America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
LAWYER-JUDGES WITH POLITICAL AGENDAS - Liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court Candidate Defends Soft-On-Crime Record Janet Protasiewicz gave no jail time to a sex offender who went on to kill a woman
Liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court Candidate Defends Soft-On-Crime Record
Janet Protasiewicz gave no jail time to a sex offender who went on to kill a woman
Liberal Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Janet Protasiewicz in a debate against her conservative opponent on Tuesday defended her decisions to issue light sentences to some rapists and pedophiles while serving as a Milwaukee Circuit Court judge.
Protasiewicz said criticism of her sentencing record, including giving no jail time to a sex offender who went on to kill a woman, was "unfair" and argued that a "handful of cases have been cherry-picked and selected and twisted" by her competitor, former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice Dan Kelly.
"All I have heard is a sketch of a handful of cases that they thought they could use against me," said Protasiewicz, adding that she has sentenced thousands of people during her time on the bench.
But Kelly argued that the cases are "representative" of Protasiewicz’s record of "weak-on-crime sentencing."
"It’s the reasoning that goes behind those sentences that’s problematic," Kelly said.
The showdown on Tuesday between Protasiewicz and Kelly is the only scheduled debate of the high-stakes election, after the liberal candidate turned down other invitations. The April 4 race, which will decide the ideological breakdown of the swing state’s top court, could have national implications for the 2024 presidential elections and has already broken U.S. spending records for state judiciary campaigns.
Crime has been a major issue in the race, with the Kelly campaign and its allies slamming Protasiewicz over her sentencing history.
Kelly pressed Protasiewicz on several of her court decisions, including a case in which Protasiewicz gave no jail time to a man who sexually assaulted a 13-year-old child and posted a video of the attack on Facebook. She also released a man who raped a 15-year-old, citing COVID concerns, according to court records.
"There’s no way that COVID provides a ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card for a man who raped a woman," said Kelly.
Protasiewicz called this an "outright lie," adding that there is "no way I would have said in any case, ‘You’re not going to prison, COVID.’"
Protasiewicz’s denial conflicts with court records. She told the defendant, Kenneth Wright, during his 2020 sentencing for sexual assault that, "But for COVID, I would be giving you some House of Correction time," according to records obtained by WISN conservative radio host Dan O’Donnell. "These are strange times, Mr. Wright. I’m not going to do that." After he was released, Wright went on to kill a woman in a drunk driving accident.
Kelly also cited a case in which Protasiewicz gave a 14-month prison sentence to a man who raped his own cousin while the victim was unconscious.
"You looked at him and you said you saw a good man," said Kelly. "And then you said you didn’t think he was a danger to society."
Protasiewicz also denied this on the debate stage, saying she "would like to see that transcript" and "that certainly doesn’t sound like anything I would do."
According to a transcript of the sentencing, Protasiewicz told the defendant "there’s a lot of good things about you." "Are you a danger to the public? I don't think so," she added. "I mean, I don’t think that you did anything other than engage in a crime of opportunity; and hopefully you’ve learned your lesson."
What's happening: Democrats are beginning to lash out at people who think crime is bad by insisting that having your car burglarized and riding the subway next to a fentanyl-smoking vagrant are "basic city life experiences."
Wait, seriously? Yes. John Hamasaki, a former San Francisco police commissioner and the failed Democratic Party-endorsed candidate for district attorney following the successful recall of Chesa Boudin, recently lashed out at a tech CEO who lamented that two of his colleagues will be "scarred forever" after having their laptops and passports stolen from their parked car.
"Is this what the suburbs do to you?" Hamasaki wrote on Twitter. "Shelter you from basic city life experiences so that when they happen you are broken to the core?"
Wow, that's deranged. Yes, it is. The same day Hamasaki posted his dumb tweet, a mob of teens took part in a massive brawl at a popular shopping mall—one of several "incidents of mob violence among school-age kids" resulting in "physical injuries" at the location. In other words, just another basic city life experience.
Do Democrats even care about crime? Not really. (See: San Francisco.) The Democrats in charge of Los Angeles, for example, have allowed the city's metro system to be overrun by fentanyl-addicted vagrants. Some liberal experts are adamant that enforcing the law "isn't a solution," which is even more bizarre given their insistence that more people use public transportation to save the planet or whatever.
