Im-Politic: The Mysteries Behind Mass Shootings Keep Growing

Tags

Andrew R. Morral, crime, Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, gun control, gun violence, homicides, Im-Politic, mass shootings, RAND Corporation, school shootings, The Globe and Mail

Mysteries continue to abound about mass shootings like the recent atrocities in Buffalo, New York and Uvalde, Texas. Chiefly, as I’ve previously noted, for most of its history, the United States was even more awash with guns than today. Yet Buffalo- and Uvalde-type shootings — the kinds of gun violence perpetrated by individuals against innocents completely unknown to them – are very recent phenomena.

Yesterday, thanks to my friend, the political commentator Mickey Kaus, I came across several more, in the form of a graphics feature from the Canadian daily, The Globe and Mail, and especially, the combined, and deeply confusing, story that seems to be told by charts four and five (below).

Let’s start with the chart on the bottom, chart five, which shows U.S. “Firearm-related homicides per 100,000 people, by county (2001–2020).” Unfortunately, the individual state names don’t show up on this reproduction, but as the original makes clear, the swathes of the country with by far the most gun-related homicides are Alaska, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and North and South Carolina. They’re the states with the biggest concentrations of dark brown counties (which signify the areas with the highest rates of such gun violence), along with big cities like Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago, which show up as little dark brown dots.

Moreover, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which is an ardent supporter of stronger gun control laws, the states mentioned above have all earned failing grades in terms of gun control measures – except for North Carolina, which merited a “C.”

So it’s easy to conclude that the above states are those where it’s easiest to get a gun – and where guns’ prevalence is most dangerous because they’re also logically the states with the biggest relative numbers of residents likely to use these weapons with deadly results.

Now, however, look at chart four, which illustrates “Deaths in mass shootings since 1982, by location [and] type.” The bigger the circle, the higher the numbers of fatalities that have resulted from each of these incidents. And what I see is that, with the (possible) exception of the Carolinas, those states with the highest levels of firearms homicides adjusted for population have suffered scarcely any mass shootings of any kind, and only one mass school shooting (depicted with grayish-blue circles) – in Arkansas.

Viewed from the opposite perspective, look at the states with the biggest concentrations of mass shootings of all types. They look very much like California, Texas, Florida, and New York. Just behind them are New York, Colorado, and Georgia, along with the D.C. area and the Chicago area.

Yet going back to the homicide chart, you can see that California, Texas, Florida, Colorado, and New York seem pretty tranquil on this front, with Georgia standing as an exception. (It’s true that Texas contains big areas of gray, where no data is supposedly available. But can anyone reasonably doubt that if these regions were homicide-heavy, we would know about it?)

Even more puzzling: The Gifford Center awards an “A” on gun control laws to California, Colorado, and New York, a “C” to Florida, and the aforementioned “F” to Texas.

These and other ongoing mysteries and paradoxes further convince me of the argument most recently advanced by Andrew R. Morral, who heads the Gun Policy in America research project at the RAND Corporation, a leading think tank: that “although some laws that reduce gun violence in general may also reduce mass shooting” (for example, restrictions on magazine capacity) “It’s an unfortunate fact that mass shootings are sufficiently rare that it is hard to establish with scientific rigor whether policies affect them….”

 

 

Im-Politic: The Washington Post’s Phony Probe of Policing Abuses

Tags

crime, Im-Politic, journalism, law enforcement, Mainstream Media, police misconduct, police reform, policing, statistics, Vera Institute of Justice, Washington Post

As RealityChek readers surely know by now, reporting information out of context is one of my biggest gripes about journalism these days. (See, e.g., here.) So if there hadn’t been so much important news coming out of the Ukraine war and on so many other fronts this week, I’d have already written about an especially egregious example that appeared in the Washington Post this past Thursday.

Its big “exclusive” finding? “The Post collected data on nearly 40,000 payments [to resolve police misconduct claims] at 25 of the nation’s largest police and sheriff’s departments within the past decade, documenting more than $3.2 billion spent to settle claims.”

Sounds like a bundle right? Even a criminally large amount of money. In isolation, of course. But information never exists in isolation. And any reporter or anyone else with a working brain or a lick of integrity would have tried to answer these two questions: How does this sum compare with the nation’s total policing budget over the same period? And how does it compare with the national cost of crime?

None of this background appeared in the Post piece. But it took me a grand total of thirtyseconds of searching on-line to find answers from reliable sources.

