If we don’t ID the problem, we can’t solve it.
“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”
Aldous Huxley, Proper Studies, 1927
If we don’t acknowledge the problem, we can’t solve it.
According to the data from the Washington Post, the most serious problem is not police officers killing young African-American men, the most serious problem is young Black men killing other young Black men (6,000 in 2015)? Why is there no media concern about this problem?
Quotes: Heather McGregor’s “The War on Cops”
"The Washington Post found press documentation of 258 black victims of fatal police shootings in 2015, most of whom were seriously attacking the officer. In 2014, the most recent year for which such data are available, there were 6,095 black homicide victims in the United States, which means that the police could eliminate all of their own fatal shootings without having a significant impact on the black homicide death rate. The killers of those black homicide victims are overwhelmingly other blacks— who are responsible for a death risk ten times that of whites in urban areas." (McGregor, 2016, p. 17)
"On March 11, 2015— only hours before two police officers were shot at protests in Ferguson, either targeted directly or the unintended casualties of a gang dispute— a six-year-old boy named Marcus Johnson was killed by a stray bullet in a St. Louis park. There have been no protests against his killer; Al Sharpton has not shown up to demand a federal investigation. Marcus is just one of the 6,000 black homicide victims a year (more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined) who receive virtually no attention." (McGregor, 2016, p. 30)
"A widely circulated video from the mayhem [in Baltimore] shows a furious mother whacking her hoodie-encased son to prevent him from joining the mob. This tiger mom may well have the capacity to rein in her would-be vandal son. But the odds are against her. Try as they might, single mothers are generally over-matched in raising males. Boys need their fathers. But over 72 percent of black children are born to single-mother households today, three times the black illegitimacy rate when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his prescient analysis of black family breakdown in 1965."
We must recognize the importance of family and faith in socializing our young people. If young people do not value family, education or work, they will have a difficult life. A family teaches children the importance of individual responsibility through modeling responsible behavior. If a young person does not see the need to get up in the morning, take care of their personal hygene responsibilities and go to work or school, they will not have the required work ethic...and they will likely not be able to get a good job. Family values help young people learn that they are first judged by how they look before anyone truly gets to know them. Who will hire someone whose clothes are dirty, their hair unkept or who is covered with tattoos? Remember what our Mothers said when we were young, "get up, get dressed, comb your hair, eat your breakfast, brush your teeth...and don't be late for school?" Individual responsibility is learned early in life through repeated modeling and guidance. The family is critically important to developing good young productive citizens and law enforcement is not a substitute for family.
McGregor, R. (2016). The war on cops: How the new attack on law and order makes everyone less safe. New York: Encounter Books