Thomas Sowell:
Amid the rioting in Milwaukee, there is also a clash between two leading lawmen there — Milwaukee County sheriff David Clarke and the city of Milwaukee’s chief of police Edward Flynn. They have very different opinions about how law enforcement should be carried out.
Chief Edward Flynn expresses the view long prevalent among those who emphasize the social “root causes” of crime, such as income disparities and educational disparities, as well as the larger society’s neglect of black communities.
Chief Flynn puts less emphasis on aggressive police action and more on community outreach and gun control.
Sheriff David Clarke represents an opposite tradition, in which the job of the police is to enforce the law, as forcefully as necessary, not to make excuses for lawbreaking or to ease up on enforcing the law, in hopes that this will mollify rioters. Sheriff Clarke would also like to see law-abiding blacks be armed.
Differences of opinion on law enforcement are sharp and unmistakable — and have been for more than 50 years. However, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”
Unfortunately, facts seem to play a remarkably small role in clashes over law-enforcement policies. And that too has been true for more than 50 years.
In his memoirs, the Supreme Court’s chief justice Earl Warren declared that “all of us must assume a share of the responsibility” for rising crime rates in the 1960s because “for decades we have swept under the rug” the slum conditions that breed crime.
But the hard fact is that the murder rate in the country as a whole was going down during those very decades when social problems in the slums were supposedly being neglected.
Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years.
The same reversal in the country at large saw murder rates by 1974 more than twice as high as in 1960. This was after the murder rate had been cut in half from where it had been in the 1930s.
Ghetto riots, which erupted in the 1960s, were blamed on poverty and discrimination. But what were the facts?
Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest of the country. But ghetto riots were not nearly as common in the South.
The most deadly ghetto riot of the 1960s occurred in Detroit, where 43 people were killed — 33 of whom were black. In Detroit at that time, black median family income was 95 percent of white median family income. The unemployment rate among blacks was 3.4 percent and black home ownership was higher in Detroit than in any other major city.
What was different about Detroit was that politicians put the police under orders that restricted their response to riots — and some rioters said “the fuzz is scared.” It was black victims who paid the highest price for letting rioters run amok.
If you’re a single lady and want a nice mate, you don’t hang out in bars or honky-tonks hoping he’ll just show up and sweep you off your feet.
You go to your church.
You take your dog and walk it in nice neighborhoods being friendly when you meet other pet owners.
If you are born in a slum, it doesn’t mean you are doomed to stay there your whole life.
Charles Payne was born in a slum.
He wore a shirt and tie to grade school so he’d be less likely to join in distractions to learning.
Ben Carson was born in a slum.
He took his education very seriously, as did his mom.
But too many slum dwellers consider getting an education as ”acting white,” and refuse to do it.
Who is holding them back?
Only those Democrats who oppose school choice, school vouchers, merit raises for teachers, battle pay for teachers in slums, and so on.
The children are victims of peer pressure.
Their parents never taught them how to resist it.
All the ”income redistribution” promises are just words.
The truth is that government workers will eat up all the extra taxes.
The poor will be left poor.
In Los Angeles, if all income redistribution/welfare programs cut out all the government workers each and every poor person would be given $37,000 each year!
But the Democrats use poverty programs as a means to line the pockets of their friends instead.
The two opposite policing philosophies have track records.
How about we just go with the one that works.
The one that gets serious offenders off the streets.
The riots after the Rodney King incident was the flualt of the news media who edited the sceen of Kings arrest and lied big time more riots blame it where it lies on the leftists scumballs
I was a week into Army basic training and was put in charge of a platoon. We were off cycle to have the majority of recruits to be high school graduates. There were two of us with college degrees and a few with high school diplomas. Over half of our platoon were minorities from big cities. Twenty-three were attending remedial reading classes to meet basic reading standards.
In basic training, one recruit screws up, we all pay. When a black recruit from Detroit screwed up, I made the mistake of helping him atone for his actions. Within minutes, our black Drill SGT had me in his office with his nose within .5 inches of my nose screaming at me. He wanted to know why I had let the black recruit off easy. When I told him that I thought few had ever given him a break in life, I thought he was going to take my head off. His vividly delivered comment condensed here was, ” none of these ___________ ____________ sons of bitches will never amount to anything in this__________ world if you and other ________s like you fail to make them abide by the laws and standards of a civilized county. Now, get your ___ out of here and do not let me see your ________ ___ back in here for this reason.
Following his advice within 3 weeks, there were no visible issues between ay of the recruits. I treated everyone fairly and they responded. When they had questions or doubts about themselves, I was able to let them find their own answers. It was the equal toughness no matter the place of their origin that made them successful, not the pandering.
It takes generations for those in poverty to escape it. The children of those in poverty have to gain an education and useful skills to break the bonds of poverty. The left, however, prefer use divisive politics to maintain power and attempt to wipe out the opposition by promising instant relief from poverty if only the evil, racist Republicans would allow it.
So, the utter failure of the “War on Poverty” continues because reversals of those policies of paying people to remain in poverty are deemed hateful and vilified, supported by a corrupt media, so that it is suicide to oppose it (opposition to the Community Reinvestment Act was anti-poor and allowed us to have this lovely recession). Compared to being told you are a victim of racist policies, here’s a hundred bucks and a pat on the head compared to “with hard work and out policies, you CAN escape poverty”, the results are pretty predictable.
If the left even remotely wanted to help those in poverty to escape it, they would not be promoting the far left agenda of violent reaction to manufactured offense and would, instead, be promoting law, order and the advancement of policies which create the road to prosperity. In eight years, the goal of eliminating poverty has been set back 20.
Rioters need to be arrested and fined riot instigators need to be held financialy liable