Laborist policy on crime and safety

Laborist family policy and support for children can be expected to reduce crime rates down to those exhibited by Asian-American families within 40 years. That would reduce all crime by 78% and all serious crime by 74%, resulting in some 1,700,000 fewer people being arrested for serious crimes every year. That would mean some 2,435,363 fewer crime incidents¹ against persons and 9,141,752 total fewer serious crime incidents in America each year, based on 2023 numbers. America would then be a relatively safe country, and fear-based prejudice against racial or ethnic groups who have higher crime rates today would fade away.

Still, halting the generation of new criminals takes time to have its effect. Further, even after achieving the Asian-American crime rate 40 years out, that leaves some 3.2 million serious crimes a year including 1 million crimes against persons in our nation of 340 million, which is still unacceptably high. So, laborist policy calls for several common-sense improvements in the meantime.

Common ground

There are many pleasant fictions of the law in constant operation, but there is not one so pleasant or practically humorous as that which supposes every man to be of equal value in its impartial eye, and the benefits of all laws to be equally attainable by all men, without the smallest reference to the furniture of their pockets. - Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

Before addressing these, though, we must deal with certain misimpressions that the financier media has spread in its effort to divide working people. The media have tried to divide us into “yay police” and “boo police” camps that don’t listen to each other. They have further tried to persuade us that certain racial, ethnic, or economic groups want us to leave all the criminals in their neighborhoods alone and that they enjoy living in unsafe areas. So, let’s look at a few numbers and find our common ground.

Let’s start with the goal. Americans may view themselves as free of government oppression, but we sit huddled up in our fortress homes with handguns and alarms and don’t allow our children to play outside for fear of other Americans. Let’s focus on fixing that. Your child is much, much more likely to be shot in school by another American than killed by a foreign terrorist. People in the old Soviet Union were not politically free, but they could walk around in the city at night. Mysterious foreign enemies are politically convenient, and they provide the basis for setting up Big Brother and the totalitarian state, so the power elites want us to focus on supposed foreign threats rather than on a safe and open society at home. Making our own society work is hard, but it is the American thing to do. If we do this correctly, not through ineffective militarized policing but through addressing the roots of crime and the breakdown of social order in poor neighborhoods, through witness protection and enlightened police and social worker involvement, through improving honest job prospects and restoring hope, we can increase fairness to the historically disadvantaged youth forced to grow up in areas that are considered bad mainly because they are so crime-ridden. Let’s work to shut down the American crime mill and turn our cities back into places where all families can go out and enjoy themselves without fear. Then we will be truly free. That freedom is the goal.

Nobody, no matter what their race or economic status, wants to raise their children in a dangerous, gang-infested, drug-ridden neighborhood where the police aren’t interested in protecting them or in investigating crimes. On the other hand, nobody wants to have their police force think and act like an occupying power that regards everybody as a potential threat and focuses on suppressing them rather than protecting them or obtaining justice for them.

In many urban areas and some rural areas, a neighborhood with perfectly nice housing will be regarded by everyone as an undesirable slum and will have low property values because it has a high crime rate and high drug use. People who could otherwise start a small business there and prosper can’t, because people are not willing to come visit their restaurant or store, and even people in the neighborhood think twice before going out after dark. Fundamental fairness to the residents of such areas requires that we recognize that they are human beings and Americans and deserve to live in the same peace and safety as their richer fellow Americans, so that their children may focus on school, their homes may rise in value and their business ventures may get new customers and employees and prosper.

An insidious form of racism in America assumes that people in minority areas want different things than those their well-to-do white fellow citizens want. That kind of thinking allows members of the limousine-liberal elite to think that people in high-crime neighborhoods would prefer not having police protection, as opposed to desperately wanting to replace bad police protection with good police protection. They then leave police in poor neighborhoods understaffed, trying to police by driving through a wide area in a squad car and never getting to know the residents. They don’t give the police adequate investigative resources or the ability to provide real protection for witnesses. They don’t provide social workers or psychiatric professionals to help to calm down dangerous situations. The kinds of resources that may be available to help the police to do their jobs effectively and non-violently in rich white areas are considered to be too expensive for poor areas.

