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I feel like the politics around crime statistics and race are at once both fascinating and exhausting / dispiriting.
On the one hand, I've come across angry black activists and civilians (in public discourse) insisting that cops are racists, white people are committing exactly the same crimes that black people do, and cops don't care because those white people are white. And, I mean, I do kind of get it, to a point. I absolutely do know white suburban people who, say, sold some weed to their friends in high school and there wasn't a police dragnet around trying to catch those people. There likely is a certain amount of that. The more that cops are around, the more that they're likely to notice you doing stuff and getting the state involved.
But on the other hand, whenever I've tried to look into the topic of mass incarceration (I'm thinking especially here of Jill Leovy's great book "Ghettoside"), one thing that comes up constantly when talking about the kind of Hatfield-McCoy retaliatory violence in many black communities is that, historically, black communities have been massively underpoliced. Like, after the collapse of slavery and during Reconstruction, lots and lots of white people looked at the truly insane amount crime and violence in black communities, shrugged, said "that's just how black people are, it will never change, they are literally outlaws by nature, and it is not the role of the police or the state to do anything about that". And so in that sense, the police really were mostly there to try to preserve decent, civilized white communities (and thus also notably disregarded poor, dysfunctional white communities too). But the consequence of that fact was, as a practical matter, crime rates in black communities were actually much, much, much higher than whatever ended up getting reported by police statistics. And the argument in her book (covering LA around 2000, I think) is that actual black people in those communities certainly did recognize the massive amount of criminality occurring in their communities, they knew the police wouldn't help (or couldn't be trusted to be useful if they showed up anyway), and so frequently vigilante behavior seemed like a sensible response.
This makes me think about the bravado culture that many blacks, who most people here wouldn't consider problematic, get trapped into. It is such a pervasive, and sometimes unavoidable, mindset. You will occasionally hear other blacks talk about the absurdity of it, and how the only real way to win a disagreement is through violence. We've all seen a convenience store video or two (or a hundred) of a young black male shooting another young black for the grave sin of bumping into him without apologizing, or something similar. The only recourse in these areas is violence and/or revenge violence, and the cycle just continues to perpetuate itself. They are told from a young age that whites, and more specifically police, are the enemy and not to be trusted. The result is that the only real justice to be had is the street kind. The blacks that win through nonviolent means, via an argument, or a scoff or anything else are dealt with in the same violent way so that the only real way to win is through violence. It's a bucket of crabs culture that needs serious intervention, but one that won't accept the hard truths being said from their white "enslavers." They'd rather latch onto the enablers who tell them the problem is someone else's fault and not theirs. It's a very human thing to not want to accept accountability when a short term path of less resistance presents itself constantly.
I do feel for the blacks who recognize the dysfunction and who criticize it. They are stuck in a uniquely difficult position. They criticize and hate the norms around them, and they are predictably labeled as sellouts or worse by their own people. "You a bitch." They have more in common personality-wise with the average white but they also know they don’t fully fit into white communities either, because they carry the background and experiences that their white peers don’t. That limbo position has to be psychologically brutal, and I know a lot of people quietly live in it.
I believe Ta-Nehisi Coates has an anecdote from when he was a young man, new to the white-collar world, where basically he was ready to physically fight some guy who was arguing with him, and an older guy had to step in to talk him down and also explain to him that starting a fight in that situation would have almost certainly wrecked his budding career.
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Immortalized by The Boondocks:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=UajTvU3sjrY?si=4xYmR5zz_UC9WVF_
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As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the underlying flaw in these debates is that what progressives want from a police force (assuming they want a police force at all) is fundamentally incoherent.
Either the police can adopt an aggressive, proactive and hands-on approach to policing African-American (and Hispanic, to a lesser extent) communities, which means more COCs (criminals of colour) getting shot and/or being sent to prison; or they can adopt a hands-off, laissez-faire approach, which means more people of colour getting victimised by the criminals in their communities. There's pretty much no way for police officers to cut down on the rate of violent crime in a community without arresting the perpetrators, and there's no way for police officers to be more hands-off without a huge spike in crime victimisation.
I'd like to believe there's some hypothetical point on the thermostat that would keep the majority of progressive activists happy most of the time, but it's hard to envision what this might look like. American progressives have been complaining about over- and under-policing in black American communities for as long as I've been alive, and indeed many decades prior.
The progressive Schrodinger’s level of policing make sense if progressives don’t understand, pretend not to understand, or choose to ignore that blacks are disproportionate sources of crime—especially violent crime—including against other blacks. Thus, the two goals of arresting fewer blacks and arresting more people who commit crime against blacks can be simultaneously pursued.
Not that mainstream law-and-order conservatives are too much better on this front. They concede that Black Lives Matter More when they sputter that blacks have always been the primary victims of underpolicing, that Democrats R the Real Racists (DR3).
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The ideal progressive policing is that:
Right, so ultimately all they really want is a maximally redistributive (read: socialist) state, in which the police force will wither away and become unnecessary. (Even if they rarely say so in so many words, acutely aware that people will look at them like they have two heads.) Kind of makes me wonder why they even bother criticising the police when their only actual beef is with capitalism.
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