By Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, July 13, 2016
As the families of slain police officers in Dallas,
Texas, prepared for the burials of their loved ones, America’s top politicians
from both sides of the aisle came to a consensus. They decided that the
solution to racial tensions — tensions that have now resulted in the mass
shooting of white police officers, as well as a dramatically escalating murder
rate in America’s largest cities — was to talk about feelings.
Yes, feelings.
Not a culture of crime in minority areas of America’s
major cities. Not the hamstringing of police by the Department of Justice, or
the nasty, politically driven coverage of yet-to-be-investigated police
shootings by the media.
No, said our politicians. We had to discuss coming
together in a sort of national group-therapy session.
Naturally, America’s group-therapy leader, President
Obama, led the way. After two videos surrounding police shootings went viral —
one showing the shooting of Alton Sterling in Louisiana, the second, the
aftermath of the shooting of Philando Castile in Minnesota — Obama leapt to the
airwaves to declare, without evidence, that such shootings were not merely
“isolated incidents.” No, Obama explained — they were more. “They are
symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal-justice system, the racial
disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting
lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the
communities they serve,” Obama stated, ignoring the fact that such statistical
disparities are largely due to higher rates of crime among some racial
subgroups.
Obama concluded, holding the conch: “All Americans should
recognize the anger, frustration, and grief that so many Americans are feeling
— feelings that are being expressed in peaceful protests and vigils. Michelle
and I share those feelings. Rather than fall into a predictable pattern of
division and political posturing, let’s reflect on what we can do better.”
Except that Obama offered no solutions. Because advocates
of feelings over facts never do. They believe that merely acknowledging
feelings, justifying them, and excusing them allows them to wash their hands of
the problem entirely.
It’s not just Obama. On the right side of the aisle, Newt
Gingrich declared, “If you are a normal, white American, the truth is you don’t
understand being black in America and you instinctively underestimate the level
of discrimination and the level of additional risk.” Senator Marco Rubio
stated: “Those of us who are not African American will never fully understand
the experience of being black in America. . . . How they feel is a reality that
we cannot and should not ignore.”
But if the political goal is to alleviate feelings of
discrimination, no end point can ever be reached so long as a disproportionate
number of black people end up in prison. And a disproportionate number of black
people end up in prison not because
of discrimination in the criminal-justice system, but because a
disproportionate number of black people commit crimes.
Obama, Gingrich, and Rubio all prize offering sympathy
over help; crediting the unjustified feeling that there is pervasive bias in
the criminal-justice system means making evidence secondary to perceptions. In
the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Mo., a large majority of black Americans felt that Officer Darren Wilson was
guilty of murder in August 2015. They were wrong. But according to our
political leaders, such feelings ought to be granted the patina of legitimacy.
This isn’t leadership. It’s moral cowardice.
There are only two real
solutions to ending tension between black communities and the police. First,
the police could withdraw from black communities entirely. That would end the
problem of confrontations, but it would also result in a tremendous uptick in
crime. That’s beginning to happen now, as Heather Mac Donald has documented in
what she calls the “Ferguson effect”: Violent crime, up to and including
murder, is skyrocketing in America’s major cities, and especially in minority
areas.
Second, the police could actually solve the crime problem. That would require more police presence, not less.
In the short term, more police presence could exacerbate
conflict with members of minority communities, of course. That’s because
policing in high-crime areas is necessarily more abrasive and aggressive — if
you place men and women in blue at higher risk of danger, then they’re
significantly more likely to get rough with those they confront.
But it is also possible that more police deployed to
high-crime areas would tamp down
racial confrontations. As Jill Loevy, of the Los Angeles Times — a liberal herself — writes, “It may seem
paradoxical, but the police tactics that protesters have recently denounced as
harassment and discrimination actually overcompensate for what is, in essence,
a weak police presence in these neighborhoods.”
In the long term, there is no choice but to increase
police presence. In order for high-crime areas to become places of investment
and safety — in order to tamp down the need
for more policing — the source of crime must be removed: criminals. And there
is only one group in America empowered with the ability to remove criminals
from high-crime communities, no matter how much locals may feel uncomfortable
about it: the cops.
Over the course of American history, population groups in
which crime is concentrated have routinely come into conflict with the police —
and, as their crime rate has lowered, so have their adversarial relations with
law enforcement. Lowering the crime rate in particular areas has generally
occurred through those areas’ advancing economically, or through population
movement. But America’s current high-crime areas are short on economic
opportunity and mobility thanks to intergenerational legacies of single
motherhood and crime. That leaves just one option: cleaning up the streets as
they currently stand.
But that’s precisely the option foreclosed by the Black
Lives Matter evidence-last, feelings-first racialism we’re now hearing from our
loudest and most prominent voices.
And that, in turn, means more black Americans will die. More
cops will die, too, as they’re forced to try to handle crime while understaffed
and overburdened. And the drumbeat of criticism will continue, because it’s
always easier for politicians to tell you they feel your pain than to give you
solutions that may hurt.
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