A similar sort of misguided thinking, promoted by the financiers who want to divide us, is that police misconduct is almost exclusively directed against minorities. Minorities do suffer proportionally more cases of police acting like an occupying power, but police misconduct is widespread and affects all kinds of people, though lower-income people suffer more than higher-income people, and part (but not all) of the white vs. minority difference flows from the white vs minority difference in income. Police officers abuse Hispanics more than white people, but they do not abuse Asians more than white people, because Asians on average have higher incomes and commit fewer crimes. Higher‐income African Americans report being stopped at about 1.5 times the rate of higher‐income white Americans, but lower-income African Americans report being stopped only slightly more frequently than lower-income white Americans. As a percentage of felony arrests (the situations where deadly force is most likely to be used), police are somewhat less likely to kill a black person than a white person; while black people are much more likely to be shot than white people, they are are also 5.4 times (in 2022) more likely to be arrested for a violent crime². We have a police problem that should be addressed, and it is highly likely that the racial aspect of that problem will be solved by addressing the larger issue, since any actual racists will also be creeps, and in any event getting police officers to be safe and respectful will make whatever racial feelings they may have less significant. Trying to just stamp out racism among police officers without addressing overall police misconduct and methods, in contrast, is highly unlikely to be an effective strategy.

The financier media chooses to only publicize police misconduct cases when they can spin them in a divisive³ way. The Cato Institute has a good website that tracks misconduct. One recent incident, for example, involved a middle-aged white woman who was drunk, naked and asleep in her own home when police burst in with guns drawn and excitedly demanded that she get up (still naked) and show them a gun she was reported to have.⁴ She understandably first negotiated to be able to put something on, then in response to their repeated shouted demands, guns pointed, she (still drunk, sleepy, and now terrified) reached into the bed and said “here it is!” and held it out for them, at which point they shot her in the face and killed her. There are too many such incidents involving people of all races, along with officer-perpetrated rapes, assaults, spouse abuse, and other inexcusable acts. All of that should be dealt with as a police problem.⁵ But it is not primarily a race problem⁶, it is a police problem. There are undoubtedly some cases even today where a white police officer murders a black person because the officer does not like black people, but if that accounts for many of the 235 black people killed by police in 2022, then the 415 white people killed by police that year are very difficult to explain, as discussed below.

In the meantime, we also have a criminal problem. While killings of black people by police get a huge amount of news reporting, all of us, and particularly black people, are far more likely to be killed by a criminal. In 2022, 235 black people and 415 white people were shot by police. In the same year, 10,470 black people and 7,704 white people were killed by criminals. (Compare this ongoing routine slaughter with the 2,977 victims of the 9/11 attacks, which caused us to toss the Constitution in the shredder and spend trillions of dollars killing foreigners.) So, 2.2% of the black victims and 5.4% of the white victims were killed by police. You will notice that white people had more than twice as high of a police-to-criminal killer ratio, which may not be what you would have guessed from the news. Black people are 3.5 times more likely to be a victim of a violent crime than are white people, and black people aren’t any happier about being violent crime victims than white people are. We need to address the police problem in ways that are consistent with addressing the crime problem.

For white males, about 90% will die of disease, 5.5% in accidents, 2% by suicide or homicide (mostly suicide) and the rest will still be alive at age 100. For black males, 90% will die of disease, 4.5% in accidents, 3.2% by suicide or homicide (mostly homicide), and the rest will survive to 100. White men are relatively likely to kill themselves and have accidents, while black men are relatively likely to be killed by other black men. About 2.4% of black male deaths are by homicide, compared to about 0.23% for white males – less than a tenth as much. More tellingly, homicide is the leading cause of death by far for black males age 21-35, accounting for a third of all deaths in that group, as contrasted to 3% of deaths for white males in the same age group. In all, in 2012⁷ 6,454 black persons were murdered, some 92% of those by other black people, while 5,855 white people were murdered, some 84% by other white people. Young black people suffer badly from violent crime, most of it committed by other black people, and most of that concentrated into predominantly black urban or rural neighborhoods where shootings are alarmingly common.