The national law cost of policing? That’s $115 billion per year, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, whose declared mission is ending “the overcriminalization and mass incarceration of people of color, immigrants, and people experiencing poverty.”

That is, the organization isn’t exactly an apologist for current policing performance. But it’s telling us that over ten years, the cost of settling police misconduct claims equalled 0.28 percent of America’s policing budget (of $1.15 trillion). Any decent person would like to see that number fall to zero percent, but 0.28 is pretty close. And it’s even better considering that, as at least Post reporters Keith Alexander, Steven Rich, and Hannah Thacker (along with their editors) had the honesty to observe (in the middle of this long article) that

“City officials and attorneys representing the police departments said settling claims is often more cost-efficient than fighting them in court. And settlements rarely involve an admission or finding of wrongdoing.”

The authors also state that their figures exclude payments of less than $1,000. Let’s suppose, however, that including these incidents doubles the total amount of payouts over the last decade. Then they’d represent 0.56 percent of the national policing budget. That’s still awfully close to zero for a line of work whose employees lay their lives on the line every day, and who constantly need to make split-second life-and-death decisions.

It’s of course certain that the number of police misconduct charges that produced payouts, whether they stemmed from genuine abuses or not, doesn’t include all cases of misconduct because so many undoubtedly aren’t reported. But even if all of them were, and consequently the total cost of misconduct got doubled, its share of total U.S. policing spending over the last decade would barely top one percent. So forgive me if I’m not overcome with outrage.

As for the second question, in February, 2021, a team of academics and policy analysts estimated that in the 2017, crime cost the U.S. economy $2.6 trillion. That single year number is more than 8oo times bigger than the Post‘s figure for the last ten years’ worth of costs for police misconduct payouts.

As a result, these police misconduct costs as a percentage of the costs of crime to America over a year – much less a decade – don’t even represent the proverbial “drop in the bucket.” They’re more like an aerosol particle in the bucket.

The researchers who came up with the cost-of-crime figure acknowledge that limitations on the available data for crime forced them to include modeling techniques in their calculations, and that more work (and more actual information) should be performed to produce greater accuracy. But even if the $2.6 trillion overestimates the national cost of crime by half, it would still render the police misconduct payouts total utterly trivial in comparison.

Policing abuses definitely need to be reduced dramatically. But how about setting the same goal for the kinds of rampant journalistic abuses most recently epitomized by this Washington Post investigation?

Those Stubborn Facts: Where Progressives Defunded the Police…& More

Tags

"Defund the Police", African Americans, crime, law enforcement, murder, New York City, policing, shootings, Those Stiubborn Facts

African American share of N.Y City population, 2020: c. 24%

African American share of N.Y. City murder victms, 2020:  65%

African American share of N.Y. City shooting victims, 2020:  74%

 

(Source: “These Policies Were Supposed to Help Black People. They’re Backfiring,” by Jim Quinn and Hannah E. Meyers, The New York Times, February 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/opinion/nyc-black-victims-crime.html)

Im-Politic: A Small Step Toward Quality Journalism ( I Hope)

Tags

Atlanta, crime, editing, Georgia, Im-Politic, journalism, Mainstream Media, Sally Buzbee, Tim Craig, Washington Post

It was not only great news that the Washington Post‘s new Executive Editor, Sally Buzbee, has just announced that the paper will hire 41 new editors. It’s urgently needed news, as made painfully clear by this September 13 article on rising crime in Atlanta, Georgia – which violates one of the most important rules of good journalism: Don’t try to shoehorn an article into a certain narrative when you’ve presented almost no supporting evidence.

The narrative chosen by reporter Tim Craig and evidently approved by enough editors to warrant publication is plainly stated in the headline: “Brutal killing of a woman and her dog in an Atlanta park reignites the debate over city’s growing crime problem.” It’s hardly unheard of for headlines to clash with the body of their story, or to exaggerate the findings. After all, nearly news organizations are private businesses, they need to make money, and what better way to generate the kinds of eyeballs that will make advertisers pay top dollar than clickbait – which of course is journalism’s version of flashy packaging.

And sometimes, headline writers just make innocent mistakes, and place such labels on stories too late for the reporter to object – or even an editor to spot it. That’s not a capital crime, especially when we’re dealing with a form of communication that’s often necessarily hastily composed.

