The incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.”

Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr. Dotson reported. Arrests in St. Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%.

Similar “Ferguson effects” are happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric. Arrests in Baltimore were down 56% in May compared with 2014.

Heather MacDonald describes a nationwide crime wave instigated by establishment media agitprop.

The consequences of the ‘Ferguson effect’ are already appearing. The main victims of growing violence will be the inner-city poor.

The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.

By contrast, the first six months of 2014 continued a 20-year pattern of growing public safety. Violent crime in the first half of last year dropped 4.6% nationally and property crime was down 7.5%. Though comparable national figures for the first half of 2015 won’t be available for another year, the January through June 2014 crime decline is unlikely to be repeated.

The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months.

Read the whole thing.

A Morgan State professor has come to the conclusion that being a white liberal ally of black radicals ought to cost you.

College Fix:

Lawrence Brown, an assistant professor at Morgan State University, tweeted some … interesting comments at the end of last month, to say the least.

Among them is the professor’s belief that “white allies” should deposit their “unearned” wealth into “Black accounts” (note the “white” with lower case “w” and “Black” with capital “B”) or should “jump between Black people and police at EVERY opportunity.”

There was also “My new criteria for white allies is gonna be: ‘How much are you using your whiteness to LITERALLY eliminate the racial wealth gap?’”

The self-described revolutionary’s Twitter feed is protected; however, a reader of the blog Weasel Zippers provided some screen caps of the prof’s controversial tweets.

Weasel Zippers adds:

White people’s wealth is apparently ‘unearned’ because it is based off a white supremacist society that steals from black people. That is why said wealth should be ‘deposited in black accounts’.

In activist parlance, ‘white allies’ are the white liberal/leftists that come out at at some of these protests. This standing with black folk is apparently in his words being given too easily, and should not be given without this cost.

Brown, who received his undergraduate degree in African-American Studies from Morehouse College, has contributed numerous articles to the site Indypendent Reader. Among them are “A Real ‘Nigga’ Show: A Black Man’s Review,” “In Charm City, Plutocratic Pimpin’ is Easy,” and two pieces examining the messages of the popular science fiction film Avatar.

Brown was quite outspoken, too, during the unrest in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray. He said “The narrative now is on the looting and rioting taking place. People miss the underlying structural issues that are happening everyday. I would call it structural looting in form of policy.”

If you don’t want to come across with the cash, Professor Brown offers the alternative proposal that white allies should “jump between Black people and police at EVERY opportunity.”

Rich Lowry adds another large one to the First Lady’s list of personal affronts.

Michelle Obama gave a commencement address at Tuskegee University that was a ringing call for the graduates not to be discouraged by her whining.

Much of the first lady’s speech was what is right and proper for a Tuskegee commencement, drawing on the story of the determination and skill of the Tuskegee Airmen. But she devoted a long passage to her own struggles that was off key and characteristically self-pitying.

Few women in modern America have been the focus of as much adulation as Michelle Obama, a Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate who was making almost $270,000 by the time her husband was elected senator. She is routinely lionized for her beauty and her public spiritedness.

Yet, the first lady often strikes an aggrieved note when talking about her experience in America (her notorious comment in 2008 was that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country.”). Her gloss on the famous Wallis Simpson line is apparently that you can never be too rich, too thin or too easily offended.

At Tuskegee, she related a series of inconsequential gibes or perceived insults mostly from 2008 that, for her, loom large enough to share with graduating seniors years later.

The first lady cited a controversial New Yorker cover during that campaign of her sporting an Angela Davis-style Afro and a gun. The image was meant to satirize “misconceptions and prejudices” about the Obamas, in the words of the publication’s editor, David Remnick.

The first lady said “it knocked me back a bit.” Give her this: Few of us know the pain of being featured on a cover of one of the nation’s most respected magazines in a spoof meant to illustrate how our critics are mean-spirited loons.

