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“Wasn’t segregation a bad thing?”
No. One of the reasons for segregation was to try to confine black crime to black neighborhoods. People back then knew that blacks engaged in criminal acts at a far higher rate than whites.
Everything the segregationists predicted would happen if integration came about, has happened. The only thing they got wrong is that it is actually far worse than they predicted.

The next thing will be how racist businesses dont want to open stores in black neighborhoods..
and yes, that does adversely affect residents as they have to take more time to do the same thing that someone who lives in a different place does not have.

the other sad thing, and its already happening, is that the police ARE refusing to arrest or bother for minor infractions and the residents of the areas are now starting to be under the gun by the criminals who have free reign to terrorise them, threaten them, and basically do what they want. Why? because the police do not want to lose their careers and family and all that, including their pension, cause some idiot does something and they try to do something. easier now to look the other way, and ignore it.

the residents cant have it both ways.
you cant chew up the police for what happens when laws are broken
then expect those same people to prosecute to the fullest extent when laws are broken

sadly they have chosen to live in places that are worse, and have made them that way by their own actions

people will pick other places to open stores
police will pretend not to see things
and blacks will live in slums they help create and make worse

@Artfldgr: You’ve got some great observations there.
I noted the other day that the blacks of Ferguson might get a Pyrric Victory out of this affair, but they will only win the battle yet lose the war.
Michelle Obama hates a ”food desert.”
But, if she looks at Ferguson and sees one after the smoke clears, she will only want awful food stores to be put in.
So, if they get any stores back afterwards, they will be health food stores full of foods the students under Michelle’s standards are throwing away in huge amounts!
And how do you get more black officers?
Lower the standards?
One county official reached out and, after thousands of dollars spent on job fairs, got exactly 2 blacks to even try.
One passed the entry exam, the other failed so miserably even an all-black community would be better off without him.

Ferguson police are now saying what the black witnesses reported
That the first shots fired were fired when he was running away
None hit him
When he stopped fleeing and turned around that was when he was killed

No, race shouldn’t have anything to do with what happened in Ferguson. But it does. Not just because of Holder, but our own history as a nation. However, there is so much more in play here.
It’s a distrust of authority altogether, as evidenced by the fact that before Michael Brown’s body started cooling, there were already crowds gathering from the complex, standing around, comparing stories, immediately ready to blame the nameless cop who shot him. Note that most of them didn’t even know that Wilson was white at first. It was just ‘the cops shot him’ without reason’.
Then you have Michael Brown’s aggressive attitude toward others, evidenced in the fear that the black lady and her child showed in the store video, his willingness to use his greater height and weight (and skin color?) to intimidate the store clerk and likely aggression toward Officer Wilson.
So, no, it’s not all about race, but race definitely plays into it, even if only in the minds of the participants in Ferguson.
Having participated in the Civil Rights movement here in the South in a limited way at the end but witnessing racism at it’s worst and most evil my entire early life, I can sympathize with those who also lived through that era or have grown up on stories from it.
I find myself vacillating between saying to the residents of the two tumultuous streets in Ferguson, ‘Just get over it, most people aren’t racists anymore.’ to remembering the pain I felt when, as a nine year old, my friend had to ‘go’ in the bushes while white boys laughed and made comments about her anatomy from the weeds. I can’t even imagine how she felt. I’m 56 so there’s plenty of people who were subject to such humiliation still alive. I’ve told my children and will tell my grandchildren about that part of my life and I can’t imagine a black person not sharing their own life experiences with their offspring.
Perhaps acknowledging the validity of their concern while maintaining that justice is colorblind would be a step toward unity. Sunshine in government seems to be a rallying cry in Ferguson right now so, IMO, that would be a good start. Not that I think the Ferguson PD have done anything wrong. However, the perception of some of the residents on two and a half streets has turned it into a disaster. Easiest way is to allay their fears while continuing to seek justice.

As a final point, the riots in the 60’s were because white people got violent in response to black people being able to drink at their water fountains and sit on their toilet seats. Not because black people were more likely to commit crimes than white people. Some of the most Christian people I knew were the same ones who had to hold their crying children who had just got off the bus after having to walk through a phalanx of elbows to ribs and boots to shins to get to the front of the bus. If my children had had to go through that every day I might have set some grown ups on fire. Just sayin’…….