What are Democrats saying about crime? They tend to ignore the issue or pretend it isn't real. Gov. Kathy Hochul (D., N.Y.) suggested rising crime in New York City was a "conspiracy" invented by Republican "manipulators." She changed her tune somewhat after barely winning reelection (in New York!) against a Republican challenger who ran almost exclusively on crime.
Who's to blame? Everyone but the criminals, as far as most Democrats are concerned. This week California attorney general Rob Bonta (D.) blamed car manufacturers for the spike in vehicle thefts on his watch. "Families shouldn’t have to worry that manufacturers are cutting corners that could put their purchase at risk," Bonta wrote in a letter signed by 22 other attorneys general attacking auto firms Kia and Hyundai for making vehicles that are too easy to steal.
What's the bottom line? Democrats are ill-equipped to address rising crime due to their inclination to believe that criminals are the real victims, whereas actual crime victims are a bunch of Karens who should just shut up and take it.
Democrats desperately trying to spin high crime rates caused by their pro-crime policies began falsely claiming that crime was a Republican problem. The media began running articles with headlines like, “Red States Have Higher Murder Rates” and “Republicans Like to Talk Tough on Crime — But They’re the Ones with a Real Crime Problem”.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who once claimed that the internet would have no more of an impact than the fax machine, argued that high crime was really a Republican problem and decided to prove it by claiming that, “Oklahoma’s murder rate was almost 50 percent higher than California’s, almost double New York’s.”
Krugman, who somehow has a Nobel Prize, failed to note that most of the murders were coming out of Oklahoma City and Tulsa. In last year’s gubernatorial election, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt won most of the state while Oklahoma, Tulsa and Cleveland counties however went to leftist Democrat Joy Hofmeister. The ‘blue’ parts of Oklahoma are also red with blood.
“The fact is the rates of violent crime are higher in Oklahoma under your watch,” Hoffmeister had claimed in a viral gubernatorial debate attack. Oklahoma had 287 murders in 2020: 166 came out of Oklahoma County and Tulsa County, the two counties that supported Hoffmeister.
Oklahoma County and Tulsa are two of the 62 counties that were responsible for 56% of America’s murders in 2020. A groundbreaking study by John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center, revealed that “1% of counties have 21% of the population and 42% of the murders” and “2% of counties contain 31% of the population and 56% of the murders.”
The 1% of bloody red counties include such Democrat strongholds as Philadelphia, New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Dallas, D.C., Miami-Dade, Milwaukee, San Diego, St. Louis, Chicago’s Cook County, L Houston’s Harris County, Detroit’s Wayne County, Memphis’ Shelby County, Pheonix’s Maricopa County, Cleveland’s Cuyahoga County, and many others.
Biden won Cook County, the bloodiest county in the country, by 66%. He won Los Angeles County, the second bloodiest, by 71%, Harris County by 56%, Philadelphia by 81%, New York City by 76%, Wayne County by 68%, and Shelby County by 64%.
Shelby was not only one of the three counties in Tennessee to vote Democrat, it was also responsible for 311 of the state’s 682 murders. Similarly, Wayne County was responsible for 379 of Michigan’s 693 murders. Houston accounted for 405 of the 537 murders in Harris County and along with Dallas’ 251 murders, Austin’s 47, San Antonio’s 128, Fort Worth’s 99, accounted for around half of murders in Texas. Maricopa County made up 299 of the 423 murders in Arizona.
Marion County, where Indianapolis is located, accounted for nearly half of the murders in the state, even though it has less than 10% of the population. Milwaukee was responsible for 201 of Wisconsin’s 308 murders even though it also has less than 10% of the population.
There isn’t a red state murder problem, red states have a Democrat crime problem.
The CPRC study showed that while 2% of counties populated by Democrats were responsible for 56% of the country’s murders, 52% of counties had no murders and 68% of counties had at most one murder.
These numbers clearly show that America is not a violent country, that we do not have a crime problem and that gun culture is not the issue: crime culture in Democrat cities is the issue.
Democrat crime cities and counties have created a massive social problem that otherwise would hardly exist. As the study notes, “If the 1% of the counties with the worst number of murders somehow were to become a separate country, the murder rate in the rest of the US would have been only 4.31 in 2020. Removing the worst 2% or 5% would have reduced the US rate to just 3.71 or 2.99 per 100,000, respectively.” We could have the murder rate of New Zealand.
If it wasn’t for the Democrat crime counties.
