10:06am: Talkline with Hoppy Kercheval

The black community has bigger problems than the police

One of the reasons we have struggled so in recent weeks with the debate over the killing of blacks by the police is that there are many levels to the issue.

The country’s legacy of slavery and Jim Crowe cannot be denied.  It marks a painful rejection of our founding principles.  However, the country has made significant strides toward racial equality in the last half-century. Automatically playing the race card in a real or perceived wrong against a person of color has a hollow ring.

The assertion by some of the protesters that “the police” are racists is a wild generalization; each alleged overreaction by the police where race may have been a factor must be considered individually.

Did members of the New York City Police Department overreact and use excessive force in the case of Eric Garner?  The video would indicate that, though the grand jury returned no indictment.  Still, the fact that Garner happened to be black has produced a knee-jerk response by many, including Mayor de Blasio, that Garner is dead because he is black.

It remains undeniable, however, that blacks are at much higher risk that whites of dying violently and being killed by the police.  An analysis by ProPublica, an independent, non-profit news organization, found that young black males are 21 times more likely of being shot to death by police than their white counterparts.

That’s a startling statistic, but consider that blacks are much more likely to be involved in serious crimes than whites as a percentage of the population.  FBI crime numbers from 2013 show that blacks make up just 12 percent of the population, but they committed 39 percent of the homicides. The vast majority of those homicides, 90 percent, were against other blacks.

Police, therefore, are targeting high crime areas, increasing the chances there will be confrontations.   One wonders what the crime rate would be if the police simply stayed away from those communities.

That produces the larger question: why are blacks killing other blacks at such alarming rates?  That draws the debate into even more complex issues, such as poverty and the breakdown of the family.

Ninety years ago, 85 percent of black families in New York City were two-parent households.  Today, two-thirds of black households are headed by a single mother.  According to Child Trends Data Bank, “Children born to unmarried mothers are more likely to grow up in a single-parent household, experience unstable living arrangements, live in poverty and have socio-economic problems.”

The chant often heard during the protests is that black lives matter.  That theme should be applied to deeper and more complex challenges in the black community that occur long before there’s a confrontation with the police.





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