This is ill-timed, so it is probably ill-considered. Probably mealy-mouthed as well.
Generally, crime rates in America are down markedly from two decades ago. (This is not true if you live in Chicago.) The drop has not entirely been explained. One explanation, advanced by the police is that aggressive street policing (e.g. “stop-and-frisk”) has taken criminals off the street, deterred many others, and stopped a downward spiral of civic demoralization.[1]
Effective or not, the policy had unhappy consequences that were not, but could have been, anticipated. First, African-Americans are victims of crime at much higher rates than are whites. Since we live in a still-segregated society, this means that most crime is intra-racial, rather than inter-racial. African-Americans are disproportionately both victims and victimizers. Concentrating policing on high-crime areas inevitably assumed a character that could easily be construed as “racist.”
Second, the vast majority of people living in high-crime areas are not criminals. As a result, “stop-and-frisk” involves stopping and frisking lots of innocent people in order to catch a few guilty ones. All those innocent people have every right to feel that they are being harassed merely because they fit some demographic profile. Not much effort seems to have been committed to trying to ease this feeling, if it even would be possible.
Third, policing appears to be a “coarse art,” instead of a “fine art.” Ordinary fallible and flawed human beings have to figure out how to carry out the strategies defined by their superiors. Often they have to carry out these policies while in contact with difficult, non-compliant people. Moreover, America is awash in firearms. Far too often, these interactions end in violent death. Often, but not always, the circumstances are gray rather than black and white. Afterwards, prosecutors, judges, and juries are more inclined than not to reject condemning the police. Politicians pile-on, affirming that the laws are applied in a discriminatory way, or voicing platitudes, or asserting an unquestioning integral defense of police conduct.
If you stay at this policy long enough, you’re going to anger an awful lot of people. It’s like building up the “fuel” for a forest fire. All that is required for a conflagration is a lightning strike or a series of them.
Trayvon Martin. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Laquan McDonald. Walter Scott. Freddy Gray. All were lightning strikes that set off a conflagration. On the one hand, the “Black Lives Matter” protest movement sprang up. On the other hand, American views on the state of race relations shifted from optimistic to pessimistic. Recently, Baltimore prosecutors have suffered a series of stinging defeats in the effort to prosecute police officers in the arresting-to-death of Freddy Gray. Then, police in Minnesota and Louisiana shot to death two black men in what should have been minor incidents. More lightning strikes.
Protests erupted in many cities. In Dallas, a black sniper used the occasion of one such peaceful protest to kill five police officers.
It has been difficult to hold an intelligent conversation about these matters. For one thing, the subject is both complex and painful. For another, it coincides with other complex and painful controversies. The white populist revolts in both major parties. The mass shootings and terrorist attacks. Are these issues inter-related, with a common solution, or is it just our bad luck that they arose at the same time?
[1] See Barry Friedman, “Thin Blue Lines,” NYT Book Review, 3 July 2016. Friedman reviews Heather Mac Donald, The War on Cops:, and Malcolm Sparrow, Handcuffed.
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