The Seattle Times weighs in on the Gates arrest and argues:
In the larger picture, what ought to drive attention and public policy is the long history of racial disparities in law enforcement.
African Americans are 12 percent of the U.S. population, yet account for 28 percent of national arrests and 38 percent of those convicted of a felony. More than 60 percent of prison inmates are racial and ethnic minorities. Among black males in their twenties, 1 in every 8 is in prison or jail on any given day.
It would be easy to accept these statistics as proof that blacks commit more crimes. Racial profiling is more likely.
(Emphasis added.)
That last sentence is an astonishing slur on our police, whatever their race or ethnicity. In particular, it is an astonishing slur on our many black police officers, who have one of the toughest jobs in the world, and often do it very well.
As happens far too often, I am left hoping that whoever wrote that editorial is lying, that they do not believe what they wrote. But I fear that they do, which is why I chose that title for this post.
Oddly, whoever wrote the editorial is right about racial disparities in law enforcement, but not in the way that they think. In the past, racists often tolerated black-on-black crime. Now, the people who tolerate, or excuse, or even deny, as in that editorial, the problem of black crime are almost all on the left. I won't get into their motives; I'll leave that question to liberals like Jim Sleeper. But I will say this: The people hurt most by the tolerance for black crime are usually black. That fact, which should trouble every decent American, apparently has escaped the Seattle Times editorial board.
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
(I didn't bother to check the numbers in that second paragraph, since the Times doesn't give their source(s). Most likely all of their numbers are wrong. For instance, the census says that blacks make up 12.8 percent of the population — but that's without counting people who identify themselves as mixed race.)
Comments are closed because I don't have time today to supervise them. But I would really like to have reactions from police and prosecutors to that extraordinary claim. Some may want to react without revealing their identities, and that would be fine.
Posted by Jim Miller at July 28, 2009 09:29 AM | Email This