Analysis by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Well, the Left’s ongoing and endless efforts to bring more parity to the world stage by reducing America’s power, wealth and influence relative to the rest of the planet is paying dividends. Now, just like big-boy tin-pot dictatorships and third-world hell holes, the USA has its own “Travel Advisories” being issued against it by foreign nations. Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and the Bahamas have all warned their citizens of the potential dangers of traveling to the USA, Reuters reported this past Sunday. This is, of course, due to the popular belief that police in the USA are constantly shooting brownish people; the denizens of those nations issuing the advisories are mostly similarly brownish.
Hyperbole is the handmaiden of catastrophe it seems, nothing in America is ever so bad that it can’t be made out to be worse by the media or politicians. Worse still, we’re all too busy reinforcing our own narratives to bother with reality anymore; we seek out hyperbole.
Picking up the thread, MTV-dot-com published a lengthy screed on “How to Survive in America.” In it, Jamil Smith relates his unique experience.
“From childhood, we’re trained in respectability politics to improve our odds of survival. If this were a class, learning how to make sure a police officer doesn’t kill us would be something we’d be instructed in the first week. The reason why we’re taught this is because we are made to understand, from a very young age, that there is rarely ever any penalty for cops who kill us,” Smith wrote.
Odd, I recall a similar bit of instruction from my father in white bread suburban Detroit on the advent of my getting a driver license. Let’s be clear: the cops rarely face discipline when they harm or kill anyone, regardless of race. All responsible parents, regardless of race, advise their kids to calmly and politely obey police officers when in contact with them. Cops, after all, are the state’s surrogates of violence. It’s usually not a good idea to irritate them more than necessary.
Depending on who you ask, there were right about 1,000 people shot to death, total, by police last year, both justified and unjustified. In an average year, 9,000 – 11,000 Americans fall victim to homicide. Last year, most of the people shot to death by cops were white; not black, not Hispanic, not Middle Eastern but white. Of course, that number doesn’t tell the right story, so Black Lives Matter, et. al. focus on the percentages, which tell an uglier tale; 7.13 black people are killed by police per million, versus 2.91 for white people per million. Add to that the fact that black people only make up about 13 percent of the population – but most of those shot by cops are young black males, which would only account for maybe five percent of the total U.S. population – and the disparity looks really bad.
Of course, pointing out that young black males are caught in the commission of crimes at a much, much higher rate, statistically, than are whites gets one called a “racist,” which isn’t helpful; and calls into question whether or not blacks really commit more crimes, or if black communities are just policed more heavy-handedly than are predominantly white ones, which is helpful.
In that light, a strong case can be made that young black males are caught in a maelstrom of bad circumstances that all too often leads to them being shot by cops at a rate that is totally inappropriate. Generational poverty brought by big government programs like the failed “war on poverty,” keeps many blacks clustered into low-income communities in inner cities. From there, the doomed “war on drugs” provides a means of making money in an area where there aren’t many legitimate jobs to be had for young people. This “drug activity” brings cops to the neighborhood, looking to arrest the peddlers. Gangs form to protect drug turf, violence escalates. This brings more cops, more patrols, more pressure, more harassment, more arrests – the fuse burns lower, then boom.
Then, the media gets a hold of the story and runs with it. Tensions are stoked, angry flames fanned. Protests become riots. And now, as society ostensibly deteriorates further, we get sniper fire at hitherto peaceful demonstrations.
“He was upset about Black Lives Matter (and) he wanted to kill white people, especially white officers,” said Dallas Police Chief David Brown after the July 7 attack in Dallas where a lone gunman shot 12 police officers, killing five of them.
“I think it’s very hard to untangle the motives of this shooter. By definition if you shoot people who pose no threat to you, you have a troubled mind,” President Obama said in Warsaw, Poland on July 9.
Instead of helping provide some clarity, the president just muddies the waters some more and watches the chaos swirl.
This has become the predictable cycle that follows a tragedy. Add to it the social media dynamic, where the remoteness and relative anonymity of the Internet makes everyone twice as tough and correct as they actually are, and the level of national discourse plummets.
By now, everyone is back in their corners, having their prejudices reconfirmed. Blacks and liberals and others who sympathize with the Black Lives Matter crowd are doubling down on their favorite sources, Salon, Mother Jones and other purveyors of comforting lies. Whites, conservatives, dittoheads, etc., have similarly too turned to their Rush Limbaughs and Bill O’Reillys to be told what to think about the matter. The space cadets are, as usual, tuned into Infowars.
The bell sounds and the social media sites light up, the enraged, impassioned combatants back in the center of the ring swinging their lies and distortions and nonsense like so many haymakers; most of them never bothering to spare a critical, independent thought. The smart ones will say “screw this” and go outside to catch Pokemon. As the topic gets distorted and twisted further and further away from reality, so too does the mindset of Americans participating in the debate. Already, we’re laser-focused on race politics as being the entire problem with police shootings. That must be it, right? That’s what the protests are all about. That’s what all the stuff on Twitter and Facebook keep reconfirming, after all. Unless you’ve already decided BLM is a terrorist organization, and then this is all much ado about nothing, the cops were, of course, justified in the recent shootings, just as they “usually” are.
And, as long as we remain laser-focused on symptoms, the cause of the disease is free to go untreated. The cause is not “institutional racism.” In fact, there is no one cause for this. Why white cops occasionally freak out and shoot unarmed black men is usually a confluence of several factors; many of which are beyond the white cop’s immediate control. What we as a society can, however, control are the laws that brought that cop into contact with that young black man to begin with.
The war on drugs, more than anything else, is what brings cops into black neighborhoods and other low-income areas where young people supplement the lack of legit employment opportunities with illicit entrepreneurship. Increasing the number of contacts between police and a community is naturally going to increase the number of times a cop shoots a member of that community. The inverse is equally true.
We ought try it.
In fact, we ought to try a completely different model of policing in this nation. We should return the role of the police officer to its rightful, historical place, that of protector of life and property. Today, all cops are glorified meter maids; their prime directive is to generate revenue for their jurisdiction by handing out tickets or, better yet, making drug arrests that allow for asset forfeiture. This, by now long-running role of the police, has stood the entire original purpose of the state upon its head.
“The law perverted! The law — and, in its wake, all the collective forces of the nation — the law, I say, not only diverted from its proper direction, but made to pursue one entirely contrary! The law become the tool of every kind of avarice, instead of being its check! The law guilty of that very iniquity which it was its mission to punish! Truly, this is a serious fact, if it exists, and one to which I feel bound to call the attention of my fellow citizens,” wrote Frederic Bastiat in “The Law,” which was published in 1890.
Of course, the proper direction of the Law was to protect individuals from damage to person and property. As Bastiat pointed out over a century ago, when the state uses its monopoly on violence to damage the person and property of citizens, the purpose of the state has become perverted.
If the governments of this nation, from the federal level on down to the county sheriff, were serious about reducing the number of civilians shot by cops, they’d end the drug war and stop trying to fund bloated local government budgets on tickets, fines and confiscation. Hell, decriminalize all crimes in which there is no victim. Have municipalities learn to balance their budgets and stop relying on their police as a source of revenue. Do those things, and there most certainly will be a rapid and noticeable decline in all violence. Stay the current course, and prepare for more bloodshed, confusion, chaos and national discord – and probably more nations advising their citizens against visiting us.
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