A Real Cop Explains What Cops Do

Fred Reed

Fred Reed used to be a cop.  In Washington, D.C., if I remember correctly.  He has written an essay on the difficulties of being a cop on the street.  He explains how a cop must sometimes make a split second decision to shoot a suspect, thinking that his own life is in immediate danger.  Sometimes innocent people get killed as a result.

He writes:

With time, your views on police brutality will become ambivalent, or not ambivalent. You will see the pretty blonde rape victim, fifteen, about due for her first prom, screaming and screaming and screaming, sobbing and choking,  while the med tech tries to get a sedative into her arm. And you will hear the cop next to you, hand clenching hard on his night stick, say in cold fury, “I hope the sonofabitch resists arrest.” Yeah, you may find yourself thinking, yeah. Social theories are nice. The streets are not theoretical.

And you will find that the perps are almost always black. If you are a good liberal, you won’t like this, but after three months on the street you will not have the faintest doubt. If you are a suburban conservative out of Reader’s Digest, you will be surprised at the starkness of the racial delineation.

All cops know this. They know better than to say it. This can be tricky for black cops, especially if former military who believe in law and order.

Read it all here.   It is worth your time.

Racial Profiling is Rational and Necessary, Based on Crime Statistics - #Zimmerman

There is a great editorial today in the Wall Street Journal, posted on Jason Riley: Race, Politics and the Zimmerman Trial.  (Hat tip:  American Power)

Riley's editorial, whether he intended it or not, makes a sound case for racial profiling of blacks. He writes:

Any candid debate on race and criminality in this country would have to start with the fact that blacks commit an astoundingly disproportionate number of crimes. African-Americans constitute about 13% of the population, yet between 1976 and 2005 blacks committed more than half of all murders in the U.S. The black arrest rate for most offenses—including robbery, aggravated assault and property crimes—is typically two to three times their representation in the population.

And he quotes a Harvard Law professor:

"High rates of black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical fact, not bigoted imagination," wrote the late Harvard Law professor William Stuntz in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice." "The trends reached their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North, and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise of civil rights for African Americans—and of African American control of city governments."

And finally, Martin Luther King:

"Do you know that Negroes are 10 percent of the population of St. Louis and are responsible for 58% of its crimes? We've got to face that. And we've got to do something about our moral standards," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told a congregation in 1961. "We know that there are many things wrong in the white world, but there are many things wrong in the black world, too. We can't keep on blaming the white man. There are things we must do for ourselves."

So let's see...13% of the population is responsible for over half of all murders, and commits other violent crimes at a rate 2 to 3 times their representation in the population. 

So black people, tell me again why profiling is bad?  Tell me again why people shouldn't fear or be suspicious of black strangers?