Notes on the Passing Scene

For your edification I have collected some notes on the passing scene. And especially about the ongoing insurrection taking place in America’s most liberal cities. 

Among the salient details is one that I and many others have often mentioned. In Americas great cities, the middle class has been hollowed out, leaving the rich and the rest. Surely, this is combustible, even though it tends to ignore the fact that these cities have long been leftist bastions. This means that the leftists governing the places ought to be held accountable for the damage their policies have inflicted on their cities.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal this morning, William Galston provides an overview of inequality in Minneapolis:

In some ways, Minneapolis was ripe for this incident. The city’s income gap between white and African-American households is among the widest in the country. Minorities are significantly underrepresented in its police force. Only 8% of its officers live in the city—almost none in minority communities—compared with a nationwide average of 40%.

Of course, Minneapolis has a weak-kneed mayor who let rioters run wild in his city. Then again, liberal politicians surely had a hand in producing a city where the income gap was so wide.

Emily Badger explains in the New York Times that this year’s rioters have often directed their rage against luxury shops and boutiques. The poor seem to be rebelling against the ostentatious show of wealth, wealth that they cannot imagine ever having:

Downtowns became a destination again for white diners and even residents. “Tech hubs” arrived. Stadiums and condos were built. Restaurants proliferated. Rents rose. Decent manufacturing and clerical jobs all but disappeared, replaced by a vast low-wage service sector. And the gaps between the most prosperous neighborhoods and those still trapped in poverty grew wider and more visible.

This expanding urban inequality is now implicated in new waves of unrest, another source of rage, inseparable from race, bound up with all the older ones. If protesters in the 1960s cried out from black neighborhoods that had seen severe disinvestment, now they are calling attention to cities that have experienced enormous investment — investment that excludes them.

If complaining about the problem could solve the problem, we would long since have solved the problem. If liberal white guilt could solve the problem, there would be no problem. But, consider this. Children from the inner cities receive substandard educations. They are consigned to lifelong poverty because the school system does not allow them to work at their best. When reformers like Eva Moskowitz established Success Academies where inner city children excel academically, local politicians, goaded by the teachers’ unions and New York City’s idiot School Chancellor, want to shut them down. 

The Wall Street Journal editorializes this morning that the cities where riotous insurrection has taken root are true blue, true liberal, truly progressive. Apparently, the leaders of these cities believe that the rich should be punished-- by having their fancy boutiques taken away from them. The Journal also points out the level of violence directed against the police:

In downtown St. Louis, four police officers were shot after midnight. “I believe some coward randomly shot at the police line,” said police chief John Hayden. A 7-Eleven was looted and set afire, but firefighters were deliberately slowed by protesters in responding. “We had people lying down in the street” and trash cans were placed as obstacles to block fire trucks, said fire chief Dennis Jenkerson.

The NYPD has some 36,000 officers. How could they not be deployed in enough numbers to contain this rampage? And how can these public officials not deploy the National Guard to assist the police in restoring public order and protecting the innocent? This wasn’t the first night of mayhem. It was the fourth in a row, and the police clearly knew what could happen. The only explanation is that Messrs. Cuomo and de Blasio lack the political will to stop it.

And also:

What all these cities have in common is that they are led by Democrats who seem to have bought into the belief that the police are a bigger problem than rampant disorder. They are either cowed by their party’s left, or they agree that America is systemically racist and rioting is a justified expression of anger against it. They offer pro forma disapproval of law breakers but refuse to act to stop them.

As for the urban legend that the police are the problem, Heather Mac Donald provides some statistics to debunk the notion that the police are intrinsically racist. One suspects, as noted yesterday, that blaming the police is simply a way to exculpate the rioters:

However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

What do the statistics tell us?

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.

She reports the results from the National Academy of Sciences study about police bias:

The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.

The Obama Justice Department reached the same conclusion:

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

Blaming the police does not just exculpate local politicians and leftist intellectuals. It treats minority group members as a hopeless and incapable of doing anything on their own. This tells them that they can only succeed in America by electing leftist politicians who will take care of them in a great big Nanny state. If you don't think that the left's politicians are playing the current riots as they played the pandemic, as a way to boost minority voter turnout, you have missed the story.