“And police forces should reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.”
No, the police forces should reflect the best, brightest, and most courageous people that are available. Ethnicity and diversity do not automatically improve quality.

“When a white person shoots an unarmed black person”
Ah, the false narrative again. He was armed, with size, ability, and fists… formidable weapons when used by an evil thug.

“If this happens to him, it can to anybody’s kid.”
Not likely if “anybody” has taught their kids to respect other people and that actions have consequences. Michael Brown ended up where he was- dead on the pavement- as a direct result of decisions that he made. No one else is responsible.

@John: Really? Got a link for that? Because, the opposite is true; Dorian Johnson has recanted his original morphing story and has corroborated the stories of the officer and TWELVE other witnesses.

Brown’s robbing the store, walking in traffic and the assault and battery of a police officer are continuously being suppressed.

I guess waiting for all the facts hit its expiration date.

An exceedingly odd post. Are there people out there living in America with ready access to information who really are this confused about the uproar and agony in the community regarding the death of Michael Brown? There seem to be people who want to understand why things happen, whether or not that understanding is comforting or pleasing, and people who just want to reinforce their own beliefs no matter the circumstances or the effort involved in shielding themselves from basic information. I can point to comment 5 as an example of the former, and Dr John’s entire output as an example of the latter. I don’t think I need to rehash stated reasons here, the history involved, the mountains of data regarding the troubled interactions between law enforcement and black men, the stunning incarceration rates for black men. You’d have to go out of your way not to find that information, if you cared to see it. I will simply reiterate the observation : that much of the reaction I’m witnessing here fits the pattern of “transmutation of black protest into moral hectoring of black people”.

If you don’t know Holder, like his boss, is a devout white hating racist, you have not been paying attention.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down.
Following his slaying, there were riots in Washington, DC, a location far away from the slaying site.
It took a generation or more to rebuild the riot corridors in DC.
Who got hurt? Many small business owners and their patrons, that’s who.
Ferguson will be the same. Some will never recover.
Moral of the story: let’s go hurt someone. Anyone. Just rape, pillage, tear down, and destroy.
What a sick philosophy!
Dr King would be saddened by this violence.

Lou Alcindor (now known as Karem Abdul Jabar) penned an essay about why the aftermath of the shooting is not about race.
He claims there is no longer any stigma for being on the dole, but there is plenty of jealousy for what others have that poor people cannot afford to have.
So, they LOOTED.
They needed those hair extensions (did you observe how many black men and women wore them in the streets of Ferguson?)
They needed those shoes.
They needed that liquor.
They needed those electronic toys.
Once Ferguson was looted out the place calmed down.
Kareem seems to think the looters deserved the right to equalize their possessions with the ”rich” 1%ers.
I bet he was glad to be able to write from behind a guarded gated community’s walls.

@Nanny G:

He claims there is no longer any stigma for being on the dole, but there is plenty of jealousy for what others have that poor people cannot afford to have.

Professor Sowell has outlined a simple remedy for that problem. Don’t have a high school diploma? Attend GED classes, provided for free in every community, then attend a community college where tuition assistance is available to every low income student.

It is common knowledge that high school graduates, and those with just two years college, will have higher earning power their entire lives.

When Dr. King marched along side Rev. Abernathy, how did they look? Men, dressed in suits, often wearing hats, marching in protest along side women dressed well, often in white gloves. Compare that to the protesters of Ferguson. Dr. King realized that optics were important, and it was important to show that the civil rights protesters were average Americans just like their white counterparts.

@Tom #8:
“I don’t think I need to rehash stated reasons here, the history involved, the mountains of data regarding the troubled interactions between law enforcement and black men, the stunning incarceration rates for black men.”

I have tried very hard to cultivate a “progressive” attitude (as in: will lead to progress being made in the effort to mend race relations) toward this particular sore point, but I have had surprisingly little success in this regard. What I keep banging my head up against is my conviction that if law enforcement discovers through repeated experience that every third guy wearing a turban is carrying improvised explosive devices and that every third young black male has cocoa-leaf products on his person or in his bloodstream, then “profiling” isn’t unreasonable, no matter how “politically incorrect” it may be. Where there is smoke, there is usually fire.

