From Cold Fury:
Heather McDonald cuts to the chase:
On Friday, Obama declared that wants to have a “teachable moment” about “relations between police officers and minority communities.” Here’s a good place to start teaching: Expose the reality of black crime. It is preposterous to talk about urban policing without talking about crime, and yet that is what anti-cop activists, politicians, and reporters have done for years. They focus public attention on police stop-and-arrest data while keeping crime rates carefully off-stage. But nearly everything that the police do, especially in this age of data-driven policing, is a function of criminal behavior. Attend any Compstat meeting in New York or Los Angeles, and you will hear police commanders intently and passionately debating how best to deploy officers to disrupt ongoing crime patterns; race never comes up. And those crime patterns are reported to them most often by law-abiding residents of inner-city neighborhoods who plead in precinct-community meetings for more police protection against drug dealers and thugs, as I have witnessed numerous times.
When liberals and left-wingers ponderously refer to “race” — as in Attorney General Eric Holder’s admonition this February that “we, as average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race,” or as in Obama’s observation in his recent primetime press conference that “race remains a factor in the society,” or as in Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree’s scary announcement that Henry Louis Gates Jr. intends to keep the country talking about issues of race and law enforcement — they mean: Let’s talk about white racism and skin color. Here’s another possible way of defining the problem: behavior. The issues that the race industry subsumes under the accusatory rubric of “race,” such as differential arrest or poverty rates, overwhelmingly result today from behavior, not from a reaction to skin color. I’ll be ready to concede that “race” — defined, per Obama, Holder, Ogletree, and Gates, as racism and skin color — remains a significant factor in social outcomes when the same proportion of black children as white children are raised in two-parent, married households without greatly lowering the black poverty rate, or when black crime drops to white and Asian levels without proportionally reducing the black prison population. Until we conduct that experiment, though — which is wholly within the capacity of individuals to do — I’ll remain skeptical that the race activists’ favorite “race issues” are predominantly the consequence of white Americans’ atavistic bigotry.
And might all this be because they’re the ones who are in fact “a nation of cowards,” in Holder’s outrageous formulation? They’re obviously afraid to confront and frankly discuss simple facts like these:
Of 23 peer-reviewed U.S. studies since 2000, 20 found that family structure directly affects crime and/or delinquency. Most research “strongly suggests both that young adults and teens raised in single-parent homes are more likely to commit crimes, and that communities with high rates of family fragmentation (especially unwed childbearing) suffer higher crime rates as a result.”
In The Atlantic Monthly, Barbara Dafoe Whitehead noted that the “relationship [between single-parent families and crime] is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime. This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature. The nation’s mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family break up as the most important source of rising rates of crime.”
Let me repeat: Control for single-parent families and there are no differences between the races when it comes to crime.
In addition, the statistical link between the availability of welfare and out-of-wedlock births is conclusive. There have been dozens of studies that link the availability of welfare benefits to out-of-wedlock birth.
In 1995, Dr. Patrick Fagan wrote a seminal summary of the situation: “Over the past thirty years, the rise in violent crime parallels the rise in families abandoned by fathers…High-crime neighborhoods are characterized by high concentrations of families abandoned by fathers…The rate of violent teenage crime corresponds with the number of families abandoned by fathers… Neighborhoods with a high degree of religious practice are not high-crime neighborhoods…Even in high-crime inner-city neighborhoods, well over 90 percent of children from safe, stable homes do not become delinquents. By contrast only 10 percent of children from unsafe, unstable homes in these neighborhoods avoid crime…Criminals capable of sustaining marriage gradually move away from a life of crime after they get married.”
There’s your damned “national conversation on race,” you cowards. Until you’re courageous enough to stop dismissing inconvenient truths like these as some sort of irrelevant white-power fabrication, you can jam your self-serving, hectoring “teachable moments” sideways. As Ross concludes: “It can’t be called a ‘teachable moment’ if Democrats fail, decade over decade, to learn.” And they fail to learn because they’re too busy lecturing instead of listening
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