Does any relatively well-to-do white person want to live in a place where, if their house is burgled or they are mugged on the street, there is nobody for them to call? People in poor neighborhoods don’t want that, either. What they want are police who act like police in a well-to-do, friendly white town, police who are polite and friendly like Andy Taylor in the Andy Griffith Show or John Nolan in The Rookie, who assume that most people are law abiding and that everyone deserves protection, and who are dedicated to identifying the particular people who commit crimes and arresting them and protecting the witnesses needed to prosecute them. They want police who will take forensic evidence and actually use it to catch criminals instead of just putting it in a drawer.⁸ They want police who will distinguish between the dumb teenager using an illegal drug and the gangland dealer with high-powered weapons who will shoot at rivals and hit innocent kids. They also want mental health workers and social workers and drug counselors who are trained and staffed to address other issues in a peaceful and effective manner without drawn guns or oppression. These are not crazy things to ask for. There actually are such police officers, two of whom are featured in the book Ghettoside. There actually are successful social programs. We can improve things if we make a real effort.

Besides our police problem and our crime problem, we also have a problem with defective procedures. For example, here in Texas commonly a felony arrest warrant is only enforced if and when the felon happens to be pulled over in a traffic stop. Most of us would tend to think of a traffic stop as being a situation where a police officer should not be ready to shoot anybody. Under this Texas system, though, the police know that the driver may be a wanted felon who will go to jail only if he happens to be stopped for a traffic offense. That has to affect the officer’s degree of tension when making a stop, increasing the odds that a simple traffic stop will result in deadly violence. Why do things that way? We put minor offenders in jail because they can’t afford to post bail, and let clearly dangerous people out. We put insane people in jail for lack of a better place, and bad things happen because jail is not designed for them. Somebody needs to look at the whole system, top to bottom, and fix all the stupid things.

This is common ground. This is something we all want. So how do we get it?

The police should not be structured like an occupying power

First, we need to back off of a system of “crime prevention” patrolling that, especially linked with the rise of the squad car and the ill-advised war on drugs, has led most urban police forces to behave more like an occupying foreign power than like the traditional English Bobbies. Police get frustrated by the exclusionary rule, which prevents them from using evidence to prosecute criminals unless they have followed the constitutional rules governing searches and seizures. They also get frustrated by their own lack of skills, time and resources to investigate crime. “Crime prevention” is an active process of interfering with people in which constitutional restrictions don’t matter much, since the officers are not investigating a crime but are rather just trying to intimidate would-be criminals. The exclusionary rule offers precisely zero protection for innocent people, so if the police randomly stop and frisk people or search their cars or rough them up just to intimidate them, rather than to prosecute them, the rules don’t matter. Acting like an occupying power tends to encourage people to respond like an occupied population rather than like a cooperative citizenry. That is unhelpful. Perhaps more to the point, it does not in fact shut down crime and it encourages sloppy habits that lead to actual crimes not being properly investigated and solved.

There is plenty of evidence in criminology that the thing that stops crime is a high degree of certainty that the criminal will be caught and punished quickly. It does not matter as much if the punishment is just a little severe or a lot severe⁹ (although of course a person in prison cannot commit additional crimes, except against other prisoners), but swiftness and certainty are. Good detective work is far and away the most effective way to reduce crime in any neighborhood. Good detectives need to get to know people. “Crime prevention”, as that term is used by police forces, does not prevent crime. Being really diligent about quickly catching, trying, convicting, and punishing criminals does.

