Watching the trailer to Spike Lee's new CHI-RAQ joint, a strangely light-hearted, erotic attempt to shine light on Chicago's black-on-black epidemic of violence, reminded me of the bad old days when New York City averaged 2,085 homicides a year. The murder rate spiraled out of control from January 1990 to December 1993, the four years of Gotham's first and only black mayor, David Dinkins.
Rudolph Giuliani took power in January 1994 and immediately ordered a much needed police crackdown. The dark underbelly of this clampdown was a sharp increase in reports of police abuse; the upside was a decrease in the homicide rate to 891 annually during Giuliani's eight-year reign. If "Black Lives Matter" had existed twenty years ago, they doubtless would not have admitted what the self-appointed community activists of the day wouldn't acknowledge, either: that those who benefited the most from this substantial drop in grisly wrongdoing were NYC's minority residents. Instead, militants resorted to denigrating Giuliani as a bigoted fascist.
That Black Lives Matter ignores inner-city crime while focusing solely on the acts of rogue white police officers reveals the black community's longstanding reluctance to air its dirty laundry apropos criminality. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation ("CRIME in the United States 2014"), whites committed 3,807 murders and non-negligent manslaughters in 2014, while blacks were responsible for 4,224. Blacks make up approximately 12.6% of the country's population yet accounted for 51.3% of these crimes in 2013. Whites are about 70% yet committed 46.3% of these horrendous acts. Why is this math so difficult to grasp?
None should deny the existence of police officers who embrace racist ideology, but what percentage of the approximately one million full-time law enforcement employees across our nation subscribe to supremacist dogma? Obviously if it's one, it's one too many. The blue wall of silence among cops is slowly crumbling, however, and today's smartphone technology gives most Americans the ability to record egregious behavior by corrupt cops in real time. Even when conventional wisdom held that justice was not served vis-à-vis the July 2014 Eric Garner chokehold death in Staten Island, N.Y., change occurred, with the governor announcing his commitment to reforming the state's criminal justice system -- particularly as it relates to the grand jury process.
Unfortunately, the following month produced the travesty of Ferguson, after which the Justice Department's own report regarding its investigation into the shooting of Michael Brown concluded that Brown did not have his hands raised in an effort to surrender. "Hands up, don't shoot" was a lie, but it helped propel Black Lives Matter into the nation's collective consciousness.
What's truly shameful and tragic is that there is now a two-tiered classification system regarding the worth of black people. Those whose lives are snuffed out by white cops are at the top, while those killed by other blacks are lesser than. The problem is, they're both dead!
That Black Lives Matter aspires to political influence and power is not debatable. President Obama recently told law enforcement officials, "There is a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community that is not happening in other communities, and that is a legitimate issue that we've got to address. The African-American community is not just making this up. It's not something that's just being politicized. It's real. We as a society, particularly given our history, have to take this seriously."
"Given our history" is code for "slavery and Jim Crow violence." People who can think, however, are aware that the extreme racism of those eras is behind us and that we should no longer view police misconduct and inner-city violence as mutually exclusive – regardless of what the first mulatto president and Black Lives Matter would have the weak-minded believe.
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