But the claim of a “debate” on crime convulsing the city wasn’t confined to the headline. Craig himself wrote that Atlanta’s crime rate is dominating the political debate in Georgia, a state that is expected to be key in next year’s midterm elections. Georgia Republicans believe a tough-on-crime message offers them a chance to win back suburban Atlanta-area voters after the party suffered punishing losses in last year’s presidential and U.S. Senate contests.”

Meanwhile, “many Democrats,” readers are told, dismiss [such] concerns as a partisan effort to rally conservatives to the polls by stoking fear….”

The above link documents that Atlanta crime is definitely influencing city and state politics. But what’s weird about Craig’s story is that it per se offers almost no examples of such clashing opinions.

Toward the end of the article, Craig quotes a single resident fretting that “state Republicans will use the city’s crime problem to their political advantage.” But even she both acknowledges a “crime problem,” calls it “unbelievable” and “said she thinks some of the city’s Democratic leaders went too far last year by embracing calls to shift resources away from the police.”

The only Democratic politician whose views are presented – Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis, told Craig that Georgia’s Republican Governor Brian Kemp, who’s up for reelection next year and has focused on the crime issue, “is right to be concerned” because “the city’s criminal justice system is overwhelmed amid a shortage of police officers and ballistics experts needed to help solve crimes.”

This is a debate on crime? Or even close?

In fact, the rest of Craig’s article is devoted almost exclusively to a wide variety of Atlantans emphasizing how serious the city’s crime problem is and worrying that if some dramatically different strategy to fight it isn’t adopted soon, its economy could suffer and its “community cohesion, vitality and civility” could be damaged. (One exception to the head of a local business booster group – who’s basically paid to be optimistic.)

Just as important, no one mentioned in the article voiced any support for defunding police or “reimagining public safety” to focus on non-coercive ways to reduce crime or any of the other police reform proposals that mushroomed following George Floyd’s 2020 murder by a Minneapolis police officer.

Spotting such internal contradictions isn’t the only editing problem experienced lately by the Post (or other major news organizations). As known by RealityChek regulars, the output of these outlets regularly contains major factual mistakes, ignores crucial context, presents too narrow a range of opinion, and relies on experts plainly not worthy of the title (to name just a few of their leading shortcomings).

So let’s hope Buzbee’s hiring decision stems from a recognition of these problems (rather than a desire to add new bells and whistles to their websites and the like), and that lots of other news organizations follow suit. Her newspaper’s latest motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” spotlights the essential role journalism plays in protecting Americans’ freedoms. She and her peers should also remember that the trust on which this role is based will weaken further in incompetence.

Im-Politic: Has Biden Bet Right Politically on Afghanistan?

Tags

Afghanistan, Biden, border security, Charles Lane, crime, Donald Trump, election 2022, election 2024, Europe, hostages, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jimmy Carter, Lloyd J. Austin III, Open Borders, politics, refugees, Taliban, terrorism, Washington Post

Even if he didn’t peevishly block me on Twitter, I’d consider Washington Post columnist Charles Lane’s Tuesday piece on – how President Biden can “contain” Afghanistan-related damage to his presidency and historical legacy – pretty silly. For it completely ignores some screamingly obvious ways that this debacle can greatly worsen and keep degrading his image far into the future – and of course through the midterm 2022 elections and the 2024 presidential campaign.

Not that it’s out of the question that the domestic political calculation on which Mr. Biden is widely reported to have based his Afghan withdrawal will prove correct. The American public’s attention span can be pretty short and, as the President has rightly noted, who controls that remote “country” has no bearing on U.S. national security. (I use quotes because American policy has been led astray largely because there’s so little evidence that Afghanistan is a country in any meaningful sense of the word.)

Moreover, in case you haven’t noticed, the national news cycle has sped up considerably in recent years. Therefore, any public anger over the withdrawal botch could quickly evaporate once the next crisis or Biden failure, or Biden triumph that comes barreling down the pike. And the twenty-plus year Forever War remains unpopular. (See, e.g., here and here.  For an interesting exception, see here.) As a result, Afghanistan could indeed become yesterday’s meat loaf as far as U.S. voters are concerned, and even surprisingly quickly. 

Even so, it’s easy to imagine how fallout from the withdrawal could pose genuine threats to America and keep Mr. Biden “in the woods” politically.

For example, the odds seem good that the Biden administration will not be able to pull all American citizens out of Afghanistan during the partially open window the Taliban victors seem willing to provide – for now. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III has already admitted that the U.S. military can’t guarantee Americans not already at the Kabul airport safe passage to the airport, and the State Department has advised these individuals to “shelter in place.” Many could be widely scatttered throughout Afghanistan’s Texas-sized territory.