We should have more foot patrols of the type that become properly acquainted with the people in the neighborhood. In occupying power mode, police tend to regard anyone who does not look like them as a potential threat, just as American soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan tended to become deeply suspicious of the native population overall. A beat patrol person would learn to see people on the beat as human beings, some good and some not so good. He could even learn to distinguish the degrees of bad. In any gang there is generally a nasty true psychopath who attracts to himself a layer of poorly socialized people who are not inherently bad, but who are attracted to the power and status of the psychopath. If law enforcement could identify, target and remove those core players, far fewer other people would be corrupted.

Further, if the beat patrol cop and her colleagues proved that they were just interested in catching the people in the neighborhood who had harmed other people in the neighborhood, and were willing to work hard to succeed at it, the police overall could build trust in the community. That leads to a higher rate of cooperation, which leads to more crimes solved and punished. I went to an inner city high school where we had a police officer on campus. None of us ever met the man, he did not intervene when students were being beaten bloody by a gang of other students, and generally he was a waste of the taxpayers’ money. If he had gotten to know students and had made a real effort to identify and punish the kids who preyed on other kids, he would have gotten the trust and cooperation of students of all races. Instead, even the white kids regarded him as basically a hostile object. On the other hand, on the couple of occasions when patrol officers stopped me while I was walking home in the evening and questioned me and checked my ID, I was happy to cooperate because they seemed to be doing their jobs to protect the people.¹⁰

Of course, sprawling suburbs with no sidewalks don’t lend themselves to foot patrols, and foot patrols in Minneapolis in January or Houston in July would be hard on the officers, who wouldn’t encounter many citizens out and about anyway. But we shouldn’t avoid using foot patrols just because they cost money. We should also use other forms of friendly community policing. Police crime prevention seminars in schools, churches, community centers and apartment buildings are good, especially when combined with listening sessions to hear from the people of the neighborhood. Police departments should make strong efforts to recruit from higher-crime neighborhoods (as they did in the days of Irish immigrants) and to have patrol officers who are resident in the community. I’m not an expert in the field so I won’t draw this out, but the common sense point is to work to make opportunities for the police to see the residents of the neighborhood as individual people, and for the people of the neighborhood to see police officers as individual people¹¹ as well, people who seek to help them.

A laborist government would ensure that police don’t spoil this by using improper practices. Getting rid of the use of dangerous and unnecessary chokeholds and of laying detainees face down has taken way too long in this country. The continued failure by the Minneapolis police department to use the best practice of minimizing the time that anyone was kept face down on the ground was inexcusable. Most police in America get pretty good pay and benefits now. We should expect them to display a level of expertise that fits with that pay, universally following best practices for the safety of everyone and for minimizing violent conflict. Americans are pretty understanding. If you have served on a grand jury, you have seen that Americans of all races understand the fact that police have a hard job and that sometimes they need to use deadly force or other violence. While few of us have occasion to have to decide quickly if someone is pointing a gun at us, if you drive in traffic you know that your brain does not instantly process what you are seeing into a clear picture; you may need to look down that side street for a second to be sure whether a bicyclist or something is about to come in front of you. I think most of us get that the observation powers of police are no more magical than ours, and that civilians have some responsibility for avoiding putting police into a position where they have to make split-second decisions. But we further understand that the police, as law enforcement professionals, also have a responsibility to do the best they can and to use the safest practices they can.

We should also, for the sake of the good police officers as well as civilians, demand that police conduct be properly investigated and that the bad eggs be expelled. There are basically two sorts of people who want to become police officers. One group wants to protect and serve and be admired by the community and small children for being a good and self-sacrificing person. The other group wants to carry a badge and a gun and be able to push people around. If the public at large views police officers as a species as racist thugs, then people in that first group will be discouraged from signing up. If they try to serve and be good but people spit on them anyway, then it is hard to be motivated. The people in the second group, on the other hand, may actually be energized by being viewed as thugs, since it fits with their desire to have power and be feared. The public view then becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Anyone who has worked as a prosecutor in a good office will tell you that it feels really good to have doing the right thing be your job description – to try to identify the innocent and cut them loose with an apology and identify the guilty and prove their guilt. If someone joins the office who just wants to win or doesn’t care about truth, the others will dislike that person and want them gone, because they damage the group’s image. It is the same for police. The good ones want to work in a clean unit filled with good cops who are admired and respected, and they want to get rid of bad ones.¹² The policy question is how best to feed that desire, to reward those who seek to flush out the bad ones.