America is not a dangerous or crime-ridden country. Unfortunately Democrat cities are overrun with criminals and the politicians who cater to them. The Democrats became an urban party and, after jettisoning the white working class and the small business middle class became the party of criminals. From police defunding to the Black Lives Matter riots to mass jailbreaks and the legalization of drugs and shoplifting in major cities, they embraced pro-crime policies that unleashed a massive crime wave. And now they pretend not to know what’s causing the crime.
“Nationwide, violent crime rose substantially in 2020,” Krugman admitted. “Nobody knows for sure what caused the surge — just as nobody knows for sure what caused the epic decline in crime from 1990 to the mid-2010.”
Tough-on-crime policies cut crime in the 90s and the oughts: pro-crime policies boosted crime.
There’s no mystery here. Crime is caused by repeat offenders. In the 90s we began locking them up and then about 5 years ago, we began letting them go at the federal and state level.
In ‘I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America’, David Horowitz exposed the lies behind the Black Lives Matter pro-crime movement and warned of the pandemic of crime that was being unleashed. That hoax has unleashed unprecedented violence, but that crime wave largely remains confined to Democrat areas where criminals prey on members of the party.
More than an additional 5,000 people were killed in 2020. There is little doubt that the disproportionate majority of both the victims and the killers were Democrats. Democrat pro-crime policies are killing Americans, but mostly they’re killing fellow Democrats.
An added 5,000 murders alone means $85 billion in costs. That’s a fraction of the money, estimated at half a trillion dollars, that we spend every year coping with the criminal justice and social problems caused by Democrat crime.
America could be a safe and pleasant place to live. And the majority of its counties, which are mostly Republican, are. Unfortunately many of its Democrat counties are broken places, packed with broken families, criminal cultures and leftist politicians who pander to the criminals.
And the party and its media cover it up with lies about systemic racism.
Between May and June 2020, heroic PPD police officers, outnumbered, outmatched and with no support from local officials, battled the violent hateful BLM mobs rampaging through West Philly.
The racist mobs looted small businesses in the mostly black area, destroying lives and livelihoods, while assaulting police officers and anyone who tried to get in their way. Buildings were set on fire and mobs shrieking “Black Lives Matter” and other racist slogans hurled rocks, bricks and Molotov cocktails at officers who were risking their lives to stop the violence.
Some local residents who had enough also defied the rioting mobs and joined with a community group known as, “Take Back the Streets” to line up and stand in the way of the rioters.
“Shattered windows, burned clothes, businesses destroyed,” the Philadelphia Inquirer headlined its coverage of the aftermath. “In Philadelphia, residents couldn’t find the words and simply shook their heads as they stepped over piles of ash and peered into shattered windows.”
“‘I can’t stop walking or I’ll start crying,’ a woman told her daughter as they stepped over a scorched mannequin.”
The rioters had left behind graffiti taking credit for the attack and referencing the slogans of the BLM hate group, including, “I can’t breathe” and “Justice 4 Floyd” referring to George Floyd, a career criminal who had robbed a woman at gunpoint and whose drug overdose death while being restrained by police had been used to justify the latest round of race riots.
Now the payoff is coming, not for the small business owners, but for the rioting mobs.
New York City offered a record $6 million payout to “F___ the Police” protesters because while restraining them the NYPD officers “frequently failed to wear masks”, now Philly is offering another record $9.25 million payoff to the racist mobs in West Philly. Not to their victims.
“We hope this settlement will provide some healing from the harm experienced by people in their neighborhoods in West Philadelphia,” Mayor Jim Kenney, who has presided over record crime rates, said of the $9 million payoff snatched from the mouths of hungry children.
In 2014, the year before Kenney was elected, there were 248 murders in Philadelphia. In 2022, that number had more than doubled to 516. This year there have already been 92. In 2020, the year of the BLM pro-crime riots, murders shot up from 353 to 499. In 2021, they hit 562: the worst numbers in Philly history. That’s what real “harm” in West Philly looks like.
This $9 million payoff is based in part on a complaint that while police officers were ducking bricks and Molotov cocktails, they fired off tear gas which caused “difficulty breathing” and “mental trauma”.
The officers hit with bricks and explosive devices don’t get to sue for their “mental trauma”. And the small business owners and other civilians are entirely out of luck after suffering millions in losses and untold amounts of mental trauma at the hands of the rioting BLM mobs.
