See
A Clash of Police Policies by Thomas Sowell.
"Amid the rioting in Milwaukee, there is also a clash between two
leading lawmen there — Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and the
city of Milwaukee's Chief of Police Edward Flynn. They have very
different opinions about how law enforcement should be carried out.
Chief Edward Flynn expresses the view long prevalent among those who
emphasize the social "root causes" of crime, such as income disparities
and educational disparities, as well as the larger society's neglect of
black communities.
Chief Flynn puts less emphasis on aggressive police action and more on community outreach and gun control.
Sheriff David Clarke represents an opposite tradition, in which the
job of the police is to enforce the law, as forcefully as necessary, not
to make excuses for law-breaking or to ease up on enforcing the law, in
hopes that this will mollify rioters. Sheriff Clarke would also like to
see law-abiding blacks be armed.
Differences of opinion on law
enforcement are sharp and unmistakable — and have been for more than 50
years. However, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, "You're
entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own
facts."
Unfortunately, facts seem to
play a remarkably small role in clashes over law enforcement policies.
And that too has been true for more than 50 years.
In his memoirs, the Supreme Court's Chief Justice Earl Warren
declared that "all of us must assume a share of the responsibility" for
rising crime rates in the 1960s because "for decades we have swept under
the rug" the slum conditions that breed crime.
But the hard fact is that the murder rate in the country as a whole
was going down during those very decades when social problems in the
slums were supposedly being neglected.
Homicide rates among black males
went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It
was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice Warren and others
triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males
reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of
the previous 20 years.
The same reversal in the country at large saw murder rates by 1974
more than twice as high as in 1960. This was after the murder rate had
been cut in half from where it had been in the 1930s.
Ghetto riots, which erupted in the 1960s, were blamed on poverty and discrimination. But what were the facts?
Poverty and discrimination were worse in the South than in the rest
of the country. But ghetto riots were not nearly as common in the South.
The most deadly ghetto riot of the 1960s occurred in Detroit, where
43 people were killed — 33 of whom were black. In Detroit at that time,
black median family income was 95 percent of white median family income.
The unemployment rate among blacks was 3.4 percent and black home
ownership was higher in Detroit than in any other major city.
What was different about Detroit
was that politicians put the police under orders that restricted their
response to riots — and some rioters said "the fuzz is scared." It was
black victims who paid the highest price for letting rioters run amuck.
By contrast, Chicago's 1960s mayor Richard Daley came on television
to say that he had ordered his police to "shoot to kill" rioters who
started fires. There was outrage among the politically correct across
the country. But Chicago, with a larger population than Detroit, had no
such death rate in riots.
In later years, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's aggressive police
policies in high-crime neighborhoods cut the murder rate down to a
fraction of what it had been before.
But, in England, opposite policies prevailed, with what London's
"Daily Telegraph" newspaper referred to as "politically correct
policing" that has police acting "more like social workers than
upholders of law and order."
Although England had long been
regarded as one of the most law-abiding nations on Earth, riots that
swept through London, Manchester and other British cities in 2011 were
virtually identical to riots in Ferguson, Baltimore and other American
cities. Most of the British rioters were white but what they did was the
same, right down to setting fire to police cars.
But do facts matter anymore?"
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