How great is it that after the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice shootings (among others) cops around the country are clearly policing primarily Black areas much less aggressively?
Maybe not so great.
Excerpted from Arnold Ahlert\’s article at frontpagemag.com:
St. Louis\’s homicide rate is on target to reach its highest level in two decades, already exceeding 100 murders by the end of July.
It is an ominous trend also playing itself out in other cities, including Baltimore, New Orleans and Houston where murders are up 30 percent or more. There are also increased homicide totals in Chicago, Dallas, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C. And despite the lip service given to the notion that black lives matter, the increased violence is disproportionately affecting poor and predominantly African-American and Latino neighborhoods that are bearing the brunt of the carnage.
In St. Louis, a city that is 44 percent white, and 49 percent black, it is carnage being perpetrated overwhelmingly by black Americans themselves. In 2012, the most recent year for which statistics are available, a whopping 97.6 percent of those arrested for murder were black, compared to 2.4 percent who were white. Of those arrested for serious crimes overall, including murder, aggravated assault and larceny, more than 82 percent of those arrested were black, compared to 17.5 percent who were white.
As bad as they are, those arrest stats may nonetheless be understating the problem. Earlier last month when the murder total had reached 93 homicides (compared with 58 at the same point last year) police had made only 29 arrests. (Saint Louis Police Chief) Dotson admitted the city\’s “clearance rates aren\’t where I\’d like them to be,” a reality Mayor Francis Slay attributes to a no-snitch mentality. “These are disputes, and there are victims who won\’t talk to the police,” he said following a spate of violence in June. “Trying to make an arrest isn\’t that simple. In one case, they\’ve got (multiple) people shot and not one of them would identify the shooter.”
That sure is showing those cops, isn\’t it?
I wonder how many Black citizens in the affected areas, regardless of their feelings about individual incidents, such as the shooting deaths of Brown and Gray, wish to God that police, if anything, were being more aggressive, not less?
Remember: the people who are victimized by crime in vastly Black areas – the people who are doing nothing other than trying to live their lives in peace, who go to work and support their families, who care about those families and their communities, are, themselves Black. These are people who do not have the luxury of pretending that their biggest problems are the police.
In other words, the victims of a lowered police presence are exactly the people who #blacklivesmatter agitators claim to speak for.
Do they really?
