Posted by
Andrews on Friday, April 04, 2008 4:10:38 PM
There is one thing that has puzzled me for a long time, the attitude of black populations in big cities toward the police. The first charge you hear is that the police are slow to respond to crime in minority neighborhoods and do too little to fight crime there, which may or may not be valid. But, as soon as a black criminal is apprehended, the news that evening is filled with images of his neighbors asking why the police arrested him, telling everyone that the criminal was a "good boy", and generally implying that the police are railroading an innocent man. And, G-d forbid the police shoot anyone, as everyone within a mile of the scene will demand to know why the police didn't fire a warning shot, why they felt the need to kill someone only armed with a knife, why they shot a man who was only charging at them, and a lot more.
It is this schizophrenic behavior which puzzles me. And it is not exclusively limited to black neighborhoods, though they often provide the most striking examples. Hispanic neighborhood seem to do the same, as do some white "redneck" neighborhoods. The residents complain about crime, and about the fact that the police ignore their problems, yet, when the police finally act, they do everything they can to see that the criminal is let back out on the streets.
That is the part that confuses me the most. I could almost understand this "racial solidarity" (or perhaps "class solidarity" in the case of "redneck" neighborhoods) if the criminals were out robbing and killing other people. I could almost see a black neighborhood pulling for a black criminal who robbed whites. It would be stupid and racist, but I could understand it. But that is not the case here. These criminals are causing problems in the very neighborhood that is defending them.
It just makes no sense.
The residents are basically asking police to come and stop crime, but, when the police do just that, they then demand that the police let the criminals go so they can come back and cause trouble once again. It is a strangely masochistic position, asking to have crime restored to one's neighborhood.
I understand that some of this derives from fears of police racism, and a knee jerk reaction that automatically assumes any black man is being arrested unfairly, but does no one in the community see how self-destructive that response is? They know perfectly well that the person arrested is a criminal, and is likely guilty, some of those defending him may even have witnessed his misdeeds, yet they have so internalized suspicion of police that they would willingly let a criminal back on the streets rather than give the benefit of the doubt to the police.
And, actually, this ties into some of the more topical matters on my blog, as it is this sort of thinking that Reverend Wright is feeding. By his rhetoric of fear and suspicion of whites and white authority, he is setting up the circumstances that prevent blacks for supporting the police even when it means taking crime out of their own neighborhoods.*
In short, Wright and those like him, through their rhetoric of hatred and fear, have prevented cities from doing anything about rampant crime in black neighborhoods, and have set up their parishioners to be unable to assist the police in combating crime.
To somehow think that such hatred is helping inner city blacks is absurd. The rhetoric of Wright and others does nothing but hurt the black community. It interjects race into issues where it does not belong, and does so in a way that does nothing to advance the interests of law abiding blacks, but instead helps those who are breaking the law.
So long as we bring irresponsible charges of racism into law enforcement, we will never see any improvement. It is only when people see the issue as the law abiding versus the criminal, rather than black versus white, that we will be able to take even the most basic, common sense steps needed to stop crime.
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* The reason Hispanics follow this model is similar to the reason blacks do. Redneck neighborhoods are harder to understand, though the white underclass does tend to vilify police and lionize criminals almost as much as poor blacks, so the explanation may hold there as well.