George Rebane

[This is the addended transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 25 May 2016.]

Amid this two-year election season we have ignored the alarming rise in crime rates across the nation.  Violent crime in big cities has begun rocketing upward over the last couple of years since the August 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO.  The shooting of Brown was then amplified by attention drawn to the deaths of other black men at the hands of police during the following months.  This gave rise to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement that focused its ire on the resurrection of ‘proactive policing’ which has been widely connected with the dramatic drop in crime rates over the last twenty years.

Proactive policing included the traditional tactics of police stopping to question young people gathered on street corners at 2AM in high crime neighborhoods where drug trafficking was rampant.  In cities like New York proactive policing applied the ‘Broken Windows’ theory that markedly improved a community’s self-respect and reduced crime.  It also involved the practice of ‘stop, question, and frisk’ of individuals the cop on the beat considered suspicious.  While these encounters seldom advanced to the ‘frisk’ stage, the anti-police activists shortened the label to ‘stop and frisk’, and accused police of its widespread and gratuitous practice in black neighborhoods.  

After Ferguson, President Obama launched a direct and politicized attack on America’s police, instructing his Department of Justice to conduct several investigations of law enforcement agencies which were pre-judged guilty until proven innocent.  The message quickly got across to outfits like Black Lives Matter that held numerous demonstrations and urged blacks to confront the police whenever there was an officer involved activity in their community.  Consequently, police departments and individual officers also got the message – ‘if you can let it go, then then let it go.’ – and proactive policing became a thing of the past.

As a result the Ferguson Effect now correlates perfectly with the jump in crime rates to a degree that FBI Director James Comey has recently come out twice citing the alarming statistics.  For example, “Homicides increased 9% in the largest 63 cities in the first quarter of 2016; nonfatal shootings were up 21%, according to a Major Cities Chiefs Association survey. Those increases come on top of last year’s 17% rise in homicides in the 56 biggest U.S. cities, with 10 heavily black cities showing murder spikes above 60%.”, and “homicides in Chicago are up 95%, according to the police department.” (more here)

Instead of sharing in the concern for the safety of urban Americans and instructing its Justice Department to work with police to halt this resurgence, Obama attacked Director Comey, accusing him of “cherry picking the data” and pursuing a “political agenda”.  Through his press secretary Josh Earnest, the president has made the issue one of race and class warfare as blacks continue to overwhelmingly die at each other’s hands in mounting numbers.

Why a black president would want to sacrifice other blacks in this election year might be a puzzle if it weren’t so easy to connect many of the dots.  Regardless of the impact on their health, safety, wages, and education, the African-American voters have never been able to sort out the effect of Democrat policies on their welfare, and have instead listened to their politicians’ talk and ignored their walk.  By ostracizing Comey, today Obama is casting the bureau as an anti-black, anti-Democrat political organization and therefore preparing his constituents for the possibly damning Comey Vote on Hillary’s classified emails scandal, while fanning the embers of class-war by telling all African-Americans that they still live under Jim Crow laws from which only the Democrats can free them.  And more blacks shooting other blacks is the perfect argument for castrating the Second Amendment.  So about today’s resurgent crime wave, what’s not to like?

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[Addendum]  Ms Heather MacDonald, the author of the above referenced WSJ piece, also wrote an edited version on the topic for the April 2016 Imprimis published by Hillsdale College where she gave an extended talk on “the danger of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement”.  In her forthcoming book War on Cops Ms MacDonald documents the continued tragedy of our progressive elites using black-on-black killings to serve as grist for their ongoing socio-political agenda.  I believe that keeping a segment of America’s population purposely ignorant as a compliant voting block while ignoring the gratuitous killings in their communities is evil pure and simple.  And that this has been going for decades in overwhelmingly Democrat controlled cities is literally beyond the generally accepted meaning of comprehension.

[27may16 upadate]  Additionally corroborating the above report, this week in NYC its “progressive city council, which this week repudiated the ‘broken windows’ policing that has contributed so much to making Gotham safe. … On Wednesday the councilors decriminalized so-called quality-of-life offenses such as littering, drinking or urinating in public and loitering in parks after dark. The package of new laws downgrades such misdemeanor citations to civil summonses so scofflaws will no longer have to appear in court or pay hefty fines.” (more here)  I recall what happened in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica when its city council gave a similar nod to its vagrants, homeless, and just plain bums.  Every bad statistic climbed, including the number of boarded up stores and closed restaurants in one of the most iconic and fabled locales in the world.  Then they reversed themselves and things got back to normal.  Such reports remind us again that, except for CA liberals, in general they are not stupid; it’s just that liberals so often have bad luck when they try to think.