The Taliban might agree to allow the United States to keep troops in the country beyond the August 31 total military withdrawal deadline set by the President – which Mr. Biden now says may be necessary to complete the evacuation. Or it might not. And if its leaders (whoever they really are) do decide to play nice with the United States, some groups in its jihadist ranks might not.

It’s plausible to believe that those Taliban leaders would want the American military completely gone as soon as possible, and therefore have strong incentives to play ball with Washington. But it seems to me just as plausible to believe that they’d find hostages very useful – say, as leverage to prompt the United States to release large amounts of the ousted Afghan government’s funds (which are currently held at the U.S. Federal Reserve), and the International Monetary Fund to release the smaller but not negligible amount of economic credits (called Special Drawing Rights or SDRs) that the previous regime was scheduled to receive about now. (See here for the details.)

If a hostage situation does emerge, then Mr. Biden could find himself with a problem at least as bad as former President Jimmy Carter suffered after the Iranian revolution in 1979. But even if hostages aren’t taken, a Biden administration decision to keep American troops on the ground in the country in defiance of  Taliban wishes in order to find U.S. personnel and escort them to the airport, or even increase the deployment to carry out these missions, could trigger renewed fighting and American casualties. And this fighting could last for weeks and even months.

Afghan refugees admitted into the United States could vex President Biden for years to come as well – and in two ways. First, as noted, if his administration casts too wide a net (and it’s widened already), any number of Taliban or Al Qaeda members or other jihadists could wind up resettling here. Few question the desire to protect Afghans directly employed by the U.S. military or other government agencies – and I don’t, either.

But calls are being issued to extend visas to still other categories of Afghans, and as always, it’s difficult to imagine that all of them could have been adequately vetted in peacetime given that the previous Afghan government wasn’t exactly the gold standard for efficiency or honesty. Now of course, conditions in the country are utterly chaotic, so the vetting challenge looks that much greater.

If any of those resettled in the United States wind up committing terrorist acts, there’ll surely be political hell to pay for the President. In fact, although, as I’ve argued repeatedly (e.g. here) the key to preventing Middle East-spawned terror strikes on America was never sending U.S. forces to chase around that terminally dysfunctional region every new jihadist group it would inevitably spawn. Instead, it was always securing America’s borders.

Consequently, Mr. Biden can now be fairly accused of failure on both these fronts.Thanks to his Afghan pullout, the Taliban might indeed permit jihadists from re-establishing a terrorist base benefiting from the protection of a sovereign state. And it’s reasonable to conclude that Islamic extremists in other countries and regions will be emboldened as well. At the same time, his Open Borders-friendly immigration policies were making it harder to keep them out even before Kabul fell. Talk about the worst of all possible worlds.

There’s a third refugee-related problem that could stain the Biden record long-term also: crime. Europe’s naive admission of literally millions of Afghans and other Middle Easterners fleeing their war-torn lands greatly undermined public safety in countries like Austria, Germany, and Sweden. No comparable problem has yet appeared in the United States. But so far, U.S. refugee admissions have been much more limited – largely, but not exclusively, because of the Trump administration’s more restrictive policies. If their numbers greatly increase during the Biden years, either because of more indulgent policies or failure to secure U.S. borders, all bets are off.

The 2020 U.S. presidential election showed that it’s dangerous to count Mr. Biden out. After all, until his primary victory in South Carolina, he was derided as a political “dead man walking.” In that contest, however, he benefited from powerful political allies like longtime South Carolina Democratic Congressman James Clyburn. I’m straining to see any similar saviors on the ground in Afghanistan or over the horizon. 

Im-Politic: Crime Derangement Syndrome

Tags

African Americans, Chicago, cities, crime, District of Columbia, gaslighting, gentrification, homicide, Im-Politic, inner cities, law enforcement, Mainstream Media, minorities, murder, policing, race relations, racism, Washington Post, white fragility, whites

If you still doubt that Mainstream Media coverage of the last year-plus’ national crime wave – which inevitably affects how Americans overall think about this issue – has gone completely off the wall, check out last weekend’s long Washington Post piece about the contrasting views of Black and White residents of the District of Columbia about homicides in city neighborhoods where they make up majorities.