(Remnick went on to further demonstrate his hostility to the Obamas by writing an admiring 672-page biography of the president.) …

In her Tuskegee address, at least Michelle Obama urged the graduates not to be daunted by slights (and more meaningful obstacles, like rotten schools). She commended to them the example of herself, “the fully-formed first lady who stands before you today.”

Even though Michelle Obama didn’t mention the word, what she was discussing was “microaggressions.” It is the trendy term on college campuses for often inadvertent offensiveness, such as Barack Obama, once upon a time, being mistaken for a waiter when he wore a tuxedo at an event.

The idiocy of the concept of the microaggression is its underlying premise that only people who belong to certain select groups ever suffer indignities or humiliations, when they are, of course, endemic to the human condition. George Orwell once said that every life seen from the inside is a series of defeats.

Read the whole thing.

The Thinking Housewife contemplates the highly profitable and continually popular black grievance industry.

What is the real purpose of “Black History Month”? Apologists for the cultural left (Republicans and Democrats alike) would have us believe that its purpose is entirely-benign – i.e., education, inclusion, diversity of thought, the elevation of a people whose history has in the past been neglected, etc. – the standard rationale offered up by the left for so many of its initiatives and programs. The real purpose of “Black History Month” isn’t racial healing or education; instead, it is to keep the grievances and resentments of black people (and their supporters, whatever their race) simmering and ready at a moment’s notice to come to a boil in places like Ferguson and Baltimore.

There is a vast and profitable racket based upon the narrative that black folks are victims of white oppression – and the continued success/profitability of the racial grievance industry depends on keeping blacks not only angry, but feeling alienated from mainstream culture to the extent possible. Booker T. Washington, himself a black man, foresaw this over a century ago when he said,

“There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well.”…

Of course, one of the most-interesting and disturbing aspects of the whole phenomenon is that present-day blacks are angry about injustices committed not against them, but acts which may (or may not) have been committed against their ancestors. Whites and others who aren’t black are expected to feel guilt for acts they did not even commit. Inherited anger and/or guilt for acts in which one did not even participate is obviously a logical fallacy, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the race-hustlers and their enablers. Over the last half-century, the nation has spent billions in taxpayer funds on redressing racial grievances and blacks – as a demographic cohort – have been the beneficiaries of a vast menu of privileges and special programs available to no one else. None of this seems to have mattered – race-relations are at an very low ebb, and militant blacks are angrier than ever.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Lindsay Bruce shares a black comedian’s critical take on the rioters.

There isn’t a white person on the planet who could get away with saying what this man said without being called a racist, but it is a powerful message nonetheless. It does a huge disservice to your message when protesters act like this. I know there are going to be people who complain to me and say the people rioting were not protesters, but yes they were. They were there for the same reason everyone else was there, they are angry with “the system”.

One thing that this speaker doesn’t address, however, is that those people protesting created the system. They are the ones who voted for failed democrat policies. None of these protesters, violent or calm, want to take any personal responsibility. This isn’t about a racist system. Let’s look at some of the facts shall we?

9 of the 15 council members are black, and the mayor is black. The police chief is black along with 50% of the police force. Every single member of the Baltimore City Council is a Democrat. The mayor is a Democrat. Baltimore has not had a Republican mayor since 1967. Baltimore carries the fourth highest tax rate of any city in the nation. The poverty rate within the city is nearly 25 percent. Households in Baltimore earn approximately 56 percent of the overall state average. President Obama won a whopping 87.4% of the Baltimore City vote. Democrats run the city of Baltimore, the unions, the schools, and, yes, the police force.

These protesters have no one to blame but themselves.

Maybe things are beginning to change. We do seem to be getting more African-Americans who do not automatically support rioters.

Hat tip to Robert Laird.

There were many mean streets in the Pennsylvania small town where I grew up.