That starts with the tone at the top. While a police chief or police union head will want to protect their officers against judgment standards that have unrealistic expectations as to how human beings can make decisions in difficult and dangerous situations, they should never seek to protect officers who just choose to behave badly. Likewise, they should never tolerate officers who are hostile to a fellow cop who blows the whistle on a colleague who chooses to be bad. That kind of hostility is a sure sign of a bad attitude in the hostile officer, because a good officer would want the offender to get corrected or flushed out. We do not tolerate corporate executives who create or maintain an environment in which employees misbehave and anyone calling them on it is shunned. If we can fix the tone in a business, there is no reason we can’t fix it in a police station. Police chiefs need to make it clear that a person in a blue uniform who is not willing to live up to the standards of a peace officer is not really a police officer; he is an impostor pretending to be a police officer and his coworkers, the real police officers, need to have him removed from their environment.

We need to always have the good people in law enforcement feel free to be good, to point out bad behavior, and to take pride in doing so. That means fully understanding how hard their job is and fully appreciating the ones who do it well, and then from that high ground going after the bad ones who tarnish the reputation of the good ones. Anyone who favors effective law enforcement should favor this. Consistently good police officers will earn community cooperation, which greatly increases the chances of catching and convicting the bad guys.

To this end, we should evaluate police officers under the same professionalism and politeness standards that apply to waitresses and store clerks. We can grant that police officers have potentially dangerous jobs, but that is no excuse for swearing at or otherwise abusing people. Their body cam footage of civilian encounters should be sampled to check for inappropriate behavior and any such behavior should have the same consequences for a police officer that would apply for a store clerk. Police unions may object, but these standards should be written very clearly into the police job descriptions. Police encounters with citizens should leave the citizens feeling respected, even if they are potential suspects. That doesn’t mean that police can’t give urgent commands like “put the gun down and put your hands behind your head” without saying “pretty please”, but those encounters are few and far between. In most encounters, including most arrests, they can be civil. If the civilian chooses to be uncivil to a degree where we would expect a waitress or store clerk to cuss them out, then we can tolerate similar limits to patience in an officer, but we should expect the police to always start out polite and respectful.

Provide proper social resources

We have two main government realms in America where the popularity of a government function has resulted in the politicians doing their best to destroy it: schools and the police. As a civilized society, we need to provide a number of social services to help our fellow citizens with problems. Politicians of a certain sort love to brand those efforts as “welfare”, claim that it is just rewarding lowlifes and deadbeats, and cut the funding. But we still need the services, which in fact help good, hardworking families that run into things beyond their ability to cope. Most Americans place a high value on education, as they should, and will usually be willing to spend a lot of money on their schools. Therefore, the politicians who want to harp about being anti-welfare take any services affecting children and put them in the schools, and ask teachers with no relevant training or tools to take on the functions. Likewise, we generally are willing to provide money for the police, since we are afraid of each other. Therefore, any services affecting adults are dumped on the police, who also have no relevant training or tools to take on the functions.

Where police forces are put in charge of things that they are not trained or staffed for, such as dealing with the mentally ill or with domestic disputes or child welfare or homeless persons, they do not perform those tasks well. People have sensibly suggested that it would be better to shift funding back to persons who are specifically qualified to address those matters (with police protection as appropriate). The funding “shift”, then, would be more truth in funding and more sensible funding, targeting the social program needs with resources specifically aimed at those needs. Sadly, those suggestions got translated into the “defund the police” slogan, as if just getting rid of police officers would improve the lives of people in poor neighborhoods. People who enjoy agitating but who don’t like to take the trouble to think things through then said “yeah – defund the police, because they are bad!”, and the financier-controlled media ignored the people who were suggesting the sensible funding shift and focused entirely on those who thought it would be good to just not have police.