I should actually say “supposedly contrasting views,” because there’s no reason to think that the opinions reported amount to a representative sampling of any segment of the public. In fact, it’s far more likely that these selected views reveal how this premier newspaper’s journalists (including of course editors) regard these matters.

Specifically, the article makes painfully clear how they and the rest of a disturbingly woke national media are now regularly turning cognitive somersaults in order to pin the blame for urban violence – which takes place overwhelmingly in minority neighborhoods and claims overwhelmingly minority victims – on anyone except the criminals who overwhelmingly come from these same precincts. Heading this article’s list of the truly guilty are White Americans, who allegedly only care about such violent crime when it starts threatening them and their neighborhoods.

As written by authors Rachel Chason and Emily Davies (and approved by every editor with authority over the article):

“From the majority-Black neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River that have long been afflicted by gun violence to wealthier, Whiter parts of the city that have only sporadically experienced it, there is a sense that the issue is receiving more attention now in part because the violence is touching gentrified areas like 14th Street NW.”

Especially unhinged (or “less hinged”?) – the White residents so charged by the Post live in the District, which is one of the most Democratic Party-leaning areas of the country.

But don’t think for a minute that the Post believes this alleged hypocrisy is confined to the District. After all, this is a publication that since the May, 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis, Minnesota policeman has launched a big new news beat preachily called “Race and Reckoning.” And it’s no accident that this truly national newspaper, read assiduously throughout the D.C.-based federal government and broader national policy and political establishments – ran the article on the front page of its print edition.

The glaring irony should be lost on no one: There was actually no shortage of Americans who have been calling attention to the violence-prone nature of these minority neighborhoods and its causes for years before the Floyd murder, and who have continued to flag the issue since then. And whether they’ve been indisputably liberal or progressive (as was the case with former President Barack Obama) or, more recently, conservative, (see especially any number of episodes of the Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham talk shows on Fox News, or the years of studies by Manhattan Institute Fellow Heather MacDonald, or some of former President Donald Trump’s remarks), the reaction has been typically the same. They’re pilloried as fear-mongering racists. (See, e.g., here, here, and here.)

Another favorite response to decrying the so-called obsession with Black-on-Black crime: what can only be called gaslighting. My favorite example of such “Nothing to see here” claims came here in 2016, when an apologist for inner city crime (writing, not so coincidentally, in the Washington Post) went so far as to suggest that the idea of “war-torn” South Side Chicago was nothing but a myth.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that last week’s Post piece took gaslighting a big step further that was not only downright looney, but obviously racist – except to the hopelessly woke. It came in a description of a digital exchanges among residents of D.C.’s upper 14^th Street neighborhood (which has been rapidly gentrifying in recent years and recently was the scene of a shooting that stunned its newest, more affluent residents in particular) and the nearby Shaw district (in which gentrification has been slower). It’s worth quoting the Post‘s account of it in full:

In the conversation “about violence, rowdy behavior near bars, noise from ATVs, trash and illegal parking, [White 14th Street-er Jeffrey Willis wrote] ‘We have lost control of the streets here & apparently elsewhere’….

“Shortly after came a terse reply from a woman who said she grew up in Shaw and was angered by what she saw as a desire to over-police Black communities and a refusal to understand the Black culture long at the heart of Shaw.”

In other words, “violence, rowdy behavior near bars, noise from ATVs, trash and illegal parking” should now be seen as part of “Black culture.” In addition, it should be preserved against an onslaught of White Fragility. Now it’s always possible that this woman’s frustrations about inherently difficult changes in residential patterns momentarily overcame her common sense, and that she didn’t really mean to praise such behavior. It happens to everyone. But it’s still remarkable, and in my view revealing, that her claim went utterly without comment in the Post.

Although its origins are fuzzy, I’ve always thought that one of the most compelling ideas ever advanced is the contention that “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Last week’s Post piece, and the overall direction of American thinking on race, racism, and crime, makes clear that the only thing necessary for the triumph of arrant, dangerous, and indeed racist claptrap to triumph is for sensible folks to respond just as passively.      

