Family secret: What the left won’t tell you about black crime
In the summer of 2013, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, the political left wanted to have a discussion about everything except the black crime rates that lead people to view young black males with suspicion. President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder wanted to talk about gun control. The NAACP wanted to talk about racial profiling. Assorted academics and MSNBC talking heads wanted to discuss poverty, “stand-your-ground” laws, unemployment and the supposedly racist criminal justice system. But any candid debate on race and criminality in the United States must begin with the fact that blacks are responsible for an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes, which has been the case for at least the past half a century.
Crime began rising precipitously in the 1960s after the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, started tilting the scales in favor of the criminals. Some 63 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll taken in 1968 judged the Warren Court, in place from 1953 to 1969, too lenient on crime; but Warren’s jurisprudence was supported wholeheartedly by the liberal intellectuals of that era, as well as by politicians who wanted to shift blame for criminal behavior away from the criminals. Popular books of the time, like Karl Menninger’s “The Crime of Punishment,” argued that “law and order” was an “inflammatory” term with racial overtones. “What it really means,” said Menninger, “is that we should all go out and find the n–– and beat them up.”
The late William Stuntz, a Harvard law professor, addressed this history in his 2011 book, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice.” “The lenient turn of the mid-twentieth century was, in part, the product of judges, prosecutors and politicians who saw criminal punishment as too harsh a remedy for ghetto violence,” wrote Mr. Stuntz. “The Supreme Court’s expansion of criminal defendants’ legal rights in the 1960s and after flowed from the Justices’ perception that poor and black defendants were being victimized by a system run by white government officials. Even the rise of harsh drug laws was in large measure the product of reformers’ efforts to limit the awful costs illegal drug markets impose on poor city neighborhoods. Each of these changes flowed, in large measure, from the decisions of men who saw themselves as reformers. But their reforms showed an uncanny ability to take bad situations and make them worse.” ...
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