The Patriot Post® · In Brief: Crime Killed a Quarter of a Million Black People
Crime is not a “gun problem,” but a culture one. It’s also not a Republican problem, but a Democrat one. And journalist Daniel Greenfield explains the almost unbelievable cost in human life.
Over the last decade, BLM, and assorted leftist and libertarian groups dismantled our criminal justice system. Police forces were defunded, pro-crime prosecutors refused to lock up criminals, federal and state prison systems released tens of thousands of them, and a wave of legislative decriminalization legalized everything from shoplifting, to drug dealing and mugging.
The pro-crime policymaking that eliminated public safety and cost over 3,000 lives in 2020 alone was done under the guise of fighting racism. Statistics which showed that black people were more likely to be arrested, imprisoned or shot during criminal encounters with police were used to spread conspiracy theories falsely accusing the criminal justice system of systemic racism.
What all of these racist conspiracy theories popularized by politicians, the media, and the entertainment industry ignored was that black people were also far more likely to be crime victims. …
A Pew survey found that while only 33% of white Democrats wanted to reduce crime, 63% of Hispanics and 66% of black people thought that fighting crime should be a priority.
Why is that? Because, again, they are “disproportionately affected by crime.” Greenfield gives some numbers and a big takeaway:
Pro-crime policies led to the deaths of an additional 2,244 black people in 2020. According to a Johns Hopkins report, “in 2020, one out of every 1,000 young black males (15–34) was shot and killed” and, “more than half of all black teens (15–19) who died in 2020 — a staggering 52% — were killed by gun violence.”
CDC numbers showed that homicide is a leading cause of death among black men under the age of 20, and from the ages of 20 to 44. White men are killed by guns at the rate of 3.15 per 100,000 while black men die at the rate of 48.16 per 100,000. Pro-crime policies increase crime and kill thousands of black people. That’s what a real disproportionate impact looks like.
Every time pro-crime politicians free criminals, pro-crime prosecutors refuse to prosecute violent offenders, and legislatures eliminate bail, the impact is felt most strongly in the black community.
Law enforcement isn’t racist, but getting rid of it is. When a community depends more on a particular service, losing it has a clear disproportionate impact. Keeping the peace, arresting offenders and dispensing justice is one of the few primal duties of government. The breach in the social contract when the government fails to provide peacekeeping services is devastating.
After advocating the simple solution of locking up criminals, as well as discussing the consequences for black neighborhoods. He goes so far as to assert:
It is hard to think of any single policy in the last generation that has done more harm to black people or claimed more lives than the pro-crime agenda. Pro-crime activists have falsely claimed that police shootings of black men are a form of genocide. They’re not. Crime is.
One study counted 286,075 firearm deaths among black people from 1990 to 2021. That’s over a quarter of a million deaths. Some of them are due to suicide, but suicides are much lower among black people than white people, and the majority of black gun deaths were homicides.
And seeing a quarter of a million deaths, the pro-crime Left wants even more bodies.
Those quarter of a million deaths have been largely self-inflicted, but, much as with the welfare state, they were aided and abetted by white liberal policymakers who had come to believe that what the black community really needed was for the government to enable its criminals.
Racist liberal condescension continues to destroy black communities, families and lives.
Greenfield eventually concludes:
Pro-crime policies are racist. They enable a crime epidemic that has killed more black people than the total number of battlefield casualties for all races in the Civil War. More black people died in the year of Black Lives Matter than our entire death toll in the Iraq War. …
While the Left claims that highways and dress codes are systemically racist, their pro-crime policies are a racist program that promises liberation but offers only mass death.