If a bill mandated that police mustn’t pull over male drivers more than female drivers, even if the former exhibited greater criminality, what effect would it have on law enforcement?
Okay, now what if that legislation mandated that police mustn’t pull over black drivers more than they do white drivers? Would the effect be any more positive?
Actually, the above wasn’t an analogy. For it turns out that the misnamed George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021 — which was just passed by the Democrat-controlled House — mandates both those things.
The legislation cleared the lower chamber by a party-line vote of 220 to 212, with only two Democrats voting nay and no Republicans supporting it. One GOP representative did accidentally vote for the bill, but later corrected the record. That man, Lance Gooden of Texas, took pains to emphasize that he wouldn’t knowingly support such legislation — because it’s that radical (and wrong).
First, the bill is a solution in search of a problem. As I’ve documented, there’s no evidence that police discriminate unjustly against minorities. Just consider, for example, that cops not only kill far more white than black suspects every year, but are also more likely to shoot whites than blacks relative to the races’ different homicide rates and the rates at which they feloniously shoot police.
Among the bill’s provisions would be prohibitions against racial profiling and police use of chokeholds. Yet as I’ve often explained, what’s demonized as “racial profiling” is not only also applied to whites, but is generally just profiling that involves consideration of all relevant factors, in accordance with good criminological science.
As to this, police are more likely to suspect men than women when seeking perpetrators of crime. Is this some kind of unjust “sex profiling”? Or is it called recognizing reality?
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As for chokeholds, consider the words of Rafael Mangual, a senior fellow and deputy director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute.
“Obviously no one wants to see excessive force used on anyone when it’s not necessary, but the mere fact that we’ve had a handful of controversial cases involving chokeholds, I’m not sure that that should justify a blanket ban, particularly when you consider the fact that there are going to be situations in which using that kind of neck restraint could probably mean less force than what might otherwise end up being used because an effective grappling technique was taken off the table,” the Federalist quotes him as saying. “Proposals like that kind of failed to appreciate some of the nuance involved in policing.”
I’ll add that chokeholds are legal in mixed-martial-arts competitions. So is it rational to allow them in a sport, but not in violent, possibly life-or-death street confrontations?
Yet the bill’s perhaps most radical and destructive provision is its Section 311. It “identifies that officers who pull over certain identity groups, such as more black men than black women, will be defined as a ‘prima facie evidence’ violation,” the Federalist reports in a different article.
“If men are found to speed at higher rates than women in a given region, for example, a police department would technically be in violation of the act,” the outlet continues. “The Justice in Policing Act also calls for racial quotas for ‘traffic stops,’ ‘pedestrian stops,’ and ‘interviews.’ In essence, departments would be forced to deal with all people equitably, which would fundamentally contradict the notion of equal justice in a free and fair society.”
It would do more than that. It would also mean “passive cops and emboldened criminals,” said author and Manhattan Institute fellow Heather Mac Donald in a Thursday interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Consider: Approximately 81 percent of those arrested for violent crimes are men. So how could you equalize criminal-justice action against the sexes, an apparent goal of the act? You’d either have to pull over women unjustly — or refuse to take action against many male criminals.
Now let’s consider the races. Mac Donald related the following statistics in her interview:
- In New York City, blacks commit about 75 percent of all shootings despite being just 23 percent of the Big Apple’s population.
- In Chicago, blacks commit about 80 percent of all shootings, but are less than a third of the population.
- In Los Angeles, blacks commit approximately 44 percent of the violent crime, but are nine percent of the population.
- In St. Louis, blacks commit 90 percent of homicides, but are 46 percent of the population (video below).
As for the big picture, 52 percent of homicide in the United States is committed by six percent of the population: black men. Thirty-six percent of violent crime in general is committed by blacks, who constitute 13 percent of the population. (And most of this crime is, again, perpetrated by the men within that cohort.)
Now, as with the sexes, the only realistic way to begin equalizing these criminal-justice disparities is to start ignoring much black criminality. Baltimore did this some years back, mind you: Its crime rate “dropped” because it just stopped arresting many criminals.
Yet who’d be most affected by this? Well, note that the majority of the crime in question is black-on-black. For example, 92 percent of black homicide victims are killed by other blacks.
In other words, establishing de facto racial quotas in criminal-justice would cause cops to “de-police” in precisely the neighborhoods that need them most; police would pull back from black areas, ensuring more black victimization.
This is why the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act” could be called the Kill Black People Act. It’s also why a poll showed that 81 percent of black Americans want police presence in their neighborhoods maintained or increased, not reduced.
By the way, the act’s race-quota social engineering didn’t come from nowhere. It’s an outgrowth of “disparate impact theory” (DIT), which essentially states that if groups perform differently on a test or under a standard, that yardstick is by definition unjustly discriminatory.
DIT has for decades been used to compel the dumbing down of police- and fire-department exams so as to increase the number of female and non-white applicants who’d pass. The Obama administration later used the theory to try to compel schools to equalize the suspension and expulsion rates between whites and blacks/Hispanics (it doesn’t seem to attract attention that Asians are punished less than whites are).
Now we have what’s merely a logical extension of this: The application of insane DIT to criminal-justice.
The good news is that the Kill Black People Act likely won’t pass the Senate. The bad news is that it’s just the latest front in the Democrats War on Blacks, courtesy of the power-mongers and race-hustlers. It’s also why black commentator Jesse Lee Peterson called Black Lives Matter “worse than the Ku Klux Klan.”