A laborist government would hire specialists to handle encounters with the mentally ill, with domestic abuse, and other situations where factors other than force-backed law enforcement or investigation are called for. We would ensure a good partnership between those specialists and the police, so that the specialists are happy with their protection and with the law-enforcement back-up option.

In schools, we would have social work specialists engage with the complex family and community problems of the students and encourage a good partnership between the specialists and school police officers. We would also use the social work specialists to help identify the students who appear to just be bad. We would set up systems by which the school police officers and specialists inform community police officers, community social workers and parents about kids who have issues that they need help with, and about kids who appear to just be bad,¹³ so that the community officers and specialists and parents will be better prepared to ensure that the kids with issues will receive proper support and will be protected from the kids who are really bad. Young predators are good at finding at-risk kids and recruiting them for crime. The best way to prevent crime is to prevent the creation of criminals. If we can, through such support, keep at-risk kids from becoming criminals by age 25, we will probably have kept them out of the criminal ranks for life. In the longer run, laborist family policy will take care of most of that problem.

A laborist government will also give proper attention to those who have already taken a wrong turn. We will improve the tiering of our prison system to separate nonviolent dimwits from both violent criminals and career white collar criminals like con men and other incorrigibles who are likely to corrupt them. We need to separate people who have committed violent crimes in an uncharacteristic moment after being provoked from people who commit violent crimes because that is their nature. We should then make real efforts to seek reform and a new start for the nonviolent people who made a mistake or fell into bad habits and the redeemable violent people. If a person in either group behaves in prison in a way that shows they have been misclassified, they can be moved to a prison with the real criminals. The real criminals, the psychopaths, the rapists and child molesters who will surely reoffend, the habitually violent, the chronic con artists, and others who have demonstrated that they have no empathy with their fellow citizens and won’t be redeemed, need to be kept securely locked up for the protection of the innocent. For them, we should acknowledge that real reform is very unlikely, and that given their past offenses fairness requires that we give priority to protecting future innocent victims over giving the truly bad criminal another chance.¹⁴ For other offenders, however, we will make a serious effort to get them back on the right path.

Many criminals are people with messed-up backgrounds, drug problems, bad friends, and other influences that increase the likelihood of their misbehaving. They desperately need responsible adults who take a genuine interest in getting them on the straight and narrow, coupled with the resources to put them on that path. They may need to move to a different area, be given a job, be encouraged in better hobbies, learn healthier habits, be introduced to better friends, and be given remedial schooling. They may need what amounts to a finishing school to learn how to dress, act and speak in a way that gives them access to better things. They definitely need to be protected from people who seek to exploit them, like their parents, foster parents, false friends, and other bad adults in their lives may have done. In our current system, we imprison people like this with a variety of criminals as their company. If they are lucky, when they are released we may put them in a halfway house for a while with other newly-released criminals as they practice getting restarted in society. We then release them onto the street with, at best, an overworked parole officer to check in on them once in a while. We expect something good to result from this. Surprise! It often doesn’t help.

People with these issues need to be dealt with. Patting them on the head when they are arrested for drugs or theft or burglary or bar fights and sending them back onto the street doesn’t help them or the rest of us. They need serious attention from people who can really be trusted to care about them and help them. The people who help them need to teach them the facts of life, that being a druggy, tatted-up ex-con with bad work habits and bad manners won’t end well, but that it is possible to rewrite their story into one where they can win at life. They need people who understand all the harmful behaviors that tend to be shown by people who were abused or neglected as kids and kicked around by the system, and understand how to start correcting those behaviors. They need to be separated from and protected from people who are really bad.

