A former New York City police detective writes for the WSJ:
I don’t understand how a movement called “Black Lives Matter” can ignore the leading cause of death among young black men in the U.S., which is homicide by their peers.
In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counted 129 instances of black men killed by “legal intervention”—that is to say, by cops. The figure is incomplete because of a lack of national reporting requirements, and it says nothing about the circumstances of the killings or the race of the officers involved. But it gives a sense of the scope of the problem.
By contrast, in that same year, 6,739 black men were murdered, overwhelmingly by young men like themselves. Since 2001, even as rates of violent crime have dropped dramatically, more than 90,000 black men in the U.S. have been killed by other black men. With fatalities on this scale, the term epidemic is not a metaphor. Every year, the casualty count of black-on-black crime is twice that of the death toll of 9/11…
For most cops and their supporters, the rising homicide rate over the past year—surging in Baltimore and St. Louis, creeping up in New York and elsewhere—is the inevitable result of demoralized police departments. The price of rage can be calculated in the number of cops who have been targeted and shot—most notoriously, NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos last December and, just last week, Deputy Darren Goforth in Texas.
The price of fear and distrust is harder to gauge. After nearly a year of relentless coverage of stories portraying police as irredeemably brutal and racist—whether the facts surrounding the deaths remain troublingly obscure, as with Freddie Gray in Baltimore, or appear plainly criminal, as with Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C.—who knows how many people in danger now hesitate before calling the police, or don’t call at all? Who knows how many kids doing something stupid now think of resisting cops not just as an option but as a moral obligation?
