Yikes. Is this 5-point plan real? A few thoughts about each of the 5 agenda items in the OP:
1.) It’s not a “loan” if you don’t have to pay it back; and I’m pretty sure the 14th Amendment has something to say about restricting access to government benefits on the basis of race.
2.) Who actually believes that governmental “championing” (whatever that means) of education, training, and mentorship programs is what’s going to meaningfully improve black male employment?
3.) Wouldn’t white men, black women, etc. who invest in/own crypto currencies also be protected by such a regulatory framework (assuming it works, of course)?
4.) Does anyone sincerely believe that a “National Health Equity Initiative” is what’s going to finally give us the cure for diseases like diabetes, bipolar disorder, and prostate cancer? Like, c’mon now.
5.) Try to imagine being in the meeting where these people presented their ideas for helping black men. I wish I was a fly on the wall when some (probably white) person was like, “I know! We can help them be drug dealers!” 🤦🏽♂️
No. The Chronicle created a tool that tracks the racial distribution of selected enforcement measures (presented without context—like the demographic and geographic concentration of serious crime) in order to perpetuate the lie that policing in the U.S. is racist. It’s not.
The truth is that one of the most robust and consistent findings in the social science literature on policing is that more policing/more police spending/more enforcement/“problem oriented” policing/etc. all reduce crime—particularly serious violent crime. Why is that important?
Because the very communities the Chronicle wants you to believe are unfairly targeted for unjustifiably violent over-policing pursuant to racial animus disproportionately benefit (almost exclusively when it comes to gun violence) from police enforcement.
Notice the vagueness throughout the OP. Those who advance this claim (against the weight of the evidence) never bother to explain the mechanics of how poverty, unemployment or educational inequities cause a man to stab a teenage girl to death because she rejected his advances.
Here you have a literal millionaire gangster who live-streamed himself shooting an unarmed man at point blank range over nothing. Why didn’t his immense wealth stop this shooting from happening?
🙄…🧵 This is middle school-level reasoning from the NYCLU. Arguing that b/c crime still occurs despite the existence of cops➡️ police don’t deter crime ignores many things, including a massive, robust literature providing clear CAUSAL evidence that police reduce crime. [**]
It also ignores the facts that (1) NYC was one of the safest cities in the world not long ago, and (2) the effect police have on crime is in part a function of whether (and to what degree) other criminal justice actors do their jobs to ensure offenders are incapacitated.
A good example of the hole in the NYCLU’s logic here can be illustrated by the following dumbass claim: “If social welfare spending reduced poverty, NYC would be the least poor city in the world.”
🧵I’ll never understand why the disparities in this table don’t animate the “progressives” nearly as much as those in, say, arrests or incarceration. Maybe it’s that the disparities pictured below largely explain the enforcement disparities that have proven so politically potent.
But here are some things to remember: Policing—particularly proactive policing in the crime hot-spots where these homicides tend to happen—reduces homicides. So does the incarceration of repeat offenders (who drive the bulk of America’s gun violence problem).
Given the unequal distribution of homicide victimization risk, it’s impossible to get around the reality that, to the extent policing and incarceration reduce criminal gun violence, both things disproportionately *benefit* the black community.
⬇️This⬇️ by @radleybalko is by far one of the worst pieces of crime-related journalism I’ve seen in a while. The article’s upshot? A bunch of cops quit in a very low-crime community and crime didn’t spike. So yeah, we can probably depolice.
I know… yikes. nytimes.com/2023/07/02/opi…
That something like this makes it into the New York Times is frustrating because, well, the author’s suggestion is belied by a very large body of research. Perhaps an editor found this hard to ignore because, five paragraphs in, Balko begrudgingly includes this line.
But Balko’s admission (“some academic studies… correlate”) is still misleading. In fact, the existing body of empirical evidence—including and especially *causal* analyses of the highest quality (e.g., randomized control trials)—overwhelmingly proves more policing ➡️ less crime.
I’m not sure where this assertion comes from; but there’s a clear trend toward decarceration and depolicing in many parts of the country struggling with serious violent crime.
Nationally, the prison population had declined by 25% since 2009 (as of EOY 2020). On the policing front, we went from seeing 13M+ arrests in a year in 2010 to just over 10M in 2019. It’s worth noting these changes (and their effects) are not evenly distributed. Neither is crime.
The literature is pretty clear on a few things that matter a great deal to this debate: 1. Policing reduces crime. 2. Prisoners are dangerous