Im-Politic: Biden’s Big George Floyd Fail

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African Americans, Biden, Chauvin trial, criminal justice, Derek Chauvin, George Floyd, Im-Politic, Jimmy Carter, law enforcement, police, police brutality, Soviet Union, systemic racism

Back in 1978, President Jimmy Carter felt he had a big problem. He wanted to use an upcoming speech to send a major message to Moscow about the future of his policy toward the Soviet Union, but his main foreign policy advisers were split. His White House national security chief urged him to take a tougher line across-the-board, but his Secretary of State backed a more nuanced approach.

According to some of his aides, he finally dealt with the problem by taking the preparatory memos each of them wrote, stapling them together, and using the resulting contradictory document as the basis of the address. Not surprisngly, Carter simply succeeded in sowing confusion throughout the nation and around the world, and reinforcing a growing perception that he was a fatally indecisive leader.

What really happened is still up in the air. (See here for the background and a good description of some of the major conflicting accounts). But I dredge up this episode because President Biden’s remarks yesterday about the verdict in the “George Floyd trial” struck me as equally incoherent and troubling – at best.

It seems clear that the President was trying to walk an unquestionably fine line. On the one hand, he was trying to make the case that although former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of murdering Floyd during an arrest, serious racial problems still plagued American law enforcement. On the other hand, he obviously recognized the dangers of describing all or even most or even lots of policemen and women as disgraceful racists in whom the nation – and especially minority Americans – should place no trust.

But it should also be clear that Mr. Biden’s apparent balancing act merited a solid “F.” He did state that “most men and women who wear the badge serve their communities honorably” and even that exceptions were “few.”

Those contentions, though, were exceptions themselves, for much more of the text consisted of a description of American law enforcement that not only included the systemic racism charge, but that accused the system literally of waging war on minorities.

What else can be concluded from his contentions about “the fear so many people of color live with every day when they go to sleep at night and pray for the safety of themselves and their loved ones”?

And about the need to “ensure that Black and brown people or anyone…don’t fear the interactions with law enforcement, that they don’t have to wake up knowing that they can lose their very life in the course of just living their life. They don’t have to worry about whether their sons or daughters will come home after a grocery store run or just walking down the street or driving their car or playing in the park or just sleeping at home”?

And about the imperative of “acknowledging and confronting, head on, systemic racism and the racial disparities that exist in policing and in our criminal justice system more broadly”?

Let’s leave aside for now the strong evidence that African Americans “want police to spend same amount of or more time in their area” – a share that stood at 81 percent according to a Gallup survey last summer. (For some other polling data powerfully challenging the systemic racism narrative, see this post.)

The most charitable conclusion possible is that Mr. Biden believes that this criminal justice system is systemically (meaning “deliberately?” “pervasively”? Both?) racist even though most of its foot soldiers – who interact with minorities the most often by far – somehow aren’t. That’s not exactly a resounding testament to his reasoning or analytical skills, or to his common sense.

Cynics could understandably decide that the President chose to pay a bit of lip service to cops before aggressively embracing the systemic racism school of thought in hopes of making everyone from politically moderate voters to his own party’s far Left happy.

And what’s to be made of a President who demonstrates absolutely no awareness that the views he’s expressing have little grounding in reality?

Near the end of his talk, Mr. Biden rightly warned about the threat posed by “those who will seek to exploit the raw emotions of the moment — agitators and extremists who have no interest in social justice; who seek to carry out violence, destroy property, to fan the flames of hate and division; who will do everything in their power to stop this country’s march toward racial justice. We can’t let them succeed.”

No sane person could accuse the President of supporting or fostering most of these outrages. But when it comes to “fanning the flames of hate and division,” his George Floyd remarks came uncomfortably close.

Im-Politic: Unwitting Evidence that Criminal Justice Racism Hasn’t Been Systemic Lately

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criminal justice, Ekow Yankah, Im-Politic, incarceration, Keith Humphreys, police, police brutality, policing, prison reform, racism, systemic racism, Washington Post

It’s hard to imagine anything more ordinary in the national media these days than an item making or reporting the claim that the American criminal justice system is plagued with systemic racism. Much harder to imagine: such an article containing evidence powerfully refuting that charge. But that’s exactly what appeared in the Washington Post Outlook section today.

Authors Keith Humphreys, a Stanford University narcotics policy specialist and Ekow N. Yankah, a law professor at New York City’s Yeshiva University tell readers near the beginning of their essay that “the criminal justice system is suffused with racial biases that harm African Americans and Hispanics while favoring Whites.”

They go on to deplore “continuing, pervasive discrimination against African Americans in the criminal justice system and huge disparities in incarceration.” They note that “Blacks…are five times more likely to be imprisoned than Whites.” And they insist that “Race-based critiques of mass incarceration remain essential….”

But weirdly, what the authors themselves recognize as new and important in the national debate about race relations and law enforcement is the official research they report that in jails, which are operated mainly by local governments, “since 2000, the rate of being jailed increased 41 percent among Whites while declining 22 percent among African Americans.”

Further, “Beginning in 2017, the White rate of being jailed surpassed that of Hispanics for the first time in living memory. And in 2018, Whites became 50 percent of the jail population, particularly notable because Whites represent a lower proportion of the U.S. population than they have in centuries.”

As for prisons, which are operated by the states and the federal government, “parallel racial dynamics are evident. The White rate of imprisonment is down only 12 percent in this century, whereas the Hispanic rate has fallen 18 percent and the Black rate is down a remarkable 40 percent. The trend of African Americans leaving prison is accelerating, dropping Black imprisonment rates to levels not seen in 30 years.”

These statistics, remarkable – and neglected – as they are, by no means prove conclusively that racism isn’t too common in American law enforcement, at every level. Indeed, as I wrote last August:

“My own personal conversations with black friends have helped convince me (despite my deep mistrust of the evidentiary value of anecdotes) that there is a tendency on the part of a non-negligible number of police officers across the country to view African American men in particular with special suspicion, and to act on these suspicions. South Carolina Republican Senator Tim Scott’s alleged experiences in this respect carry weight with me, too.”

There’s also no shortage of statistical evidence pointing to discriminatory policing and sentencing.

But at or close to the heart of the systemic criminal justice racism charges is the insistence that America’s police and prosecutors and courts consistently and on a national level, all else equal, go after and actually lock up more blacks (and other minorities) than whites. And authors Humphreys and Yankah have made clear – unwittingly, it seems – that

>the exact opposite has been happening;

>that it’s been happening for at least two decades; and

>it continued even after the election as President of one Donald J. Trump, who has not only often been called one of America’s most racist chief executives (including by no less than current President Biden), but whose bigotry is widely supposed to have inspired ever more brazen and terrible brutality by racist cops.

In other words, the data that’s arguably most important show that whatever racism has stained American law enforcement is fading away. If true, hopefully reports describing and amplifying that encouraging trend will become commonplace in the national media, too.