accept your premise that police departments can meaningfully prevent crime (beyond via solving crime, which I support obviously) – what does police centered crime prevention actually look like? It’s generally an extremely expensive saturation of patrol officers and roadblock checkpoints. People (including me) have been ok with very short term implementation of this stuff in response to specific actionable intelligence, but that’s a far cry from wholesale “stop and frisk” as a base strategy. Or maybe you have better ideas – what is a good Police-centered crime prevention strategy? Beyond a catch-phrase, I mean.
Does it even work? So, we spend all that money and what do we get? Not much. The evidence is not substantial in my opinion and always cherry picked. Again, for a specific and actionable situation where there is credible evidence – sure, have the police do some prevention. But those situations don’t have the same constitutional issues.
To call my position progressive is laughable. I was under the impression upholding the constitution and not wasting taxpayer dollars was the conservative position. You’re more MAGA than I thought 🙂
Is what we are not doing now working?
It’s a matter of opinion, but I don’t think it is. I’d like to see less resources put to “preventing” crime and more to solving it. Let’s get our clearance rates up. This is a pro-police position. If everything a police officer did each workday was in service to a crime victim they’d be seen more as heroes. It’s the rooting around and harassing innocent “potential criminals” and never catching the guy that stole your lawnmower that drives anti police sentiment.
Rollie; you are as real as you are terse.
[…] Didn’t we just write “So much for over-policing”? […]