Time to Punch Back?
Letting dangerous felons off the hook for violent crime isn't "anti-racism." It's anti-civilization.
For several decades now, America has been principally engaged in enforcing (if not legislating) a cultural prohibition against “punching down.” A kind of noblesse oblige-for-the-masses demands that we forswear portraying designated underdog demographics in an unflattering light. Through the years such edicts have applied to women, gays and lately the trans community, but the chief beneficiary of this mindset has always been black America en masse. This privileged status only intensified with the death of George Floyd. (Yes, privileged, you read that right.)
Black Americans today profit from an all-pervading commitment to what one might call “image affirmative action”: We extravagantly celebrate the smallest positives while insulating black people from any meaningful criticism. This dichotomy governs practices in politics, academia, and mainstream media. And again, post-Floyd, black America’s hands-off immunity has been near-complete.
There’s nothing wrong with empathy for the underdog (even if underdog status is sometimes claimed or conferred fraudulently), as long as it’s appropriate to the circumstances. But such deference must take a back seat to a recognition of the greater good. It should never prevent the saying of what needs desperately to be said.
In the case of America’s beleaguered cities, what desperately needs to be said is this:
The No. 1 problem facing America’s cities is a virulent epidemic of street violence perpetrated by young black thugs. Flinch-inducing as that may sound, it is both anecdotally and statistically beyond dispute.
To look at one such metropolis, New York City, black people, who constitute 23% of the city's nearly 9 million residents, were implicated in 61% of the murder and manslaughter cases last year. The demographics of much-maligned Chicago tell an even more compelling story. The city is 29% black, yet black perpetrators commit 71% of all homicides.
Figures for other types of violent crime loosely track with these numbers. Further, I specify “young” thugs because across all races, murder in particular is a young man’s game. Over 70% of all homicides in 2020 were committed by offenders between ages 13 and 29. So-called children” ages 13 through 16 committed 604 homicides in 2020. That stat alone is nearly 30 times the number of fatalities in Uvalde, the coverage of which was ubiquitous for months.
And the terrible irony is that because most crime occurs in-group, young black felons pose a special danger to other black Americans, the overwhelming mass of whom are law-abiding. But we cannot say even that. We are proscribed from looking at crime through the lens of race.
The New York Times, the so-called paper of record, will barely cover the existence of such an urban malaise, let alone cover it in racial terms—so fearful is the paper that its elite black journalists-cum-snowflakes will rise up and complain of feeling “unsafe.” (Such coverage also would get a rise out of the paper’s most engaged readership: citizens who are liberal-tending-toward-woke.) The Times’ blind spot in this area can be such that helpful onlookers might want to chip in for a seeing-eye dog.
On April 12, 2022, with a manhunt underway for an escaped subway shooter—who was armed and plainly dangerous—the Times did not put a picture of the announced person of interest, Frank James, on its site in real time. Might it not have been helpful for New Yorkers to actually look at the person they needed to “be on the lookout” for? Guess not. Instead of showing the face of the actively sought black suspect, the Times showed other generic images, notably a photo of a subway platform being patrolled by a black cop.
Similarly, when California police arrested a suspected serial killer who happened to be black, the Times ran a photo not of the suspect, but of the town’s black police chief. This racial “prettification” represents a wholesale abdication of journalistic responsibility.
Meanwhile, the Times (like much of the assembled media) obsesses over the gratuitous use of force during an arrest or the (admittedly unfortunate) handcuffing of a pregnant woman. Or the fact that black Americans seem to be disproportionately affected by a recent surge in traffic fatalities. That’s what matters. Traffic deaths. Not homicides.
To the extent that the liberal media cover crime in-depth, it is usually in terms of preventive measures. “What might we do better so that so many young men of color don’t feel so hopeless?” And of course there’s a time and place for discussions of the genesis of our crime problem, though I’m far from persuaded by the sympathetic epidemiology that places “hopelessness” paramount among its causes.
Regardless, as the old saying goes, when the wolf is at the door, you don’t ask how it got there. Today, however, too many mainstream media are hard-pressed to even admit the presence of a wolf.
We have been assured by a loose consortium of academics and social-justice fanatics that restorative justice (RJ) is the answer: We must show compensatory charity to those who, having long been denied the American Dream, turn to crime as a result. Like many abstract arguments, this has its superficial allure. RJ has been embraced as an MO by progressive DAs in a number of American cities. But think about what restorative justice really does:
It prioritizes the life of the thug over the lives of his present and potential future victims.
Contrary to talking points from BLM and its allies, aggressive law enforcement does not augur a vendetta against black people as a class. Far from it. All victim-offender statistics show that this thug demographic is relatively small (the black incarceration rate is 368 per 100,000, or .3%), and that the victims of black thugs are overwhelmingly other black people.
But under RJ’s lenient tenets, we are not only tolerating superpredators—to invoke (and affirm) the term that Hillary came to regret—but creating more of them. This is due to perhaps the least controversial axiom in human psychology:
You get the behavior you reward.
One might plausibly argue that there are some black lives that seem to matter quite a bit more than they should. No, I am not proposing that we go George Floyd on the bad apples, or that we “throw away” the future of every thrill-seeking 15-year-old carjacker. But to paraphrase the memorable Pacino line from Heat, if it’s a choice between the teenage carjacker and some mother whose kids he may orphan, that teenager needs to go down. We must get such individuals off the street.
Before we close, let me be clear about what I am saying and not saying. I am not saying that black people as a class pose a threat that other races do not. That’s ridiculous. Material linked above suggests that perhaps 1-2% of black America is responsible for our current predicament. And I am certainly not saying that there is anything inherent in blackness that causes lawlessness.
What I am saying is this: In America 2023, the crime wave engulfing our cities is animated by young black people, mostly male. And I’m saying that specifically because they are black, the penal bureaucracy, led by functionaries drunk on so-called “allyship,” pursues a kid glove policy. As do, mostly, the media.
We need to arrest and prosecute the bad guys. Period. The mere thought that a man of any shade—a registered sex offender, no less—could sucker-punch someone on video, put him in the hospital with life-threatening injuries, and be back on the same street within 24 hours—shocks the conscience. Yes, New York’s governor interceded, but is that really the point? In how many cases can such intercession take place? (And the man was returned to jail not for attempted murder, but for violating his parole.)
If we don’t cast off our reticence about discussing the real problem facing us, cities soon will consist of two polar groups: elites who can afford to live in 24K bunkers, and a street culture consisting entirely of the Thug Class and their hapless prey. And to be clear again, the typical black American, these days, is not predator but prey.
Impolitic or not, that is the reality before us. The wolf is at the door.
Great post and a timely message! Unfortunately, our political class seems to he doing this by design, trying to turn the USA into a failed state, and the big cities are the harbingers of this. I don't know why they would do this, though I have heard some theories that seem plausible. Regardless of why, though, I don't see any signs that they are taking their foot off the gas, even as our society hurtles towards the cliff. A quasi-religious neo-Marxist movement has completely captured the political establishment, academia, the mainstream media, etc., and things like defunding or abolishing police, ending cash bail, electing woke prosecutors who go easy on the criminal class but go all-out prosecuting anyone who defends themselves against criminal attack, etc., are all elements of their strategy. Hopefully enough of the NPC useful-idiots who vote for Marxist politicians can be awakened from their stupor when they see these politicians turning their cities into anarchic hell holes, but from what I see, too many Californians and New Yorkers move but take their politics with them, never bothering to connect the obvious dots linking wokeism with social decay. But I think we're going to reach a tipping point nationally where those of us in "flyover country" really push for a national divorce in earnest.