Trial of the child killer by the “respectable” criminal underground in Fritz Lang’s “M”

For generations now American reformists keep trying to get our criminal justice system to make real efforts to reform this kind of offender, but we keep refusing to provide adequate resources and we keep losing interest. In a financier-run nation, spending money and time to help young offenders to achieve normal, productive lives will never be a priority. In a laborist America, we will give these people adequate priority, for their sake and ours.

As discussed in a prior post, a laborist government will get homeless people, including the dangerous mentally ill, off the street. A friend of my daughter’s was in the second week of his new job in New York when an insane homeless man tried to kill him, randomly, by whacking him on the back of the head with a pipe. Fortunately her friend survived and recovered, though he did not return to New York. The homeless man in question was well known to the police and had attacked other people previously, but the New York system had no effective provision for either holding him or treating him. They just did catch and release. That is bad for the mentally ill man, bad for innocent citizens, and bad for the police who have to keep catching him while trying not to hurt him. We can’t have that kind of nonsense. We also can’t have a system where society thinks it has done enough to address homelessness by providing shelters, but the homeless are afraid to sleep in the shelters because they are assaulted and robbed and molested by the other people there. It is time to say that we won’t think it is OK to have people living in those conditions, and that we will help them if we can or, if they are just incorrigible criminals who prey on the other homeless, we will lock them up.

To defeat the power of compound interest, we must use compound effort. Please subscribe (it’s free and I won’t send any spam, just posts) and pledge to recruit at least 5 other people who each pledge to recruit at least 5 others. Recruit family, friends, co-workers, church members, union members, lodge members, people in your organizations, strangers. We can do this, but we each need to put in the effort.

1. A crime incident is an overall criminal action, which may include multiple crimes, such as rape and murder by a single criminal on a single occasion, or a double homicide.

2. The arrest rate is in line with the rate of crimes actually committed. The percentage of victims of fatal police shootings who are black is 29.2%, while the percentage of persons arrested for violent crime who are black is 38.5%. (39.8% of the people who murder police officers are black.) That arrest percentage is consistent with the percentage of violent crimes that are committed by black people per the reports of the victims (36% of crimes against persons where the race of the offender is known and 55% of homicides are committed by black people). This is not because of anything inherent in black people, but rather results from the factors discussed above regarding family policy, plus a fixable cultural element in some areas. The book Ghettoside makes a good case for the proposition that black-on-black violence stems from a period in the south when the white law enforcement establishment refused to make any effort to prosecute black-on-black crimes, a situation that triggers a seemingly universal human mode of behavior that reverts to informal “law enforcement”, a system of revenge killings, violent posturing, and deadly focus on “honor” and respect that prevails where the state has failed to assert a monopoly on the use of violence. Once such a system starts, it tends to maintain itself until proper state-sponsored law enforcement steps in to stop it and replace it with a system of state-sponsored safety. When black people from the south migrated to northern and western cities, they brought the culture of violence with them, and the police in their new homes failed to stop it. Because American white society has been content to think of black people as somehow fundamentally different, our government has not seen fit to figure out how to break the cycle of violence in predominantly black areas.

3. The George Floyd killing, for example, received tons of press because it involved a white officer and a black victim. The fact that the white officer was using a technique that the Minneapolis police habitually used on people of all races despite it having been banned by other cities was not the focus. The fact that the killing involved 2 Hmong police officers, who were very unlikely to have started their day saying “I want to kill a black person today”, was not the focus. The killing resulted from misconduct, but the press wanted desperately to have it be a certain kind of misconduct that fit their goals.

4. A friend of the woman’s had called the police and reported that he was concerned about her because she had a gun and was acting depressed and he worried that she might hurt herself.

5. To be clear, there are plenty of good police officers. But there are also bad ones, and that’s a problem given that they have guns and power.

6. Media talking heads will disagree with that. The media loves to show us designated spokespeople for black Americans. Think about that one. If Fox News wanted to interview a self-proclaimed spokesman for white Americans, can you picture what that person would be like? Would that person be at all likely to represent the views of the average white American?

7. 2012 is the most recent year for which I have good victim and perpetrator data.

