George Floyd. Eric Garner. Freddie Gray. Rodney King. The baleful list of the names of black men killed or brutalised by police in America is long and too familiar. So too the list of cities where these and other acts occurred, cities now engulfed in protest and mayhem: Minneapolis. New York. Baltimore. Los Angeles.
These places have something else in common. Every one of them is controlled by the Democratic Party. Not just recently, or narrowly, or tenuously. Like almost all big cities in America where most instances of racial tension have occurred of late, they are citadels of one-party rule.
Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, has had a Democrat mayor for the past 42 years. There hasn’t been a single Republican elected to the city council there in the 21st century. The last time a Republican was mayor of Baltimore, Lyndon Johnson was president. Fourteen of the 15 members of the Los Angeles council are Democrats. The other is an independent. In New York at the last council elections in 2017, Republicans celebrated inroads into the Democrat majority — they won four seats against the Democrats’ 47.
In America, states and cities have a large measure of autonomy. They have extensive revenue-raising powers through a range of taxes: property, business, sales and, in some cities, personal income tax. Directly elected mayors, in concert with councils, control vast budgets with authority in most municipalities over housing, education, urban development, fire and, of course, the police.
Police chiefs are in most cases appointed directly by the mayor and are supervised by and accountable to him or her. For decades these Democrat cities have had, in other words, near complete responsibility for the staffing, policies and performance of their police forces. If the mayor of Minneapolis and the city council that aligns with him had chosen, they could have transformed the police department. If they were alarmed about systemic abuse by police, about racist attitudes and behaviour, they’ve had more than 40 years to put them right. They could have replaced the entire force with black officers if they’d wanted to.
And yet, in the safe hands of a party that protests its absolute support for eradicating inequality and protecting minorities, we still get cases like that of Floyd and the others. How can this be? In part, it’s because Democrat politicians know that, whatever the shortcomings of their policies, they have a handy narrative to deflect responsibility. It’s always easy to blame racist white cops, “systemic racism” in the nation, the legacy of slavery and generations of inequality. They know a complaisant media will, as it has done with particular alacrity in the past week, buy into and promote the idea that when a black man is killed by a police officer it’s nothing to do with the authorities who appointed, trained and now regulate that police officer, but somehow the fault of Republicans in Washington, or some nebulous threat of white supremacy.
Perhaps, in fairness to these municipal kingpins, it’s also that the situation with urban police forces in the US is not quite as unremittingly racist as protesters, the media and Democrat politicians would have us believe. The picture painted in the past week of a daily reality for black men in which they cannot walk out their front door without fear of being murdered by a white police officer is grotesque.
According to the Justice Department, blacks accounted for about a quarter of all those killed by police in the past three years; whites were slightly more than half. Blacks of course represent a smaller proportion of the US population – about 13 per cent — so those black fatalities do indeed represent a significantly disproportionate number of deaths by law enforcement.
But this is misleading. The relevant statistic when considering what happens to people at the hands of the police is not total population but the numbers of people who come into contact with police. In short, a better measure is the relationship between those who commit recorded violent crimes and those who are killed by police. According to the FBI, almost 39 per cent of murders and 54 per cent of robberies in the US are committed by African-Americans.
The Times
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