I grew up in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, a major place of settlement for turn-of-the-last-century Lithuanian immigrants to the United States. Shenandoah was, even in my youth, a former mining boom-town, well along in the processes of decline and decay.

Shenandoah was a kind of miniature city. It had, everyone said, in its heyday, more barrooms than Philadelphia. Protestants, English, German, and Welsh, constituted a small, and shrinking, minority. The town’s population was overwhelming composed of recent Roman Catholic immigrants. Lithuanians were nearly a plurality, but there were also plenty of Poles, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Irish, and Italians. Main Street commerce was dominated by Jews, who lived on Oak Street in the grandest houses in town.

By my 1950s boyhood, once homogeneous ethnic neighborhoods were dispersed. My father bought two houses (he rented one) on the West side of town, in what had, long ago, been the Italian neighborhood. We got along well with our Italian neighbors, who were always stopping us to press fresh tomatoes and other vegetables grown in the backyards on us. When I was a bit older, I was especially popular with the old Italian men because I had grown into a tough guy and protected the Italian kids (Lithuanians like me looked upon Italians, like Jews, as helpless non-combatants) from the juvenile gangs who lay in wait to waylay smaller children to steal their money and to torment and sexually abuse them.

Lithuanians tended to get along with the Italians and the Pennsylvania Dutch, who usually voted Republican. We tended not to get along with the Irish and the Poles, who usually voted democrat.

Shenandoah was a basically working-class mining town (where the mines had just closed down forever), with a significant welfare-and-criminal underclass.

The Internet keeps me in touch today with friends I went to school with and with whom I served mass and who were in the same boy scout troop. One friend, now retired from the Air Force and teaching Systems Theory as an adjunct at several Southern colleges, was reminiscing not long ago, and reflected how his family and mine were “the nice families,” largely surrounded at the end of town by gangsters and scum.

Like most people born into working class families, I was brought up with a contempt for the welfare class and knew first-hand the profound fear that parents like mine had of sinking to the point of “going on relief.” With the mines closing, men were being everywhere thrown out of work, and times were hard in the Anthracite region. Everyone knew people who were up against it and who were proud enough that they would go hungry before they would take relief, and though we pitied their condition, we felt strongly that they were perfectly right.

As you may imagine, I’ve been hearing now, for more than 50 years, sob stories about the plight of the “disenfranchised” (who do actually have the vote) and the “impoverished” (by whom?) in the inner cities. Not surprisingly, I am entirely lacking in sympathy.

We were corresponding on Facebook yesterday about the rioting in Baltimore, and I said the kind of hard-core, unsympathetic things that elderly, white, redneck racists like myself are prone to say. The thread belonged to a bouzhy, female, liberal attorney friend from Yale, and I would have been slightly more diplomatic in my remarks had I realized that one of the readers and participants in the thread was a young, black female recent Yale graduate.

The young lady took offense at my comments, which has caused me to reflect on the peculiarities of racial politics. My preceding remarks were intended to make the point that, in Lithuanian immigrant society, the respectable people may have gone so far as to feel some pity for the welfare/criminal scum residing nearby, but we did not side with them against the police. We also did not tolerate their criminal activities. I personally used to walk to and from school deliberately taking different routes, patrolling to prevent two different well-known juvenile gangs from molesting younger kids.

No one could have set up a drug dealing station in any residential neighborhood in our town. Nor could any adult criminal gangs take over neighborhoods. If any had tried, and the police not intervened, there were plenty of male adult veterans of WWII would have taken care of them immediately.

So, why is it, I often wonder how it is that decent & respectable African-American people have to live in such bad neighborhoods, dominated by drug dealers and gangbangers? Are there no tough and law-abiding African-Americans? And how come the better black people all come a-running to stick-up on racial solidarity grounds for the thug Leroy when the cops beat up on Leroy’s ass? Back where I grew up, if the Lithuanian criminal elements “Hopper” or “Cutha” were seen getting belathered by Shakey the cop with his hickory nightstick, their respectable fellow-Lithuanians would have smiled with warm approval and defended Shakey’s conduct all day long.

