Memphis Will Get Worse

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One of the principles of American race relations is that black people cannot be racist. Racism is prejudice plus power, and blacks, by definition, have no power. However, blacks can be white supremacists. They are in the Proud Boys, some support Donald Trump, and most of all, they are in police departments.

One of these police departments is in Memphis, Tennessee. In January, five police officers beat a black man who later died. It was briefly the most important story in the country, until it turned out that all the officers were black. This took the wind out of protests. There were small-scale gatherings put on by a non-entity called the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PLS), with scattered antifa leading the way. Black Lives Matter was nowhere to be seen.

The reason is simple. There was no story for media-addicted leftists to rally behind. “Black cops beat black guy” isn’t the black-and-white fairy tale the masses need to get fired up about “racism.” Instead, fringe leftist groups were left arguing that the police in general were racist, or that policing is inherently white supremacist.

Here is some of the fanciful rubbish leading journalists served up. NyRee Auster at MSNBC: “The racial identity of Tyre Nichols’ killers is irrelevant — white supremacy is still to blame.” That’s because those five black officers “were trained in a system rooted in anti-Blackness,” which means they were “operating in the same racist system with the same racist ideals as their white counterparts.” And best of all: “[They] wrongly believed that their white adjacency gave them the license to do what they did. They were wrong.”

TV commentator Van Jones also had it figured out. Black people “are not immune to anti-Black messages.” “At the end of the day, it is the race of the victim who is brutalized — not the race of the violent cop — that is most relevant in determining whether racial bias is a factor in police violence.”

Jemele Hill, who boasts on her twitter profile that she is a “contributing writer for The ATLANTIC,” explained it to her 1,400,000 followers: “The entire system of policing is based on white supremacist violence. We see people under the boot of oppression carry its water all the time.”

Miss Hill was quote-tweeting another wise black lady with half a million followers: “Diversifying the police force doesn’t end racism because racism is inherent to the organization of the institution & its daily operation. Racism is what policing is.”

Congressman Maxwell Alejandro Frost said, “[It] doesn’t matter what color those police officers are. The murder of Tyre Nichols is anti-Black and the result of white supremacy.” There was plenty more of this guff.

The NAACP has argued that “the origins of modern-day police can be traced back to the ‘Slave Patrol.’” The group also blames local police for enforcing Jim Crow laws — as though police shouldn’t be enforcing laws.

Laws have changed, but the NAACP says this isn’t enough. “The criminal justice system is heavily impacted by the bias of police mentality and outdated judicial precedents,” it says. “The system is largely driven by racial disparities and the Black community continues to be a target. The results are brutal and long lasting.”

The supposed connection between slavery and policing is why anti-prison and anti-police groups call themselves “abolitionists.” Mainstream media have dutifully recycled this silliness:

“The Invention of the Police: Why did American policing get so big, so fast? The answer, mainly, is slavery”, The New Yorker, July 13, 2020

“The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops”, The Conversation, June 4, 2019

“Not just George Floyd: Police departments have 400-year history of racism”, USA Today, June 7, 2020

The implication is that an all-white country would have no problem with police.

USA Today, the nation’s newspaper with the second-largest circulation, wrote:

There was no place to hide, no place to truly be safe. Across the U.S., black Americans lived in fear of law enforcement officials armed with weapons who monitored their every behavior, attacked them on the street and in their homes, and killed them for the slightest alleged provocation.

These organized groups of white men known as slave patrols lay at the roots of the nation’s law enforcement excesses, historians say, helping launch centuries of violent and racist behavior toward black Americans, as well as a tradition of protests and uprisings against police brutality.

Meanwhile, in New York City just yesterday, the population that we are told lives in mortal terror of police was acting like this:

NYC RESIDENTS THROWING BOTTLES AT NYPD pic.twitter.com/8mSew7v8lY

— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) August 4, 2023

Look at how oppressed they are.

The same people who I’m told are consistently terrified of the police and have to act a certain way to avoid police confrontation. https://t.co/sJIjff3Ep8

— iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) August 4, 2023

When news stories outsource the intended message to “historians” or “experts,” we know what readers are supposed to think. Of course, the brief move towards abolishing police in the wake of George Floyd’s death led to the largest homicide increase in American history, but the great and the good assure us that “defunding the police” was always just a myth.

Few mainstream Democrats now openly say they want to defund police, but the presumption of the federal government is that local police departments are still hotbeds of racism. Thus, when the media seizes on a particular city, the Justice Department usually announces an investigation to look for “racism.” It inevitably finds it, because police always stop and arrest blacks more often that whites, and under “disparate impact,” this is inherently proof of racism. The Justice Department then imposes a “consent decree” as it has on Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, Maryland, and more than a dozen other cities. These agreements are “voluntary” in the sense that cities must agree or face lawsuits. Fighting crime is not the priority. Equity is.

Fighting crime ought to be the priority in Memphis. It is one of the most dangerous cities in America — the most dangerous by some measurements. Perhaps not coincidentally, it’s now our largest majority-black city. Since 1960, its white population has fallen from a majority to about 30 percent. Schools are abysmal. The city government has busied itself with digging up the corpses of Nathan Bedford Forrest and his wife, and taking down a famous portrait of Andrew Jackson that hung in the city’s art museum. Perhaps this is a form of tribute. I doubt these men would want to be associated with the crumbling ruin that passes for an American city.

Still, it’s worth considering what the Department of Justice will require of Memphis. The police chief is a black woman. The city lowered requirements for new police officers to hire more blacks. Even violent felons can now become cops. Some of the officers in the Tyre Nichols case were recent hires, probably deliberate “diversity hires” for which many standards were waived. The police have already abolished the special unit these officers worked in.

The New York Times hints at what the DOJ will probably complain about:

In the sample reviewed by The Times, about 90 percent of those arrested by the unit were Black — much higher than the share of the city’s population that is Black, which is about 65 percent. Black residents across Memphis were also three times as likely as white residents to be subjected to physical force by police officers, according to department data over the past seven years.

Again, under disparate impact, it doesn’t matter if blacks commit more crime or resist arrest more often. The police will probably be ordered to stop enforcing some laws. This has already happened, with police no longer stopping drivers with expired registrations or loose bumpers, because that catches more blacks than whites. Crime is surging, with property crimes up 43 percent and gun crime on the rise. The website MLK50 blames “hard-right policies.”

The truth is much simpler. Blacks commit more crime. Black police can’t stop it any better than white police can. The federal government and media oppose any policies that might stop it, such as stop-and-frisk, broken-window policing, and stiff sentences. The federal government’s attempt to ban reality by fiat will fail.

Until we have a nation of our own, or at least real representation in this one, all whites can do is what Scott Adams suggested. Get the heck away from black people.

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