8. Many police fail to use their resources, and that has been true for decades. When my wife and I lived in Cambridge MA in 1982 a thief broke into our car, not realizing that we were too poor then to have a stereo to steal, and trashed the dash, but cut himself and left a full set of bloody fingerprints. The police didn’t even bother to collect them. Just a couple of years ago in Dallas, a home invader broke into my son’s home and he and his family had to flee outside and wait until the burglar fled when he heard the police sirens. They stayed up the rest of the night while Crime Scene processed the house and collected a lot of fingerprints and other evidence, but the detective assigned never used any of it.

9. Once upon a time, the highest rates of pick-pocketing were among the crowds gathered to watch the hanging of a pickpocket, because his friends and associates came to see him off.

10. Yes, middle class white kids have encounters with the police. I don’t think I’m unusual, and I have been arrested twice (and then de-arrested pretty quickly – one was police misconduct and the other just police sloppiness), stopped and questioned on foot a couple of times, and pulled over and questioned for no obvious reason at least four times. I mention this not to say “woe is me – I have suffered too”, but to point out that the constant drumbeat of “police racism” in the media hurts young black and Hispanic people who have encounters with the police. My contacts didn’t make me feel humiliated. Yes I had to do what I was told and yes I hadn’t done anything wrong, but regardless of the race of the police officers I knew I wasn’t being treated like an inferior being. I had been misidentified as a suspect (“oh, you mean the other young male non-Mormons!”) or the police were suspicious for some reason; that’s just life in the city. If I had been subjected to relentless propaganda telling me that every time I had an encounter with the police it was due to racism and they were treating me as an inferior being, on the other hand, I would have felt humiliated and angry. The Cato data (Cato is NOT pro-police) shows that most of the time the contacts have nothing to do with racism, so this trauma is an unnecessary effect of media misrepresentation. To be clear, I am not saying that there aren’t still, in some places or with some individuals, some loser-white-cop-oppressing-black-people-to-feel-good-about-himself situations; I am sure there are. I am saying, however, that most encounters between black people and police are not that sort. Even when police from outside the neighborhood go into a high-crime area and assume that the residents are mostly criminals, instead of more properly assuming that most of the residents are crime victims deserving respect and help, that’s just incompetence, not old-fashioned oppressor racism.

11. Seeing people as individuals rather than as groups is 90% of the battle. Consider a situation in which a number of individuals from Group B assault and kill individuals from Group A. The members of Group A get very distressed about this and declare that Group B people are awful thugs, and the Group B people who didn’t actually commit the crimes should have stopped them, and something needs to be done about Group B. If we identify Group B as being black or Hispanic people, then the response by Group A will be considered to be unfair and bigoted. If we identify Group B as police officers, then the reaction of Group A is commonly seen as fair and enlightened. But the reaction has the same flaw either way. Smearing a whole group for the bad actions of certain members of that group is both unfair and unhelpful.

12. The police officer primarily in charge of the raid on my family’s home was well known among the police for being a very bad officer, but he kept getting promoted. When good police officers see that, it wrecks their spirit and colors their own behavior.

13. We tend to be very reluctant to label children as bad people no matter how heinous their actions may be, fearing that we may unfairly pre-judge a young person whose nature has not yet been fully formed. While certainly we need to be very careful about putting on an irreversible label and about skewing our view of behaviors based on a tentative label, realistically the failure to start watching a psychopathic child or to act to prevent them from harming others early allows needless horrific things to happen to innocents. We can avoid being sloppy and can be humane in our containment efforts without just saying “well, after a few innocent lives have been destroyed, then we can be pretty sure we need to do something.”

14. The line “OK, if you want to let him out then how about if he stays at your house?” is actually pretty appropriate. Part of our insidious racism and classism is that people are often happy to make themselves feel morally superior by saying “we have to give him another chance!” when the innocents who suffer from that mistake will be people living in a different neighborhood. If I wouldn’t let a parolee stay at my house, then I don’t think I should inflict him on some other innocents, either.