People with high IQs commit fewer crimes than people with low IQs. They have more empathy (which depends on the ability for abstract thought to put yourself in the place of others) and they see the future more clearly.
Joe Domanick wrote two books about the LAPD: “To Protect and to Serve” and “Blue: The LAPD and the Battle to Redeem American Policing.”
Rob Eshman of the Jewish Journal conducts the following interview:
Rob Eshman: What was your reaction as the events of last week unfolded?
Joe Domanick: I wasn’t at all surprised about either one of the two killings by the officers, because [each is] just one of the string of shootings that have come to public attention, really, ever since Ferguson [Mo.], because of cameras and other technologies.
And then when the five officers were killed in Dallas, that made me very anxious because, No. 1, we had a chief of police in Dallas who was really doing all of the right things to alleviate these kinds of situations.
RE: You’ve said there were 900 officer-involved shootings that led to fatalities in 2015, and 2016 is on track to have even more. Why? Iceland has one in 71 years. Germany has six.
JD: An even better comparison is Canada, which per capita has more guns than the United States, but has very few shootings.
I just think that America is a very, very violent country. It was born in violence. It started with genocide. Then it followed up with the most brutal, dehumanizing kind of slavery, which was enforced strictly through brutality. Then you had the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, when it really became the job of the police to closely monitor African-Americans, and that became a tradition. And the whole country, of course, was racist — it wasn’t just the South.
So I think that this is a very violent country. We worship violence. We see it everywhere in our advertisements. It’s hard for me to think of a movie star, man or woman, who I haven’t seen on a billboard off Sunset Boulevard holding a gun, holding a .45, wearing a police badge. So I think that we worship violence, we do, and I think that’s a big part of it.
RE: You really can draw a direct connection from the Fugitive Slave Law to what’s going on now in these communities?
JD: You had decades of people living in very violent communities, and the violence becoming almost a norm. And the African-American people that could get out of the ghettos got out, but what you had left was a kind of social pathology that imploded. That’s what’s made our ghettos so dangerous. We refuse as a society to do anything about it, to take the steps to alleviate, to change the values in that subculture.