I refuse to excuse the commission of a crime on the grounds that disproportionately high numbers of people committing that crime happen to be of a particular race. The obligation to equilibrate incarceration rates with racial demographics falls in this case to a Black community that has too long taught its own brand of sociopathic racism to its children, not to law enforcement or the courts. Yes, law enforcement and the courts have made plenty of egregious mistakes, and I think that Ferguson is a fine example of that. But don’t you get tired of getting worked up every time a young black dude gets snuffed by a cop, only to discover that the kid wasn’t “clean?”

At some point, you have to let go of the “history” of racism, in the sense that you are using it to enable behavior that is otherwise sociopathic. I used to believe in “affirmative action,” but I now understand that “together but unequal” is just as bad as “separate but equal.” Justice does indeed need to be blind, but law enforcement needs to keep its eyes OPEN.

@retire05: When Dr. King marched along side Rev. Abernathy, how did they look? Men, dressed in suits, often wearing hats, marching in protest along side women dressed well, often in white gloves. Compare that to the protesters of Ferguson. Dr. King realized that optics were important…

Great comment, I’m just going to add a bit from personal experience about this one above.
I marched in two Civil Rights for MLK.
One in SF and the other in the South.
We all knew to travel with ”our Sunday best,” clothes for the actual march.
PS, I don’t think I’ve seen a modern-day demonstration bigger than that totally peaceful march in SF.
It was gigantic!

@Nanny G:

Dr, King was clear in his famous speech given in St. Louis; the protesters may be met with violence, but the violence must not be on the part of the protesters.

One needs to ask; why did that change? When did it change? The riots in Ferguson have been dismissed due to “perceived” injustices. Since when do we act violently over “perceived” injustices?

A couple of years ago a Vietnamese man was murdered by black thugs playing the knock-out game in St. Louis. Did the Vietnamese march, protest, riot? No. Are we to assume that the Vietnamese have never known persecution or that their road to the American dream was any easier than the road taken by blacks?

#15:

“Dr, King was clear in his famous speech given in St. Louis; the protesters may be met with violence, but the violence must not be on the part of the protesters.

One needs to ask; why did that change? When did it change?”

Sadly, Blacks seem to have learned this behavior through lessons we have taught them:
That any multi-racial altercation is automatically symptomatic of racism on the part of Whites involved,
That Whites will respond to the accusation of such racism with guilt and remorse,
That Whites will then falter in their enforcement of the Law,
And that Blacks will then be free to riot and rob at will.

(As an aside, note the number of people in New Orleans who went on looting rampages after Katrina overwhelmed law enforcement’s ability to respond.)

Children go through a phase where they “test” their parent’s resolve to maintain control, and the urge to engage in this instinctive “testing” is not lost with age, but simply shelved as we learn (hopefully) that challenging authority doesn’t end well.

Although “emancipated,” Blacks in America were still treated rather severely for the next century, with no show of weakness or remorse on the part of Whites who would oppress them. But after 1964, Whites have assumed a posture of appeasement that has invited “testing.”

Dr. King was an enlightened activist with noble ethics and morality. Neither the White community nor the Black community shares such lofty values. Blacks are just behaving like children, and Whites are enabling that behavior.

@George Wells:

I refuse to excuse the commission of a crime on the grounds that disproportionately high numbers of people committing that crime happen to be of a particular race.

George, I hope you’ll forgive me for being frank and stating that I find your views on this issue uninformed and naive. This isn’t a question of who breaks the law. It’s a question of who is arrested and prosecuted for breaking the law. It’s a question of what is deemed “criminal” and why. It’s a question of where law enforcement decides to concentrate it’s efforts, who it decides to profile, who it chooses to prosecute and at what cost to society. No one is saying that crime isn’t more prevalent in poorer neighborhoods, but is how we treat crime mitigating it or making the problem worse? When blacks and whites use marijuana at roughly the same rates, but blacks are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana, how does that square with your view that justice should be color blind? And how does arresting a young black man for marijuana, entering him into the criminal justice system and all the stigmatization and liability that implies, how does that make you safer? At a certain point, you need to ask yourself if you attribute “black crime” to an inherent predispostion for crime on the part of black people (the default position around here on any story involving race and crime), or if something else is at play. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% 0f the world’s prisoners. Is that statistic indicative of the criminality of Americans or reflective of specific policy choices we make regarding crime and punishment? Blacks are incarcerated at six times the rate of whites. Are blacks six times more criminal, or is this also, at least in part, a function of those same choices? Are you aware of the correlation between the end of Jim Crow and the rise of black incarceration?