Those Stubborn Facts: Race, Class, and Crime in NYC

Tags

"Defund the Police", African Americans, Bronx, class, crime, Democrats, Eric Adams, Latinos, law enforcement, Manhattan, New York City, police, police brutality, policing, progressives, race, subways, Those Stubborn Facts, whites

Share of college-graduate New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 62%

Share of non-college-grad New Yorkers wanting more policy on the subway: 80%

Share of New Yorkers earning $50K-plus per year wanting more police on the subway: 66%

Share of New Yorkers earning less than $50K per year wanting more police on the subway: 75%

Share of white New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 62%

Share of Latino New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 69%

Share of African American New Yorkers wanting more police on the subway: 77%

Share of Manhattan-ites saying they feel safe from crime riding the subway: 65%

Share of Bronx residents saying they feel safe from crime riding the subway: 43%

(Sources: “Progressives in Denial About Crime Are Catering to Elites and Losing Elections,” by Zaid Jilani, Newsweek, July 14, 2021, Progressives in Denial About Crime Are Catering to Elites and Losing Elections | Opinion (newsweek.com) )

Im-Politic: New York City Shows How Not to Fight Crime

Tags

African Americans, cities, crime, Im-Politic, inner cities, New York City, progressives, The New York Times, urban poverty

I gotta tell ya – nearly a week days later, I’m completely gobsmacked by the following paragraph in a June 30 New York Times article on New York City’s newly approved budget:

“To address a rise in shootings and homicides that have plagued the city since the pandemic, the city will spend $24 million to provide job training and support services to 1,000 people who are most at risk of participating in or being a victim of violence in neighborhoods including Brownsville, Brooklyn; South Jamaica, Queens; and Mott Haven in the Bronx.”

Granted, the spending barely moves the needle in the $98.7 billion plan for municipal outlays. But assuming the description is accurate, it’s difficult to imagine a program so deeply, and indeed tragicomically, weird in so many ways – not to mention one that so strongly reenforces doubt that the kinds of liberals and progressives who run cities like New York have a clue how to deal with crime. If your imagination is failing you on this score, ask yourself:

>The city is going to identify residents “who are most at risk of participating in…violence” in these crime-ridden precincts? Based on what? If the main or a major criterion concerns prior criminal records, including the commission of violent acts, what’s the rationale for putting any of these individuals ahead of anyone who’s “at risk of…being a victim of violence”? Like it’ll be tough to find 1,000 of these?

>If prior records aren’t being used, or prioritized, what other considerations will help decide who’s “most at risk of participating in…violence”? Are city officials going to seek out youngish African American and Hispanic men? That sounds like endorsing harmful racial stereotypes to me. Will they poll these or other residents and ask which ones are considering “participating in…violence”? And if they do, what happens to those respondents who raise their hands but aren’t selected? Do they get profiled by the police? Moreover, doesn’t that clear risk mean that few if any criminals-to-be are likely to come forward to begin with?

>As suggested above, the city is spotlighting these neighborhoods because crime is so widespread. So in principle, all adult residents are seriously at risk of “being a victim of violence.” But common sense indicates that the elderly and/or are likeliest to be targeted by thugs. Make that a double, lots of evidence indicates, for elderly Asian-Americans. Are many of them going to be channeled into job training programs?

>More fundamentally, helping the genuinely disadvantaged deserves applause. But when it comes to reducing violent crime, what’s the point of providing job training to its likely victims? They’re – obviously – not the ones prone to pulling triggers.

Unless maybe the assumption is that the populations of violent criminals and likely victims of violent crime overlap a lot (say, because gang members could easily fall into both categories)? But if so, to a great extent we’re back to the formidable-at-best challenge of reliably identifying likely violent criminals.

The city could have avoided all these questions – and the potentially fatal problems they spotlight – by simply announcing that the $24 million would be spent on creating more jobs and economic opportunity overall, and/or on improving education and other social services in crime-ridden neighborhoods. It could have even added that teenagers and young adults will be the focus – to increase the odds they’ll become success stories – and maybe that they’d be chosen by lottery or some other objective system.

Not that success would be guaranteed. But the outcome would doubtless be better than what New Yorkers evidently can expect (at least according to The Times description): token expenditures guided by nothing more than the most fatuous sort of good intentions.

Im-Politic: Biden’s Latest Americans Last Immigration Policy

Tags

America First, Biden, Border Crisis, border security, Central America, Chobani, cities, corruption, crime, El Salvador, foreign aid, gang violence, governance, Guatemala, Honduras, Im-Politic, immigrants, Immigration, inequality, Kamala Harris, Mastercard, Microsoft, migrants, Northern Triangle, racial economic justice, urban poverty

As known by RealityChek regulars, I’m deeply skeptical that the Biden administration can bring migrant flows from Central America (or similar regions) under control by adequately improving the miserable local conditions that (understandably) drive so much flight northward to begin with. But the first detailed description of this policy that I’ve seen not only ignores all of the intertwined institutional, governance, and cultural obstacles to turning regions like Central America’s Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) into even approximations of success stories. It also casts real doubt on the seriousness of the vaunted domestic social justice and inequality commitments made both by President Biden and by at least some of the U.S. corporate sector.