Nor do the more than 30 officers injured in the subsequent riots after they were banned from using rubber bullets and tear gas against the racist mobs trying to kill them. That included the 56-year-old female police sergeant hit by a black pickup truck leaving her with a broken leg.
Philly Democrats made it clear early on that there would be no justice after the riots. Soros DA Larry Krasner, whose pro-crime policies have been blamed for much of the city’s crime wave, announced that he would avoid prosecuting 80% of those arrested. Instead, they’d be routed through a pro-crime ‘restorative justice’ model in which the criminal offers some sort of apology and promises not to do it again. The rioters would then be referred to “education and job opportunities” before conveniently having their records expunged so they can do it again.
It was ultimately up to the feds to provide some accountability, indicting rioters like Derrick Weatherbe who filled shopping carts with looted goods before streaming himself trying to set the store on fire with a stolen lighter, doing the job that Krasner and Philly Dems refused to do.
The head of the Asian American Chamber of Commerce had protested that minority businesses targeted by the racist mobs felt abandoned. “There is no assurance from the city of protecting them. They seem to be more concerned with protecting the offenders.”
Now Philly isn’t just protecting them, it’s paying them.
$9.2 million divided evenly among 300 plaintiffs would amount to $30,000 a head. Meanwhile, small businesses which suffered hundreds of thousands worth of damages, often got nothing.
Philly Democrats are paying their base to riot.
In the aftermath, one store owner described how, “the parts of the floor that weren’t covered in glass and tossed clothing were flooded. Demonstrators had tried to light three fires inside the store.”
“I cried on the way down and tried to get it out then. And I go in and out of wanting to cry again.”
The message to police and business owners is that Philly Democrats will stand with the rioters, not with them.
“The Philadelphia Police Department did not simply harm and terrorize individual people exercising their right to protest,” Rachel Kleinman of the Legal Defense Fund, claimed. “It inflicted wanton violence and devastated a predominately Black community.”
The violence was inflicted by protesters on police.
As Councilwoman Jamie Gauthier, who is black and and an opponent of the police, wrote during the riots, “At first things appeared calm, but it quickly turned into a standoff, with protesters throwing bricks and other objects in the direction of the police. As protesters became more aggressive, police ratcheted up their aggression and intimidation”.
The fact is that the violence did not begin with the police. And the police heroically tried to get it under control. Instead of paying the cops, police-defunding Democrats are paying the rioters.
The New York City and Philly payoffs are part of a larger pattern of state-sponsored BLM violence. Wounded police officers and civilians have tried to sue BLM organizations and chapters in vain, but it may be time for them to sue the governments that have promoted, enabled and funded the race riots that took lives, wrecked neighborhoods and killed hope.
BLM has functioned as the contemporary equivalent of the KKK. Both BLM and the KKK were covert arms of local Democrat governments which used the violence to intimidate political opponents. Municipal governments have promoted BLM, undermined law enforcement efforts to stop the racist violence and offer record payoffs knowing that this will inspire future riots. It’s time for the small businesses devastated by government-backed riots to sue cities like Philly.
The riots won’t end until BLM’s state sponsors are held accountable for their crimes.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Reader Interactions
VIDEO
BLACK MAN RAPES SEVERAL WOMEN AND KILLS ONE. GETS OFF!
Dr. Williams comments on another reality: that the rate of black homicide and armed robbery as well as other violent crimes are as is as much as 15–30 times more than whites
So, we have local black gang associates posting terror threats on social media -- threats of murder, by burning, directed at the women and children family members of white police employees -- immediately before the murder, by burning, of the white teenage daughter of a local police department employee. Plus, the killing took place only minutes after the victim was seen on video at the same location as the husband or boyfriend of the person who posted the threats, as he was filling a handheld can with gasoline.
As for interracial violence generally, blacks disproportionately commit it. Between 2012 and 2015, there were 631,830 violent interracial victimizations, excluding homicide, between blacks
and whites, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Blacks, who make up 13 percent of the U.S. population, committed 85.5 percent of those victimizations, or 540,360 felonious assaults on
whites, while whites, 61 percent of the population, committed 14.4 percent, or 91,470 felonious assaults on blacks. Regarding threats to blacks from the police, a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
Anti-cop activist Shaun King says that his involvement in the campaign around the Jazmine Barnes murder was not driven by reports that a white man had killed the seven-year-old girl, who was gunned down in Houston on December 30. According to Barnes’s mother and 15-year-old sister, the white driver of a pickup truck had pulled up next to the family’s car before opening fire. The accusation set off a frenzy of hate-crime allegations and blanket coverage by the New York Times. King offered a $100,000 reward to anyone who located the suspect.