Here’s something you might find interesting http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/07/21/1225151/–Incarceration-Nation-Michelle-Alexander-s-powerful-inditement-of-the-Drug-War-as-the-new-Jim-Crow#

A black child born today has less than a chance of being raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery. This is due in large part to the mass incarceration of black men. There was an interesting article published about this phenomenon in The Economist magazine, of all places, entitled “How the Mass Incarceration of Black Men Harms Black Women.” The article explained that the majority of black women in the U.S. are unmarried, including 70% of black professional women, and that is due largely to the mass incarceration of black men, which takes them out of the dating pool at the years they would be most likely to commit to a partner, to a family.

But what’s worse is that by branding them criminals and felons at very young ages, often before they’re even old enough to vote, they are rendered permanently unemployable in the legal job market for the most part, virtually guaranteeing that most will cycle in and out of prison, sometimes for the rest of their lives. Eighty percent
of all African American children can now expect to spend at least a significant part of their childhood years living apart from their fathers. And contrary to the image presented in the media of black men being a bunch of deadbeat dads that don’t care enough about their children to be involved or to support them, the research actually shows that black men who are separated from their children due to divorce, incarceration, or any other factor are actually more likely to make an effort to maintain meaningful contact and relationships with their children following separation than men of any other racial or ethnic group. But no other racial or ethnic group faces as much separation, and forced separation, as African Americans.
….
During a 30-year period of time our prison population quintupled, not doubled or tripled but quintupled. Our nation now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, dwarfing the rates of even highly oppressive regimes like Russia or China or Iran. But this is not due to crime rates. During that 30-year period of time crime rates fluctuated—went up, went down, went back up again, went back down again. Today, as bad as crime rates are in many parts of the country, crime rates are nationally at historical lows. But incarceration rates have consistently soared. Most criminologists and sociologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates in the U.S. have moved independently of one another. Incarceration rates, especially black incarceration rates, have soared, regardless of whether crime is going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole.
….
To get a sense of how large a contribution the drug war has made to mass incarceration, consider this. There are more people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980. Most Americans violate drug laws in their lifetime. Most do. That’s a fact. But the drug war, not by accident, has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies have consistently shown now for decades that, contrary to popular belief, people of color are not any more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. That defies our basic racial stereotypes about who a drug dealer is.

So why declare a national drug war at a time when drug crime is declining, not rising, and the American population doesn’t seem much concerned about it? From the outset the war on drugs had little to do with genuine concern about drug addiction or drug abuse and nearly everything to do with politics, racial politics. Numerous historians and political scientists have now documented that the war on drugs was part of a grand Republican Party strategy, known as the Southern strategy, of using racially coded get-tough appeals on issues of crime and welfare to appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were anxious about, fearful of, resentful of many of the gains of African

Black America and the burden of the perfect victim

I feel confident stating that neither Brown nor Wilson is an angel — because no one is. But that doesn’t matter, because the two men have been reduced to symbols. Information wars suggest that character is destiny and that character is knowable, as if a handful of snapshots or tweets constitute an autopsy of the soul. They are waged in all kinds of legal battles, from civil suits to contract negotiations to public divorces.

But when there’s a black victim involved, the information takes a different and predictable turn: The victim becomes thuggified. This is an easy leap for many minds, given the widespread expectation of black criminality. If you become nervous when you see a young black male approaching on the street, it is not hard to convince you that a kid who was shot was not one of the “good ones,” that he was scary and maybe did something to deserve it. Information wars thrive on America’s empathy gap — the way some people struggle to see any kinship or shared humanity with strangers who don’t look like them.