As argued by a White House Fact Sheet released yesterday, support for economic development in these long-impoverished, abusively ruled countries will “require more than just the resources of the U.S. government.” Also essential “to support inclusive economic growth in the Northern Triangle” will be the “unique resources and expertise” of the private sector.”

It’s true that only three completely private, profit-seeking American companies have responded so far to the “Call to Action” for business involvement issued by Vice President Kamala Harris, who’s the administration’s designated czarina for dealing immigration-wise with the Northern Triangle. But let’s say lots more get involved.

Why would anyone capable of adult thinking believe that their efforts will succeed? After all, the administration acknowledges that economic success in the region depends on overcoming its “long-standing impediments to investment-led growth.” And it specifies that these obstacles include governments that simultaneously either can’t or won’t carry out their duties in corruption-free ways, and are unable to provide minimal levels of security for their populations against criminal gangs.

Meaning that private businesses will be keen even on setting up the kinds of training and business incubator and internet connectivity programs that predominate in their Northern Triangle plans while threats of violence and extortion remain omnipresent? Maybe they’re planning to cope by hiring massive  private security forces – but such precautions were never mentioned in the Call to Action announcement.

Just as important, here’s another major head-scratcher, especially given the flood of promises over the last year or so from U.S. business circles about promoting racial economic and financial equality. If companies are willing to wade into dangerous environments to educate populations, build or strengthen the infrastructure needed for significant economic progress, and foster new businesses in Central America, why aren’t they focusing their efforts on America’s own inner cities, or at least focusing more tightly on these efforts first? It’s not like their needs aren’t pressing. And although the Northern Triangle countries have actually made some noteworthy progress in fighting violent crime lately, they’re still much more dangerous places than even most of America’s homicide capitals.

Consequently, for companies concerned overall with actual results, it would make far more sense to take an America First approach. Not that Microsoft, Chobani, and Mastercard have ignored their disadvantaged compatriots in practice. But even as their U.S. efforts remain pretty modest (Microsoft, e.g., to date has only launched its digital skills and access improvement program in Atlanta and Texas, and Chobani’s incubator program still seems pretty small scale), they’ve decided to head south of the border(s).

Incidentally, the entire Biden Central America and overall immigration policies are vulnerable to a similar criticism. Since however difficult it’s going to be to spur racial and other economic and social progress at home, the challenge will be far more difficult in foreign countries, a President truly committed both to these vital domestic goals and to staunching migrant flows would focus focus his economic development programs on his own country, and deal with the migrants as an immigration issue – by securing the border. Unfortunately for Americans, Joe Biden has been anything but that President.

Following Up: Gun Sense Still Lacking in the Crime/Violence/African Americans Debate

Tags

African Americans, Arionne Nettles, Barack Obama, Chicago, crime, Following Up, gun violence, guns, homicides, law enforcement, police reform, policing, poverty, racism, The New York Times

Everyone (like me) worried about the metastasizing influence of race-panderers can give thanks that so many are so completely, and indeed stupefyingly, incompetent. Otherwise, merchants of division like Northwestern University journalism faculty member Arionne Nettles and her enablers at The New York Times might be overwhelming favorites to tear the country apart for good. All the same, the more they push claims (I’m getting fed up with the pseudo-sophisticated term “narrative”) that are not only flagrantly phony but transparently contradictory, the more they obscure genuine and important failures and inequities that need fixing.

Nettles and The Times editors who considered her piece on African American victims of “gun violence” worthy of publication in this form took only a paragraph and a half to blow up their own case that big cities across the United States have seen a recent “rise in gun violence – perpetrated both by civilians and police officers” that’s taken an especially heavy toll on black children and teenagers.

They’re of course right about these tragedies and their scale. But the obvious insinuation that “civilians and police officers” share even remotely comparable blame is demolished by the observation that

“In one especially alarming spree last summer, Chicago police officers shot five people in just two months. And shootings and murders in the city were up more than 50 percent overall in 2020 compared with 2019; 875 people died from gun violence – a record high. A majority of the city’s victims (78 percent) were Black.”