As it turned out, Jazmine Barnes was killed by two black men, who opened fire on her mother’s car because they thought that they were targeting enemies of their gang. King passed along a tip about the real killers to the Houston police, and now says that he merely “internalized the pain of the family and tried to search as if it were my own child who was killed.” Race, in other words, had nothing to do with his activism.
It’s worth remembering, though, the many other black children who have been victims of drive-by shootings without leading King to launch a national crusade.
A sampling: in March 2015, a six-year-old boy was killed in a drive-by shooting on West Florissant Avenue in St. Louis, as Black Lives Matter protesters were converging on the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department to demand the resignation of the entire department. In August 2015, a nine-year-old girl was killed by a bullet from a drive-by shooting in Ferguson while doing her homework in her bedroom, blocks from the Black Lives Matter rioting thoroughfare. Five children were shot in Cleveland over the 2015 Fourth of July weekend. A seven-year-old boy was killed in Chicago that same weekend by a bullet intended for his father. In Cincinnati, in July 2015, a four-year-old girl was shot in the head and a six-year-old girl was left paralyzed and partially blind from two separate drive-by shootings. In Cleveland, three children five and younger were killed in September 2015, leading the black police chief to break down in tears and ask why the community only protests shootings of blacks when the perpetrator is a cop. In November 2015, a nine-year-old in Chicago was lured into an alley and killed by his father’s gang enemies; the father refused to cooperate with the police. All told, ten children under the age of ten were killed in Baltimore in 2015; twelve victims were between the age of ten and seventeen.
In 2016, a three-year-old girl in Baltimore was partially paralyzed by a drive-by shooting. In Chicago in 2016, two dozen children under the age of 12 were shot in drive-bys, including a three-year-old boy mowed down on Father’s Day 2016 who is now paralyzed for life and a ten-year-old boy shot in August; his pancreas, intestines, kidney, and spleen were torn apart. A Jacksonville 22-month-old was shot to death by a passing car last June. In September, three men killed three-year-old Azalya Anderson in a drive-by in Sacramento, and a week before Christmas in Bridgeport, a 12-year-old boy was shot and killed on his way home from the candy store in a drive-by shooting.
Why did King let these shootings of black children go by without responding as he did to Jazmine Barnes’s murder? Could it be because the perpetrators were black? You could end all white shootings of black children tomorrow and it would have zero effect on the death rate of black children by homicide, because such white-on-black shootings are extremely rare. Moral abominations, like the 2015 Charleston church massacre by white supremacist Dylann Roof, are aberrations that belong to the outermost lunatic fringe of American society. The country’s revulsion at the Charleston carnage was immediate and universal, resulting in a movement to banish the Confederate flag, embraced by Roof as a white supremacist symbol, from official sites.
If Shaun King and other Black Lives Matter activists really want to save black children from the trauma of urban violence, they should put their efforts into rebuilding inner-city culture—above all, by revalorizing a married father as the best gift a mother can give her child. Fantasies about white violence against “black bodies” are a distraction from what is actually happening on American streets.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe and The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture.
Walter Williams tackles the elephant in the room on crime
Dr. Williams is a well known conservative economist and longtime John Olin Chair faculty at George Mason University in eastern Virginia, author of 12 books and syndicated columnist. In the past, he has been substitute host on the Rush Limbaugh radio program. He is almost like family to me, and I have benefited from his essays and books over the years. This past week, I saw and read his essay on disparities in crime rates among races that was picked up by Military in its October 2019 issue. What got Dr. Williams going was the article by Matthew DeLisi of Iowa State U and John Paul Wright of the U of Cincinnati titled "What Criminologists Don't Say and Why."
Dr. Williams confirms that the writers are right about the liberal tilt of criminologists — "If criminologists have the guts to even talk about a race-crime connection, it's behind closed doors and in guarded language. Any discussion about race and crime ... can mean the end of one's professional career."
Dr. Williams points out teen black-on-white predatory behavior — chronicled in detail by many, particularly Colin Flaherty, whose investigative reports appear frequently (more than 100) at American Thinker — cannot be reported, mentioned, or considered by the media, politicians, criminologists, commentators, politicians, even law enforcement people without risking being called racist, the easy epithet used to enforce a ban on talking about the realities of racial disparities in crime and the increasingly violent nature of black violence against whites — the knockout game, polar bear hunting, flash mob violence against people and property.