In our town’s high school, there was a 350 lb.+ football coach, nicknamed “Moose.” Moose, Mr. R., was not the sharpest pencil in the faculty box, and his academic role was to be homeroom teacher to the General section, the section of academically-hopeless criminals and mental defectives. Moose kept order with a heavy hand. One day, one of the leading bad hats sassed Mr. R., who responded by picking up the large console television set in the front of the room and hurling it at the offender. The bad boy went to the hospital with a broken arm and other injuries, and the whole town told and retold the story, grinning and gloating. Moose was admired, and no disciplinary proceedings whatsoever occurred.

The 1960s triumph of the Civil Rights Movement with the end of segregation in the South and the implementation of coercive social integration via the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 was supposed to end the Race Problem in America, but what actually occurred was a wave of rioting in every major city in the country. Fifty years of cultural, governmental, and institutional racial favoritism and the election of an African-American president later, we still have an unproductive and dependent black underclass, simmering with resentment and ready to riot at the drop of a journalistic meme alleging excessive use of force by the police against one of its own.

The Wall Street Journal argues that everyone, including the rioters, ought to be blaming the political leadership which has been in charge of those cities all these decades, not the police or the rest of America, for the inner city underclass’s lack of hope, inspiration, and economic opportunity.

You’re not supposed to say this in polite company, but what went up in flames in Baltimore Monday night was not merely a senior center, small businesses and police cars. Burning down was also the blue-city model of urban governance.

Nothing excuses the violence of rampaging students or the failure of city officials to stop it before Maryland’s Governor called in the National Guard. But as order starts to return to the streets, and the usual political suspects lament the lack of economic prospects for the young men who rioted, let’s not forget who has run Baltimore and Maryland for nearly all of the last 40 years.

The men and women in charge have been Democrats, and their governing ideas are “progressive.” This model, with its reliance on government and public unions, has dominated urban America as once-vibrant cities such as Baltimore became shells of their former selves. In 1960 Baltimore was America’s sixth largest city with 940,000 people. It has since shed nearly a third of its population and today isn’t in the top 25.

The dysfunctions of the blue-city model are many, but the main failures are three: high crime, low economic growth and failing public schools that serve primarily as jobs programs for teachers and administrators rather than places of learning.

Let’s take them in order. The first and most important responsibility of any city government is to uphold law and order. When the streets are unsafe and crime is high, everything else—e.g., getting businesses to invest and create jobs—becomes next to impossible.

People also start voting with their feet. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake has stated that one of her goals is to attract 10,000 families to move to Baltimore. Good luck with that after Monday night.

Read the whole thing.

The Yale Alumni Magazine is full of chin-stroking and thumb-sucking over the scandal of the century: the Yale undergraduate son of a black NYT columnist being stopped by a Yale Police Department officer looking for a burglary suspect, having a gun pointed at him, and being forced to lie on the ground.

The NYT columnist, Charles Blow, yesterday contended that his son’s encounter with that Yale cop was terribly (and permanently) traumatic.

[T]]he scars cannot be unmade. My son will always carry the memory of the day he left his college library and an officer trained a gun on him.

Yale President Peter Salovey, yesterday afternoon, acknowledged too the “personal pain” experienced by many in the bien pensant community at this outrageous example of racial lèse majesté.

All of which brought back to my mind decades-old memories of cops pointing guns at me the time I shot that rapist in New York. Regular readers may remember my mentioning the incident once previously. I was Chief Operating Officer of a Manhattan real estate company. I used to stay in the city during the week, setting up some kind of temporary bedroom in the immediate vicinity of my temporary office, located for convenience in the building currently undergoing the most extensive renovation.