Let’s assume that every one of the five Chicago police shootings mentioned here was totally unjustified. Let’s also state categorically that unjustified shootings by police are way more disturbing than other types of shootings because law enforcement must be held to a much higher standard. Are Nettles and The Times still seriously contending that the two categories of violence are on anything like a par, even as threats to African American lives?

More important, these and similar passages – along with Nettles’ interviews with African American mothers who have lost children to such violence – add powerfully to the evidence that, as I’ve argued before, the overwhelming problem here isn’t “gun violence” at all. Instead, it’s a culture of violence and broader irresponsibility that’s gained a strong foothold in too many Black neighborhoods, and whose importance keeps being ignored by supposed champions of American minorities.

A handful of data points from recent (2018) national (FBI) law enforcement statistics clinch this case. First, of the 328.24 million total U.S. population estimated by the Census Bureau that year, 76.3 percent were white and 13.4 percent African American. That’s a ratio of nearly six-to-one. Yet that year, reported Black homicide offenders in one-on-one incidents actually slightly outnumbered their white counterparts in absolute terms (3,177 to 3,011).

Almost as stunning: Of the 2,925 Black homicide victims that year, nearly 89 percent were killed by other Blacks. Nearly 81 percent of the 3,315 white homicide victims in 2018 were killed by whites, so it’s clear that American killers principally go after members of their own race. But relatively speaking these figures – combined with Nettles’ accurate observation that Blacks are much likelier to die in firearms incidents than Whites – reveal not a gun violence crisis afflicting so many African American communities. They reveal an African American violence problem.

No one can reasonably doubt that racism’s legacy and the resulting lack of economic opportunity and poverty play a big underlying role. As I (and many others) have written, the racial wealth gap alone is yawning, owes much to discrimination, and generates affects that have lasted generations. It should be just as hard reasonably to doubt, however, that something other than poverty is responsible.

Look at Chicago. In 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, its Black poverty rate was 26.3 percent – that’s much higher than the overall poverty rate for the city (16.4 percent), or the national African American poverty rate (18.8 percent). So even though there seems to be a Chicago-specific problem on top of a poverty problem, even in Chicago nearly three fourths of the Black population lives above the poverty line. That hardly means affluence, but it’s hardly destitution, either.

Moreover, the Chicago Black poverty rate is down considerably from 2010’s 33.6 percent (although the city’s overall poverty rate fell faster during this period). Yet the city’s numbers of homicides and its homicide rate have roughly doubled during the subsequent nine data years, and in Chicago, the vast majority of the killers (as with the victims) are African American.

As suggested above, moreover, Nettles’ ham-handed treatment of the “gun violence” and homicide issue is all the more inexcusable because the author’s interview subjects do a decent job of reinforcing the case that there does exist a serious race-based policing problem in this country. Not that the African American women with which the author spoke are entirely free of denialism about what’s plaguing their neighborhoods. There’s Shanice Steenholdt, who seems to believe that Australia-like gun control laws would turn her city of Houston into a replica of the small Australian town in which she lived for a time where she “didn’t feel like [she] had to worry about gun violence.” There’s Chicago’s Diane Lasiker, w appears to think that the big problem in her city is that it seems “to want to keep the Police Department separate from the community.” Her fellow Chicagoan Chez Smith and Flint, Michigan’s Marcia McQueen put much stock in “offering conflict resolution techniques” to their communities’ youth.

But the story told by Atlanta’s Cora Miller of her husband’s arrest (in Minnesota) reinforces the case that it’s much too common for completely innocent African Americans to be mistreated by police. As I’d written last August, I’ve heard first-hand accounts of such episodes from Black friends who have experienced it first hand – on top of South Carolina Republican U.S. Senator Tim Scott’s experiences with Capitol police. If these individuals – who are all highly successful by any reasonable definition – can be harassed for no good reason, imagine how often everyday folks just trying to get by face these indignities and indeed dangers.

So let’s by all means get policing up to snuff. Let’s by all means identify the most effective ways in which government and business can help foster opportunity in needy Black (and other) communities. But let’s also never forget a voice who has passionately argued that

“no matter how much money we invest in our communities, or how many 10-point plans we propose or how many government programs we launch — none of it will make a difference, at least not enough of a difference, if we don’t seize more responsibility in our own lives.”

In case you’re wondering, his name is Barack Obama.