Referencing the Wright and DeLisi report, Dr. Williams comments on another reality: that the rate of black homicide and armed robbery as well as other violent crimes are as is as much as 15–30 times more than whites, for example, and he points out the silliness of criminologists' claims that mass incarceration rather than criminality has decimated the black community. He favorably quotes Wright and DeLisi when they say, "What they [criminals] did, in reality was to prey on their neighbors."
Dr. Williams returns to a theme he has explored many times before in this essay and commentary when he points out that the black family of the past was two parents and stable, even back to days of slavery, and that the black community was moral and law-abiding. "The strong character of black people is responsible for the great progress made from emancipation to today. ... [T]oday's conduct among black youth wouldn't have been tolerated yesteryear."
My regret is there aren't enough Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell types to engage the nutty attitudes of liberal chatterbox experts.
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D. is an emergency physician, sheriff's medical officer and inactive attorney, policy and science adviser to the American Council on Science and Health of NYC and the Heartland Institute of Chicago.
The FBI released its official crime tally for 2016 today, and the data flies in the face of the rhetoric that professional athletes rehearsed in revived Black Lives Matter protests over the weekend. Nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881. Those 7,881 “black bodies,” in the parlance of Ta-Nehisi Coates, are 1,305 more than the number of white victims (which in this case includes most Hispanics) for the same period, though blacks are only 13 percent of the nation’s population. The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.
Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks. In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest. Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers—committed vastly and disproportionately by black males. Among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243.
Violent crime has now risen by a significant amount for two consecutive years. The total number of violent crimes rose 4.1 percent in 2016, and estimated homicides rose 8.6 percent. In 2015, violent crime rose by nearly 4 percent and estimated homicides by nearly 11 percent. The last time violence rose two years in a row was 2005–06. The reason for the current increase is what I have called the Ferguson Effect. Cops are backing off of proactive policing in high-crime minority neighborhoods, and criminals are becoming emboldened. Having been told incessantly by politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter activists that they are bigoted for getting out of their cars and questioning someone loitering on a known drug corner at 2 AM, many officers are instead just driving by. Such stops are discretionary; cops don’t have to make them. And when political elites demonize the police for just such proactive policing, we shouldn’t be surprised when cops get the message and do less of it. Seventy-two percent of the nation’s officers say that they and their colleagues are now less willing to stop and question suspicious persons, according to a Pew Research poll released in January 2016. The reason is the persistent anti-cop climate.
Four studies came out in 2016 alone rebutting the charge that police shootings are racially biased. If there is a bias in police shootings, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. That truth has not stopped the ongoing demonization of the police—including, now, by many of the country’s ignorant professional athletes. The toll will be felt, as always, in the inner city, by the thousands of law-abiding people there who desperately want more police protection.
Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
*
Study: ‘Family Structure’ a Major Factor in Racial Disparities in School Conduct and Suspensions
A new study affirms what many public policy analysts say is intuitive — that unstable family structure, including chaotic households and single-parent homes, is a primary factor in racial disparities in school behavior and suspensions.
The study, conducted by senior fellows Nicholas Zill and W. Bradford Wilcox at the Institute for Family Studies, asserts education policymakers “must recognize that social and psychological problems in youth may manifest themselves at school but have their origins in family situations over which the school has little or no control.”
The authors find in their new analysis of the National Household Education Survey (NHES) that, in 2016, about 24 percent of black elementary and high school students had been suspended at least once, while eight percent of white students and only four percent of Asian students had the same experience.
The researchers note the NHES shows “black students are far more likely to be living apart from their married birth parents in the home (72%) compared to white students (37%) or Asian students (26%).”
“These family structure differences, then, are likely to play a role in inter- and intra-racial disparities in student conduct and discipline,” the authors state, and add:
Indeed, among black students who do live with both married birth parents, suspension rates are less than half as large as those for black students living in other family types: 12% versus 28%. The suspension rate for black students living in intact families, 12%, is also less than the suspension rate for white students from non-intact families, 13%.
The study also found that family structure even accounts for more of the racial disparities in school suspensions than socioeconomic factors.
When the researchers controlled for family structure, they discovered the racial disparities in school suspensions reduced by 55 percent. Controlling for socioeconomic status reduced the racial differences by only 38 percent.
