The Republican's Black Hole 4 - Black Voters and Crime

Far from being doomed to eternal rejection by black voters, this series has explored several powerful reasons for why black Americans would benefit from Republican policies.  This would make a difference in the polling place only if someone would take the trouble to try to persuade them of it, which conservatives hardly ever do.

What's really stunning about this historic failure is how leftist lies, almost totally unchallenged by the right, manage to turn Republican successes into being generally viewed as Republican racist failures!  Modern urban crime prevention provides a sordid example.

Life in Hell

Any regular viewer of movies probably has a general recollection of life in American big cities of the 1970s - dirty, dangerous, and generally risky.  The super-rich moved in their own well-guarded circles, but anyone below who could afford to got out.  That left all too many working-class Americans suffering waves of unchecked street crime, burglaries, even rape and murder.  The grim Gotham City of Batman fame wasn't entirely a work of fiction.

Despite the suffocating power of political correctness, it is still widely know that the largest single source of modern violent crime is young black males.  Even the New York Times had to admit as much.

What's not as well known is that minorities are also the vast majority of the victims of crime.  Yes, an individual white resident of New York City was and is far more likely to be mugged by a black man than by a white one.  But so is a law-abiding black man or woman.

So when Rudy Guiliani was elected mayor and turned the city around, he sent an awful lot of black felons to prison.  To this day, we see liberal fulmination against the tactics he used.  Liberals complain loudest about the "stop-and-frisk" policies whereby police arbitrarily stop people they think look "suspicious" - usually minorities; search them for anything illegal like drugs or guns; and then lock them up when they find a legal reason to do so.

One could argue that, well, they wouldn't have gone to jail if they weren't already breaking the law.  One could also argue that the Constitution supposedly protects against unreasonable searches, and just walking down the street with your drugs securely hidden in your back pocket and your illegal gun in a closed duffel bag doesn't, in and of itself, provide a reason for the search.

Headline Improvements Not Seen in the Headlines

What one can't argue, however, is the highly effective results of the policy: New York's violent crime rate has plummeted to levels not seen since 1963 when they first started counting.

Are there a lot of young black men in prison today because of Guiliani's policies, continued by his current successor as Mayor Michael Bloomberg?  Sure there are.

There are also a whole lot of law-abiding black citizens who have not been shot, not been mugged, not been murdered, not been victimized by roving gangs of thugs as in the 1970s.  Shouldn't that be worth something?

The liberal media would prefer to emphasize the black incarceration rate, which is enormously higher than the white one.  One in three black men will be behind bars sometime in their life.  The left likes to point this out as an example of how racist America is, but you never see an answer to the obvious question: are the bleeding-heart liberals suggesting that most of these black inmates are actually choirboys who never committed any crime at all?  Or, instead, that America is full of white criminals who deserve to be in jail but somehow got off because of their race?  The first is demonstrably false, and the second doesn't exactly lend itself to liberal solutions.

For conservatives, to get sucked into this debate is to miss the point.  Set aside the 1/3 of black men who are criminals; that means there are 2/3 of black men and a lot more black women who are not.

Isn't protecting the innocent from criminals something the government is supposed to do, and which "law-and-order" Republicans used to take pride in?  Why don't we talk about that anymore?

Instead of shamefacedly hemming and hawing about stop-and-frisk and other law enforcement techniques that provably reduce crime, Republican politicians should be giving boastful press conferences surrounded by black women and children who were protected from predators.  Maybe if we hunt hard enough, we can even find some who were able to defend themselves by virtue of owning a personal handgun, a right traditionally beloved of Republicans and loathed by the Left.

Don't think this'll work?  Think through what you're implying.  Consider the black victim of a mugging, a burglary, or God forbid a rape.  While they are lying there in agony, do you really suppose they're thinking "Oh, this guy assaulting me is a fellow black person, I hope he gets away with it"?

If that's what you think, then you're right, appeals to Republican defense of the innocent will get nowhere.  Your humble correspondent prefers to reflect on the famous saying that a liberal is simply a conservative who hasn't been mugged yet.  Think about that, then ponder the fact that most of the denizens of the inner city have been mugged, repeatedly.  Maybe it's time Republicans took the trouble to introduce them to some home truths.