What’s a Reasonable Number of Blacks to Shoot?

Barack Obama’s position on police shootings seems to be that more blacks get shot by police than their percentage of the population tells us is reasonable. In other words, about 45 a year is okay, any more is racist. Where the idea of a quota comes from no one knows. Maybe in a baby’s rocketship sent to Earth just before the planet Stupid exploded, because we don’t find it in the Constitution. But regardless how it arrived, we find this ridiculous belief about death quotas almost universally shared by the governing liberal elite in the nation (shouldn’t there be a quota for believing in quotas?) In short, for every one hundred people that get shot by police liberals believe no more than14 may be Black, 17 Hispanic, 60 White and the remainder miscellaneous.

But here’s where apportionment gets tricky. Among these last are American Offshore Islanders, Native-American, Eskimo, Moslems, Orientals, and Orthodox Jews. All of whom insist upon getting shot at different rates. Except for those pesky American Offshore Islanders and Orthodox Jews because they never seem to get shot at all. Yet if society is fair, police should be shooting at least I don’t know how many Islanders and one half an Orthodox Jew every year or so or maybe a whole one every two to three years. Which in turn means that absent any volunteers, we’re going to have to convince these communities to begin trying their hand at armed home invasions, carjackings, convenience store stickups, and other criminal scenarios in which the perpetrator is likely to get plugged. Is this what would Barack Obama and the liberal elite would have us do? Or maybe just lift the quota on whites in order to balance things out? Somehow one gets the impression that with these people in Washington shooting more Whites always tends to balance things out. This is how insane this discussion has gotten. Obviously blacks get shot at a higher rate than whites because their crime rate is higher, and not just by a smidgen. But the liberal elite can never say that, can they? Because they cannot believe how the police (working class, generally white, maybe college educated maybe not at state schools, often sons of police themselves, military veterans in large measure and frequently seen kneeling on a black guy’s head in order to get a pair of cuffs on) cannot be bigoted. So therefore they must be. This is called a Divine Fallacy -- I cannot imagine how something may be true therefore it’s false. It’s true that police prejudge people. That comes from experience. Years ago when I was a village police chief I worked almost exclusively when it was dark. We had a six-block Main Street with eleven bars on it. Problems began as soon as people started drinking in those bars and reached a crescendo just after 4:00 AM when they closed. We had only two murders when I worked for the village but innumerable drunken fights on the street, assaults, spousal abuse, car wrecks, drug sales, DUIs and so on. After a couple of years I thought I knew everybody in the village, and what trash they were. Then I filled in for one of my officers guarding the polls on village election day. Who were these people? The guys coming in their work clothes joking and laughing, the neatly dressed and well-groomed women wheeling a baby carriage into the voting machine with them, the guys in suits appearing after five, the old ladies and old gentlemen quietly chatting. I didn’t know them. Any of them. Why? Because they had jobs, families, went to church, patronized the library, kept to themselves, paid taxes and took care of their children. They weren’t beating each other up at three in the morning outside a ginmill. They weren’t crashing their cars in a drunken stupor or punching their girlfriend. They were the people who came out when it was light and I could have patrolled that Main Street for a hundred years after dark and not ever met one. To some degree every policeman falls into a similar error and has to think his way out of it. I work in a black area where everybody I arrest every night, night after night, year after year, is black, so therefore criminals are black or Hispanic or white trailer park trash or whatever. But the glory of the job is that police do think their way out of it. As we saw in Dallas, they will throw their bodies over a black woman in order to protect her. And not even think twice about it. There’s a brutal point to be make about this issue. In the 1960s, London and New York City were distinguished by the difference in their murder rate. New York being very high -- London extraordinarily low and in the British capitol the police never seemed to shoot anybody. Why? Well, it was pointed out to me that faced with a savage crime problem two hundred years ago, London began hanging four times as many criminals as New York did. A policy continued well up into the twentieth century. The result over generations was a society much less inclined to violence. Something similar has to occur with the black community where blacks today kill other blacks with astounding frequency. But the politics of liberal whites, not to mention the Federal courts, will not allow black leaders to even think about going down that path. And blacks have to do the hanging themselves, not whites. Otherwise there would be an explosion. The same dynamic applies to other aspects of black life. The schools in black areas are, by and large, an expensive joke. The solution quite simply is easy: found charter schools. Allow that and my guess is that after a few years every black church will be educating its member’s children, and educating them well. “And study what?” I once heard a white sneer “the Bible?” Well maybe. But so what? Lincoln taught us that the King James Bible and Shakespeare are the greatest examples of the English language ever assembled, and what employer wouldn’t hire a man or woman who could write and speak as well as Lincoln? Or half as well as Lincoln, half as well as Frederick Douglass. But the white liberal establishment, in the service of teacher unions and the tens of thousands of employees of state departments of education, won’t allow that. They have their foot on the neck of black education and they’re going to keep it there. The same liberal arrogance obtains in the judiciary, which operates well in my white rural community but not in the liberal-dominated cities. Gun control acts the same way in those liberal-controlled cities, where law-abiding blacks are not allowed the means to defend themselves. So thank you Barack Obama and the liberal establishment, both white and black. You’ve got the minority community organized just the way you want it. Which means we’re stuck. With five dead police officers in Dallas. Richard F. Miniter is the author of The Things I Want Most, Random House, BDD See it Here. He lives and writes in the colonial era hamlet of Stone Ridge, New York, blogs here and can also be reached at miniterhome@gmail.com