“These results, then, suggest that family structure is a signal factor in accounting for real differences in school conduct and school suspensions,” the authors state. “This is especially noteworthy because discussions related to racial disparities in school discipline often overlook the role of family structure and highlight socioeconomic explanations.”
Zill and Wilcox assert that, while examples of racism exist, “there are legitimate reasons for believing that some of the racial differences in school suspensions and discipline are based upon real, not just perceived, differences in students’ behavior”:
We focus here on the possibility that some of these differences are related to family factors, including notable differences in family structure by race. Students who come from chaotic homes, single-parent families, or non-intact families are less likely to get the consistent attention, affection, and discipline they need to flourish and develop self-control. Their families typically have less money, which affects the quality of their neighborhoods and their neighborhood peers, which is also an important influence on school conduct. And they are also more likely to be exposed to conflict, stress, frequent moves, and neglect—all risk factors for delinquent and disruptive behavior. Indeed, our data indicate that rates of school contact for student misbehavior are nearly twice as high among students living with separated or divorced parents as among those living with stably married parents. And they are higher still among students who live apart from both biological parents, being cared for instead by grandparents or foster parents.
The researchers say that, in order to see a drop in school suspensions among black children and adolescents, black family life must be stabilized and reinforced:
Such efforts should include criminal justice reform, ending marriage penalties in means-tested policies, subsidizing the wages of low-income workers, and launching local and national campaigns directed by black religious, civic, and cultural leaders to strengthen marriage in the black community. Efforts like these are needed because, our research suggests, increasing the number of African American children who are raised by stably married parents would dramatically increase the odds that black girls and boys steer clear of the principal’s office—and increase the odds they flourish in school, avoid contact with the criminal justice system, and, later in life, excel in the labor force further down the road.
“[S]tronger black families would go a long way towards reducing racial disparities in school discipline,” Zill and Wilcox assert.
The study comes as Obama-era holdovers and other progressives continue the narrative that racial disparities in school suspensions and discipline are due to systemic factors such as institutional racism.
The Obama Departments of Education and Justice, under Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Attorney General Eric Holder, issued public school guidelines that claimed students of color are “disproportionately impacted” by suspensions and expulsions, a situation they said led to a “school-to-prison pipeline” that discriminates against minority and low-income students.
The policy, however, essentially blamed systemic racism for the fact that black and other minority students have been punished and suspended more than white and Asian students. Recommended remedies for the problem included eliminating suspensions for unacceptable behavior by minority students and urging, instead, their participation in “restorative talking circles” and “positive behavior interventions.”
In December 2018, the Trump administration revoked the Obama-era policy that urged public schools to employ these more lenient forms of discipline for students of color and of other minority groups.
The U.S. Departments of Education and Justice rescinded the Obama administration’s 2014 “Dear Colleague Letter” that a federal school safety commission said “may have paradoxically contributed to making schools less safe.”
The outcry from parents, teachers, some media outlets, and many education analysts and stakeholders has been piercing, with most pointing to the rise in “dangerousness” in public schools.
Nevertheless, in July, Democrat members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission urged the White House and Congress to continue the Obama-era race-based discipline policy.
The commission’s report, titled “Beyond Suspensions: Examining School Discipline Policies and Connections to the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Students of Color with Disabilities,” stated, “[D]ata have consistently shown that the overrepresentation of students of color in school discipline rates is not due to higher rates of misbehavior by these students, but instead is driven by structural and systemic factors.”
The commission’s report was released as the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) issued its analysis indicating a rise in serious incidents of violence in the nation’s public schools:
Even a Democrat state lawmaker — New York State Sen. Leroy Comrie — and Teamsters President Gregory Floyd, who represents school safety officers — referred to the Obama-era policy as one that has led to “chaos” and a lack of “accountability” for dangerous behavior.
Two members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission — Peter Kirsanow and Gail Heriot — dissented from the commission’s majority report.
Kirsanow wrote at National Review the report is “essentially a defense of the Obama Department of Education’s 2014 ‘Dear Colleague’ letter that used disparate-impact theory to interpret racial disparities in school discipline as evidence of racial discrimination.”
To progressives, “any racial disparity necessarily means invidious racial discrimination,” Kirsanow asserted, adding:
It’s undisputed that black students, as a group, are disciplined more than white students. For the commission majority, this is evidence of racially disparate treatment, as it’s an article of faith that discipline disparities aren’t due to disparities in behavior.
