Can we cut through the b.s.?

Victor Davis Hanson shows how

discussion of crime is too often constructed as an ideological tool to serve larger political agendas. We see that cycle with the unproven feminist assertion that 20% of coeds will be raped on campus during their undergraduate tenures — when the government’s own statistics show that women on and off the campus have less than a 1% chance of being sexually assaulted in any given year. If the former myth is true, then the engine of feminist studies, counselors, and therapeutic curricula is fueled; if the latter fact is canonized, then society can in part be thankful that such violent sexual assault has declined from far higher percentages during past decades.

The stuff of the recent protests are weary police of the inner city confronting hundreds of thousands of times a week a small subset of the population (perhaps African-American males between ages 15 and 50 constitute no more than 2-3% of the population) who account for nearly 50% of violent crime. For such a formula for disaster to dissipate, either one of two things would have to occur. One, the police will silently avoid such confrontations, to the degree that they can mask their noncompliance without career repercussions. That is, when a call comes in that an African-American young man is walking down the middle of the street and is a suspect in a recent strong-arm robbery, they will simply avoid him, or when complaints are voiced that a large African-American vendor is illegally selling cigarettes, with a history of 30 prior arrests, they will not answer the call. Unfortunately I think such the repercussions of that adjustment will be higher crime rates, especially in the inner city.

Two, the nation would have to have the Eric Holder-coveted national dialogue of race, rather than a name-calling sessions about “cowards.” The purpose would be to address the foundations of young black criminality — the break-up of the family, the pernicious role of federal subsidies, a value system that deprecates academic learning and idolizes sports and acts of supposed masculinity, the misogyny and racism of popular rap and other cultural expression, the neglect of the inner city by the rest of America, the legacy of racism on the individual psyche, and on and on. Yet to have such a discussion, not to mention their remedies, would put the Al Sharptons and others out of business. Moreover, the entire Obama electoral strategy was to galvanize the black community to register, turn out at the polls, and vote in monolithic fashion for Obama, as the emblematic black candidate. Because there was no margin of error in such calculus (given that racial chauvinism turns off one voter for every voter it attracts), if the cases of Skip Gates, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and the Eric Garner were not politicized, others would have to be invented to create the needed outrage and solidarity that translates into political clout.

There are tragic self-corrections in politics. For the next few years, police will weigh the dangers of intervening in incidents in which African-American youths confront authorities, and too often abdicate — until crime rates inch back up, cities like New York revert to their 1970s status or present-day Chicago, the public demands recalibration, and we go back to proactive policing. Similarly, bloc ethnic voting will create backlashes or counter-movements in kind (will there be a day when conservative black Congress people outnumber those in the Black Caucus?) and we will see ethnic candidates run as individuals, in fear that appeals to the color of our skins rather than our character spell suicide.

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