Eliminating the toxic residue of Obama's racialist approach to crime

The Obama administration sent a dear colleague letter to public schools around the country indicating that schools would be evaluated to see if they were disciplining or suspending students, or making calls to police to arrest their students, in a way that created disparate impact for blacks and minority students. In other words, if blacks were 30% of a high school but committed 80% of the behavior that leads to suspension, the school, to behave correctly, would suspend fewer blacks, and conceivably more whites and Asians and Hispanics, so the black suspension percentage did not exceed blacks' population share. If schools became more violent as a result, so be it. The directive argued for more leniency in general in dealing with student misbehavior. The mass murderer in Florida was never arrested and had no record, though there was plenty of opportunity for authorities to create one. I hope Betsy DeVos will reverse the policy directive – and quickly.

The same logic was behind the prison reform program designed to keep juveniles from having a police record and minimizing bail for juveniles and many others. Blacks commit a massively disproportionate share of all crime in America compared to their population share (13% of the population, over half the murders). But Obama and Holder did not want people to go to jail for their crimes or have juveniles with a police record, if those convicted and jailed were disproportionately black. New York City's murder toll of 2,200 a year in the early 1990s dropped to below 300 last year. A major reason was arresting criminals, convicting them, and getting them off the streets. You side with either the decent people in a community or the criminals. We know where Obama and Holder stood. In Chicago, it is the same story. Cook County Board chairman Tony Preckwinkle and state's attorney Kim Fox, both African-American women, have taken the Obama-Holder message to heart. The results are pretty evident as far as Chicago's crime rate. Minnesota is the same blue story.