Kirsanow observed the commission’s report ignored key statistics in order to craft its narrative of racial discrimination against students of color.
He pointed to his colleague Heriot’s statement in which she said, “In the report, the Commission finds ‘Students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their white peers.’”
“That would be a good thing if it were true, but there is no evidence to support it and abundant evidence to the contrary,” she asserted, adding that what accounts for differing rates of misbehavior among students of color “likely” includes “differing rates of poverty, differing rates of fatherless households, differing parental education, differing achievement in school, and histories of policy failures and injustices.”
Kirsanow called for those truly concerned about improving education in the United States to “disregard” the report released by the majority of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.
“Claiming that racism or dislike of children with disabilities accounts for disparate rates of discipline only stokes resentment and erodes personal responsibility,” he asserted. “The supposed cures of ‘restorative practices’ and ‘positive behavioral interventions and supports’ only make it more likely that children in minority neighborhoods who want to learn will be less able to do so, and that teachers and children will be at the mercy of school bullies.”
Houston teens arrested in caught-on-camera 'jugging' robbery that left woman paralyzed
Houston teens arrested in caught-on-camera 'jugging' robbery that left woman paralyzed
Two teens have been arrested and charged in connection to the caught-on-camera "jugging" of a Houston woman who was left paralyzed as a result of the violent robbery of cash that she had withdrawn from a bank.
The arrests of Joseph Harrell, 17, and Zy'Nika Ayesha Woods, 19, were announced at a press conference Friday, more than a month after Nhung Truong was brutalized the day before Valentine’s Day.
Surveillance video showed a Black male suspect wearing a red, white and black sweatshirt with an Air Jordan "Jumpman" logo, dark shorts and sneakers grab Truong, who had withdrawn an estimated $4,300 in cash from a Bank of America for a planned trip to see family in Vietnam.
Police said Harrell and Woods followed the mother of three from the bank to a nearby business by car.
Joseph Harrell, 17, and Zy'Nika Ayesha Woods, 19, have been charged with aggravated robbery in the "jugging" incident on Nhung Truong last month.
Harrell allegedly got out of the vehicle driven by Woods and assaulted the victim. The video shows how the 17-year-old first took Truong’s wallet and started to run away, but upon realizing that he didn’t have the money that Truong withdrew from the bank, he immediately turned around and tried to wrestle away the envelope of money that she was holding. Harrell then picked her up and slammed her down onto the concrete, causing severe injuries, Houston police Detective Tyrus Fontenot said. Surveillance video helped detectives determine the license plate of the vehicle seen leaving the scene of the crime.
Nhung Truong, seen in a hospital bed with her mother and children, was left paralyzed after being attacked by a robber in Houston.
With assistance from the Westside gang unit, Woods was first detained for a traffic violation. During her interview with detectives, she confessed to her involvement in the robbery on Truong and also implicated Harrell, Fontenot said. Another detective had already been preparing a warrant for Harrell in a separate aggravated assault case. With assistance from the gang unit, he was located and brought into custody on that warrant. Harrell also allegedly confessed to the attack on Truong, Fontenot said.
"This type of violence will not be tolerated in our city. It is just senseless," Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said Friday. "I just spoke to Ms. Truong about an hour ago and assured her, and I want the city of Houston to stand behind us. These are very serious injuries. The recovery is very long. And I want her to know the love of our agency but also our great citizens in this city."
A robber attacked a woman in a shopping center after she made a withdrawal from her bank in Houston.
"I just want people to know if you are foolish enough to commit these types of crimes, we will find you," Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat, added. "It may take a few days. It may take a few weeks. But we will find you, and we’ll get you off the streets. Then I will trust the other parts of our system, criminal justice system, to make sure that they remain off the streets, so it doesn’t happen to somebody else."
Nhung Truong was hospitalized for more than a month after being attacked by a robber in Houston.
KTRK reported that Harrell was out on bond at the time of the attack for two charges and that he is also accused of the aggravated assault of another woman 12 days after Truong was hurt. Woods is being held on a $50,000 bond, while bond has not yet been set for Harrell, according to the outlet.
A GoFundMe account set up by Truong’s family raised more than $263,000 by Monday.
Her daughter wrote that Truong, who suffered a spinal cord injury, was discharged from the hospital Friday for what is expected to be a years-long recovery process.
Stock/Getty Images
No comments:
Post a Comment