I got a call near midnight from a tenant on the top floor who said that a woman was screaming on the roof. I borrowed the super’s .22 rifle and went up and found a rape in progress. Naturally, I made a citizen’s arrest of the rapist, but in the long course of walking him down six flights of stairs, he made a break for it and tried to escape. I cried Halt! and fired a warning shot, but he kept running, saying as he moved away: “You ain’t gonna shoot me, man. You ain’t gonna shoot nobody.” So I shot him. Intentionally, in the center of the left calf, so that if I were to wind up getting sued, the amount of damage and risk of fatal injury would be minimal.

He screamed, fell to the ground, and bled a lot. At which point, my super arrived, and I told Sam to call the cops. In a short while, multiple police cars came screaming up to the building on East 13th Street. Cops piled out of those cars, all drawing their pistols and aiming them at me. “Drop the gun!” the police demanded, overlooking the fact that I was holding it with the muzzle pointed in the air and my hand outside the trigger guard. “Here,” I said, “I’m handing it to you.” And they ran up, took the rifle, handcuffed me, and stuck me in the back of a police car.

It was obvious to me at the time that, had I made one injudicious move, those cops would have panicked and riddled me with lead. I was a mite perturbed at the time that those New York City cops could not instantly perceive that I was a good citizen rather than a criminal, and I was mildly alarmed at having looked down the barrel of so many pistols with so many fingers on their triggers. But, c’est la vie! They didn’t actually shoot me, so I figured no harm, no foul.

Unlike the sensitive Messrs. Blow père et fils, I can’t even say that I ever bore any particular psychic scars over having pistols pointed at me.

Also unlike the more fortunate Mr. Blow minor, I actually did get arrested. In defiance of the statute, which authorized the use of deadly force by a citizen making an arrest in such circumstances, I was arrested, tossed into the New York City jail system for days prior to being arraigned, and then had to face a Grand Jury deciding about whether to affirm proposed charges of First Degree Armed Assault (and incidental –never really discussed– Gun Law violations). I’d say that spending days in the filthy New York City jails, incurring serious legal expenses, and experiencing the jeopardy of possible prosecution and conviction for a major felony were all a bit traumatic, though I have certainly gotten over all of them. Being actually arrested, jailed, and potentially charged are all much bigger deals than being accosted by a cop or even having (very briefly) a gun pointed at you.

(If anybody is really interested in my shooting a rapist story, I put the scrapbook of documents on line a while back.)

Now I know that what a liberal like Mr. Blow will say is: Harummph! Well, you can skip shooting rapists and not get in any trouble, Zincavage, but I and my son were born African-American and cannot avoid getting profiled on the basis of the color of our skin.

To which I would reply: True, you can’t do anything about your skin color or ethnicity. Yet, it is actually pretty easy for a bourgeois chap of African-American descent to increase very significantly the odds of police recognizing his elite social status simply by dressing like a preppy. If Mr. Blow minor had left Sterling Library the other day wearing a J. Press Harris tweed sport coat, khacki trousers, and a tie, what are the odds that the Yale cop could possibly have confused him with the resident of New Haven recently guilty of burglarizing Trumbull College?

All this, too, demonstrates the need for fellows like Charles Blow to recognize the national extent of Black Privilege. His son gets stopped briefly, questioned, and immediately released by a Yale cop, and that trivial incident provokes national navel-gazing and serious debate.

I, a white and Lithuanian Yalie, got arrested, tossed in the calaboose for days with the roaches crawling everywhere, and I got, at the time, a joking reference in a humor column in Time Magazine. So much for Equality, Mr. Blow!

NYT’s columnist Charles Blow

The politics of racial privilege marches endlessly onward.

Last week, Yale University experienced a minor crime wave consisting of a series of thefts from undergraduate residential colleges on York & Elm Streets.