So after 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was killed in Sanford, Fla., on Feb. 26, 2012, people were told that he had been suspended from school, that he had written graffiti, that he had smoked marijuana. As a result, many saw him as a thug — even though many non-thugs have been suspended from school or gotten high, and those are not violent acts. More important, none of that sheds any light on what happened the night George Zimmerman shot him.
….
Most of us have something in our pasts we would not want revealed. And for black Americans, those facts too often are used to suggest that victims of injustice don’t deserve justice, because they weren’t some sort of credit to their race. In a nation where police often approach black communities with a dragnet, stopping and frisking everyone, marking as many black men as possible with a record, it would be hard to find a black male who looks like an angel.

@Tom: When blacks and whites use marijuana at roughly the same rates, but blacks are nearly four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana, how does that square with your view that justice should be color blind? And how does arresting a young black man for marijuana, entering him into the criminal justice system and all the stigmatization and liability that implies, how does that make you safer?

I saw much pot selling on and near campus for years in LB.
The white dealers used to sell from INSIDE their dorms, apartments, and homes.
Black dealers, on the other hand, would sell on the streets.
So…..who do you think police got more calls about?
You already know the answer.
When a person on the street causes a VISIBLE criminal element to come around he attracts both police as well as suspicious neighbors
attentions.

I have lived near several drug dealers (not just pot but coke and crack) back in LB.
One claimed he sold videos out of his apartment, but it was drugs.
He was white.
One day a “customer” went inside, tied him up, robbed him and then killed him.

I later lived near a black dealer.
He used young sellers on the streets but also sold out of his home.
He had such a steady stream of customers that police were always trying to get him.
It was his willingness to trade sex for drugs that finally got him put away.
Seems a woman left her baby in a carrier in a busy alley while she was inside.
Child services, then police, then a search warrant, then he was gone to prison for a huge amount of drugs.
But at least he lived.

Most recently we had dealers (black men) on the corner of the block we used to live on.
They hid their stash in their baby’s carriage.
Undercover police got them.
But before that happened a different gang did a drive-by shooting hitting one of them in the side.
So, they also went to prison.
At least they lived.

Seems from my experiences police are the safest way to exit the drug business – if you want to live.

@Nanny G:

The white dealers used to sell from INSIDE their dorms, apartments, and homes.
Black dealers, on the other hand, would sell on the streets.

Nan, you bring up a great point. Why aren’t those inner city kids dealing from their dorm rooms? Or taking the Lexus to the vacation home in the Hamptons? Lots of people with money who like drugs there and not so many cops. I guess the corner boys just aren’t thinking this through.

But what’s worse is that by branding them criminals and felons at very young ages, often before they’re even old enough to vote, they are rendered permanently unemployable in the legal job market

The only problem with that concept is that the criminal records of minors are sealed, and not available to any prospective employer.

So while Michelle Alexander, created in the mold of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, and heralded by left wing media like DailyKos and The Nation, wants you to think that a bust for pot when someone is 17 is life altering, it really is not public information.

@Tom #17:

Yes, Tom, I’m probably naïve. I never smoked pot – or tobacco, for that matter, and certainly never took drugs that weren’t prescribed or administered by a physician. And I never pilfered so much as a penny candy or bubblegum from a five-and-dime, much less a wide-screened television from a flooded Walmart… or a box of cigars. I was brought up respecting the law, something that young Black males are not taught, and there-in lays the difference.

Yes, the mass incarceration of Black men damages their race as a whole, but so does the decision of those men to break the laws they break and in doing so jeopardize the future of their race in America. I cannot find a tenable justification for applying the principles of “affirmative action” to the enforcement of criminal law – every excuse to soften the aggressive pursuit of justice encourages more violation of the Law.

I agree that nationally, the disparity between the laws governing drugs and the enforcement of those laws from one locality to another is a terrible mess. I’d prefer for starters that such matters be standardized under Federal law, but that would conflict with principles of Federalism, as the Constitution doesn’t address drug use. So what are you left with? A few states that legalize the recreational use of pot, a bunch more that use enforcement of their drug laws to selectively harass black males, and only an over-tasked and under-funded Department of Justice to try to bring a semblance of order and fairness to this ridiculous state of affairs. But that is no excuse to abandon enforcement of the Law.

We have spoken out of one side of our mouths preaching abstinence in premarital sex, but have done all we can to eliminate the availability of abortions, and have instituted programs that provide “assistance” to the single mothers of the resulting children, in effect encouraging the industry of producing unplanned and often unwanted children. Once these little innocents get to school, they find their education ill-attended to at under-funded, inner-city schools where they are more apt to learn the art of theft and the correct use of drug paraphernalia from other kids than reading or arithmetic from the teachers, and their parent/parents are all too often absent entirely from their child’s education.

