The Patriot Post® · What's Black and White?

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/43704-whats-black-and-white-2016-07-18

If you were only to listen to those involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, you would think that America’s cops are not dedicated to serve and protect, but, rather, to bully and brutalize honest, hard-working black citizens.

That is certainly the message that’s been parroted by Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. It certainly explains why Obama’s only two attorneys general have both been black, and why the Justice Department has grabbed every opportunity to place our nation’s police departments under its extremely heavy thumb.

It also explains why every single time a black man has been shot and killed by a police officer in the line of duty, this administration has treated it like a lynching. Even when a grand jury, as well as Eric Holder’s own Justice Department, concluded that the shooting of Michael Brown was justified, it didn’t change the narrative. Brown, a 6'5", 320-pound bully, continues to be regarded as the innocent martyr, whose death somehow justified the Ferguson, MO, race riots.

Proving that facts don’t matter and that whenever it comes down to the police versus black criminals, Obama will invariably side with the thugs and against the cops, is that he or a representative of his administration will show up at the funeral of scofflaws like Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray, but never at the funerals of police officers killed in the line of duty.

But even I can’t place the entire blame on Obama, either for black crime or for the decline in black employment. After all, he can’t compel his fellow blacks to get an education, which is required in an increasingly technological world, or to get married. The fault lies with those who keep electing the dumbest, most corrupt politicians in America, and with the media for making Al Sharpton, who should be serving time for tax evasion and sedition, the spokesman for black America.

Heather MacDonald, a lawyer-writer whose books include “Are Cops Racist?” and “The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe,” recently delivered a speech at Hillsdale College.

She came armed with indisputable statistics, statistics that toss their lies back in the face of those like Obama, Lynch, Marilyn Mosby, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, Rahm Emanuel, Bill De Blasio and the coven of racists collectively known as the Congressional Black Caucus, who feel compelled to side with criminals against the police — the very same cops who risk their own lives to protect even the likes of Obama, Lynch, Mosby and the rest of that vile crew.

For openers, Ms. MacDonald confirms that black males between the age of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic teens combined!

In a recent year, America’s cops killed 987 civilians. Of those, 493 (50%) were white, blacks were 258 (26%). In nearly every case, the perp was armed or threatening the cop with lethal force. If the cops were all racists, you would expect the black death rate to be even higher because in the 75 largest cities, blacks committed 62% of all robberies, 57% of all murders and 45% of all assaults.

In New York City, where blacks make up 23% of the population, they commit 75% of all shootings, 70% of all robberies and two-thirds of all violent crimes. Which strongly suggests that crime seems to be the one area where blacks, who constitute only 12% of the nation’s population, regularly show what they’re capable of when they really put forth the effort.

When a cop kills a black youngster because he mistakes a realistic toy gun for the real thing, the media and the left-wing politicians go wild. But when 10 black kids under the age of 10 in Baltimore, three kids under the age of five in Cleveland, and dozens more in Chicago, Cincinnati and L.A., are all dead because black gangbangers can’t shoot straight, it generally goes unreported by the media and totally ignored by black apologists.

Partly, I say, it’s because the media colludes with the liberals to ignore such politically incorrect facts and partly, I insist, because there are such low expectations of urban blacks that judging their behavior by the same standards you would apply to whites, Asians, even poor Hispanics, seems pointless. The overall attitude, although generally unspoken for fear of being labeled a bigot or a racist, is that’s the way they are and you can’t really expect them to behave decently.

And, indeed, why would anyone expect better? Even half a century after the Civil Rights Act, after 50 years of Affirmative Action, Operation Head Start, trillions of dollars in welfare and small business loans, 72% of those black babies not aborted are born to single, uneducated women.

The reality is that it’s not much different when it comes to Caucasians. Most of the white prison inmates were raised in homes in which a father was only a rumor. It’s not impossible for single women to raise decent, law-abiding children, but it’s a lot harder to do it alone, especially when it comes to dispensing discipline and providing a role model for a teenage boy.

What most people may not be aware of is that the crime rate went down considerably in the years between 1994 and, say, 2008. Mainly that happened because Mayor Giuliani and Police Chief Bratton combined to lower it in New York City. They did it by realizing that the police can actually prevent crime, not merely respond to it. The results were so dramatic that other police departments around the nation took note and began to adopt similar systems.

They began collecting and analyzing crime data on a daily and, eventually, an hourly basis. They searched for patterns in order to quell outbreaks. Moreover, the chiefs and the mayors began to hold commanders responsible for crime in their jurisdictions. They began holding weekly accountability sessions, where the police brass were questioned and if they were unaware of criminal patterns and not prepared with remedies to combat it, their careers were in jeopardy.

Whereas cops had often been guilty of ignoring crime in minority communities, they suddenly had to deal with it by focusing on those high crime areas.

Now, of course, thanks mainly to those in Washington, the cops are constantly under attack. Cops working in the inner-city now find themselves surrounded by angry mobs, cursing them and tossing stones, all of it happening as the rabble point cell phones in their faces, hoping to record a cop doing something unseemly, while being sure to avoid showing what provoked the response.

As a result, the cops simply aren’t quite as diligent about doing their job. They only have to look to Baltimore where an ambitious prosecutor and an equally ambitious mayor have tried to railroad six honest cops in order to move themselves up the political food chain. Even after three of the cops have been exonerated, the threat of being disciplined by the police review board hangs over their heads.

In the aftermath of Ferguson, cops are far likelier to be killed by blacks than the other way around, and it should not surprise anyone that as a result of cops becoming wary of confrontation, they have done their best to avoid even the suspicion of racism. The direct result of this is that over the past couple of years, homicides have soared in Milwaukee, Nashville, Washington, Minneapolis and Chicago, anywhere from 54-90%.

The losers, of course, are the honest folks in these communities, who are left without the protection they deserve. But when you only see the cop-hating mobs demonstrating and never those who should be standing up for the cops, it gets harder and harder to care about them.

This turning a blind eye to the misdeeds of blacks is nothing new. For instance, in the late 1990s, scores of L.A. cops were being accused of being seriously corrupt, guilty of planting false evidence, theft, beating up prisoners, dealing narcotics, bank robbery and perjury.

Initially, over 70 police officers were implicated, but only 24 were actually found to have committed crimes. In the end, the city had to settle 140 lawsuits to the tune of $125 million.

As you can imagine, nearly every day for months, the L.A. Times devoted a great deal of the front section to the Rampart Division scandal. But after a while, if you were paying attention, you began to notice that the stories were all text, no pictures.

Finally, one day, the newspaper broke down and ran photos and, so, the mystery was solved. All two dozen police officers were either black or Hispanic.

But it was a different story when Rodney King, off his nut on booze and marijuana and resisting arrest. got the thumping by the cops that he had coming after leading them on a 100-mph chase through the streets of L.A.

Within a day or two, the Times splashed the faces of the four white cops on the front page.

Then, for good measure, after a jury in Simi Valley acquitted the four cops, the feds, pretending it wasn’t a violation of double jeopardy, tried them on civil rights violations.

This time, two of the officers were acquitted, while the other two received sentences of 32 months.

To liberals, trying people twice for the same crime constitutes social justice. So, I imagine failing to convict two cops on two separate occasions, must, according to them, constitute something called social injustice.

Just for the record, Rodney King was never even tried for driving while intoxicated or resisting arrest. What’s more, he sued the city for roughly $4 million and another $1.5 million in attorney fees, and won.

I suspect if Obama had been president at the time, he would have said that Rodney King could have been his son.