Oldest College Daily:

On Jan. 15, Michael Cruciger ’15 had his laptop stolen from his Trumbull College common room in entryway J. Another student in the same entryway reported his wallet missing, and Axell Meza ’16 said an unknown man entered his common room claiming to be looking for “Josh.” On the same night, Kartik Srivastava ’17 said that while he was sleeping, his wallet was taken from a desk no less than a foot from his person, and his suitemate’s checkbook was taken. Transactions had been made on Srivastava’s debit card, and his suitemate’s checks had been cashed, he said.

Several days later, laptops and an iPad were stolen from a suite in Lanman-Wright Hall, the freshman residence for Berkeley and Pierson colleges.

Then, on Saturday afternoon, another pair of students in Trumbull encountered an intruder in their suite. Although the Yale Police Department reported that they had arrested a suspect in connection with the Saturday afternoon intruder in the Trumbull College suite, they initially targeted the wrong individual. Later that day, Tahj Blow ’16, son of New York Times columnist Charles Blow, was confronted at gunpoint by a YPD officer because he allegedly matched the description of the suspect. …

Mr. Blow responded to learning that his son had been stopped and questioned by Yale University Police because he matched the description of the suspect, “tall, African-American, college-aged student wearing a black jacket and a red and white hat,” by having a conniption fit on Twitter:

And in his column in the Times:

When I spoke to my son, he was shaken up. I, however, was fuming.

Now, don’t get me wrong: If indeed my son matched the description of a suspect, I would have had no problem with him being questioned appropriately. School is his community, his home away from home, and he would have appreciated reasonable efforts to keep it safe. The stop is not the problem; the method of the stop is the problem.

Why was a gun drawn first? Why was he not immediately told why he was being detained? Why not ask for ID first?

What if my son had panicked under the stress, having never had a gun pointed at him before, and made what the officer considered a “suspicious” movement? Had I come close to losing him? Triggers cannot be unpulled. Bullets cannot be called back.

My son was unarmed, possessed no plunder, obeyed all instructions, answered all questions, did not attempt to flee or resist in any way.

This is the scenario I have always dreaded: my son at the wrong end of a gun barrel, face down on the concrete. I had always dreaded the moment that we would share stories about encounters with the police in which our lives hung in the balance, intergenerational stories of joining the inglorious “club.”

When that moment came, I was exceedingly happy I had talked to him about how to conduct himself if a situation like this ever occurred. Yet I was brewing with sadness and anger that he had to use that advice.

I am reminded of what I have always known, but what some would choose to deny: that there is no way to work your way out — earn your way out — of this sort of crisis. In these moments, what you’ve done matters less than how you look.

There is no amount of respectability that can bend a gun’s barrel. All of our boys are bound together.

The dean of Yale College and the campus police chief have apologized and promised an internal investigation, and I appreciate that. But the scars cannot be unmade. My son will always carry the memory of the day he left his college library and an officer trained a gun on him.

Demands for special consideration and regard for American Americans as recompense for a system of involuntary servitude ended a hundred and fifty years ago and a system of regional segregation ended fifty years ago never seem to end and, indeed, keep escalating.

Black privilege, these days, is considered by its loudest advocates to include immunity to profiling by police in defiance of the obvious reality that essentially all crime in places like New Haven, Connecticut is committed by African Americans.

Mr. Blow implicitly demands that police should start treating all suspected criminals, without regard to the well-known propensity of many belonging to that category to be illegally-armed and readily capable of murderous violence, as if they were all respectable citizens.

Evidently Mr. Blow believes that, in order to avoid offending the amour propre of the rara avis upper middle class African American the police officer might encounter one day, he ought never to draw his gun first or insist upon immobilizing any gangbanger from the Hood. All police officers should simply trust to the benevolence of humanity. Protecting the police officer’s life is, from Mr. Blow’s perspective, less important than the possibility that psychic scars might be inflicted upon some black haute bourgeoisie by being confronted with lethal force or by being briefly treated with less than the customary reverence he is accustomed to receiving.

Needless to say, few police officers, black or white, are likely to share Mr. Blow’s priorities.