This is nothing new. I attended an inner-city junior high school in Baltimore back around 1964 (80% Black) and the crime in the halls and the classrooms was rampant. Drugs, guns & knives, sex (IN THE CLASSROOMS!) and on and on, for two years. Unbelievable. Then I went to a good high-school that happened to be about 99% White, and, well, if there was anything illegal going on, I never heard of it or saw any evidence of it… not once. No weapons, no drugs (though I would imagine that there were some in use somewhere) and no classroom intercourse or related mischief. It wasn’t a matter of selective law enforcement. There simply was a completely different set of cultural standards in operation at these two different places. And this difference is carried on beyond the walls of the public schools in question, on to higher educational facilities, out into the job market or out onto the streets. It is unfortunate but understandable that so many young Black males end up “on the streets” as opposed to in institutions of higher learning or gainfully employed, but that IS where quite a few of them end up. And as Nanny G points out, it is on the streets that criminal activity is most visible and most easily attended to by law enforcement. Just as you can make the argument that law enforcement’s focus on criminal activity “on the streets” is a veiled exercise in racial harassment, I can make the argument that it is the most visible expression of a commitment to ensure public safety, and the public demonstration of that commitment by a chronically underfunded arm of the government is vital to the maintenance of public order.

Thank you for all of your cut-and-paste work. It illuminates well the one-sided perspective you are championing. It does nothing to suggest a solution to the rampant crime rate among young black males, and that is a fatal flaw in your position. Either those Black males have to collectively get smart enough to not get caught, or they have to stop breaking the Law in the first place. Only then can young Black males stop being the disaster that they currently are.

@George Wells: Interesting way of looking at the need by the black community to change their ”culture,”
BUT who did Obama send to Michael Brown’s funeral?
Three staffers, but let’s focus on this one:
Broderick Johnson, chairman of the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force.

OK, who knows what Obama’s ”My Brother’s Keeper Task Force,” does?
I do.
This new office at the White House imposes ”equalization of punishment” on public schools.
That means no black student can be expelled or suspended UNLESS an EQUAL NUMBER of students of each of the school’s other races are, too!
Already schools are suffering because the worst students must now stay inside the school where they threaten teachers and fellow students.
Of course the stated goals of this public/private consortium are couched in terms of ”equality of outcome,” but it is resulting in policies that insure worse classroom experiences for all.

@Nanny G #23:

Obama was the first Black president. Fine. Just to make the point that the oval office doesn’t belong exclusively to White males, we should also eventually elect a woman president.
But Obama certainly hasn’t lived up to the hopes and expectations of the folks who elected him, that’s for sure. He has tried, and his circumstances – including a House of Representatives who have dedicated themselves to doing nothing as long as he is in office – have been unusually difficult.

In all honesty, I couldn’t care less what “His Brother’s Task Force” does – it’s too insignificant for me to waste my time looking into, particularly as I have no hope what-so-ever of effecting any changes that I might think are needed. This is not said to be disrespectful to you. It is an observation that a professor taught in a marketing course I took: what to bother with and what to ignore.
More to the point: as the “first Black president,” Obama had an opportunity to be both tough and encouraging to both sides of the racial divide, and he blew it. Instead, he pandered to his constituency, probably helping to cement Black support for the Democratic party in the near term but failing to help extract Blacks from their culture of dependency, their culture of crime and their obsessive love affair with the cycle of poverty.

Governmental programs – usually Democratic initiatives – that were intended to help Blacks have largely failed and often simply exacerbated the problems they intended to mitigate. This is a HUGE problem, and one that cannot be corrected by simply ending the programs “cold-turkey.” We haven’t even come to the point where we can discuss the details of this problem without pointing fingers and assigning blame, and that means that we have absolutely no chance what-so-ever of fixing this problem that we have created.

I can’t imagine what Tom’s “solution” might be, but it sure sounds like it involves putting fewer Black criminals behind bars, and no bleeding heart rationalization of the wounded temperament of the Black community is ever going to convince me that leaving more criminals on the streets is going to make this a better place to live.