COPS KILL BLACKS FOR NO GOOD REASON?

“African Americans are the only US group which routinely finds its members killed by law enforcement and those aping law enforcement (Zimmerman) for no good reason, which killings are subjected to close judicial review, upon which they are told that those killings are OK. And they are the only US group in which this killing, and the support of that killing by the state, is a continued playing out of a long and vile history of state-sanctioned violence and oppression. They don't like it.”

So wrote Professor David M. Kennedy, director of the National Network for Safe Communities at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in an email to one of my friends. In a reply, with a copy to Prof. Kennedy, I referred to those remarks as ‘horseshit’ and said: “That load of left-wing crap just doesn’t fly and he should know better. Shame on him!”

The good professor felt insulted and responded directly to me: “I don't normally respond to insults from people I don't know and who don't know me, but since I'm writing in an exchange that began with my exchange with Jay, you might want to look here:

Trayvon Martin
By David Kennedy / July 19, 2013

There’s a conservative argument gaining ground around Trayvon Martin’s killing that American blacks shouldn’t be taking it so seriously because the real threat of violence against blacks is internal. Here’s one such from Pat Buchanan, continuing an honorable tradition of explaining to the black community why it can’t understand its own interests:

From listening to cable channels and hearing Holder, Sharpton, Jealous and others, one would think the great threat to black children today emanates from white vigilantes and white cops.

Hence, every black father must have a “conversation” with his son, warning him not to resist or run if pulled over or hassled by a cop.

Make the wrong move, son, and you may be dead is the implication.

But is this the reality in Black America?

When Holder delivered his 2009 “nation-of-cowards” speech blaming racism for racial separation, Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald suggested that our attorney general study his crime statistics.

In New York from January to June 2008, 83 percent of all gun assailants were black, according to witnesses and victims, though blacks were only 24 percent of the population. Blacks and Hispanics together accounted for 98 percent of all gun assailants. Forty-nine of every 50 muggings and murders in the Big Apple were the work of black or Hispanic criminals.

A lot of Buchanan’s raw stats are correct (the statement in his piece about drug use is not - survey work shows that white kids both use drugs and commit other crimes at somewhat higher rates than black kids). Gun violence is heavily concentrated in poor black communities, and violent victimization is universally committed primarily against one’s own race and ethnic group, because it is primarily committed against people one has relationships with, and most people mostly have relationships within their own group.

But this line of argument misses one vital point. African Americans are the only US group which routinely finds its members killed by law enforcement and those aping law enforcement (Zimmerman) for no good reason, which killings are subjected to close judicial review, upon which they are told that those killings are OK. And they are the only US group in which this killing, and the support of that killing by the state, is a continued playing out of a long and vile history of state-sanctioned violence and oppression.

They don’t like it.

The most profound truth I’ve found from working in and with black communities around these issues – violence, police abuse, mass incarceration, racial profiling – is that white folks look at incidents and ask, was this (stop, arrest, frisk, police shooting, instance of standing one’s ground) justified? Black folks look at history, and ask, why do you keep doing this to us? It is a very good question, and there is no good answer.
__________

My response directly to Prof. Kennedy:

“If you consider my response an insult, so be it. How dare you say that the police kill blacks for no good reason. While there have been occasions where the killing of blacks by cops was unjustified, that is absolutely not true in the overwhelming majority of cases. It has been open season on cops for some time. I do not blame them for shooting anyone multiple times - white, black, green or whatever - if they believe he is reaching for a gun. If that object turns out to be a wallet as in the Diallo case, that is a tragedy, but better a tragedy than a dead cop.

As a retired academic I do not like to use phrases like this, but you can take your left-wing crap and shove it!”

I may have insulted a respected criminal justice educator, but Prof. Kennedy insulted and trashed 800,000 local, state and federal law enforcement officers with his outrageous, preposterous and inflammatory statement that African-Americans are routinely killed by law enforcement for no good reason.

I would add that when Prof. Kennedy points out that “white kids both use drugs and commit other crimes at somewhat higher rates than black kids,” he is being rather disingenuous. Because less than 15 percent of Americans are black, the raw numbers will show that more whites use drugs and commit crimes than blacks. But the rate (let’s say per 100,000) for using drugs and committing crimes is much higher for blacks than for whites.