* What’s so magical about 12 month periods of time? Cultural shifts may take time to sink in and spread out. They act like a ‘Ferguson Effect’ is as a light switch that gets snapped on or off. That black homicide has reached a high pitch of frenzy seems indisputable (Chicago has 72 homicides so far this year, total of 338 shot, just as of the 7th of Feb, almost all black). Ferguson was just a symptom and not a cause of what’s been changing. What it is is the legitimation of a criminal lifestyle as just another way for a black person to support themselves. Trafficking in drugs, shoplifting, burglary, robbery, car theft, occasional carjacking and other forms of low-mentality criminality are accepted by most blacks as being a justifiable lifestyle which is now considered legitimate; the ‘man’ won’t give him anything so a guy has to take it. Their rap music celebrates this; it’s being announced through their music loud and clear if anyone would bother to notice. The violence is a by-product of the thug lifestyle whereby their ‘honor’ has to be protected and they can’t afford to ‘lose face’; unfortunate but the price of doing business. What they’re doing is to try to create a safe space around these forms of criminality, to make them mere ticket offenses in recognition of it being a legitimate lifestyle on a par with others. In this view people like the thug Brown haven’t really done anything wrong or if he did it’s minor and should be given a pass. Standards are being pressed to change and accommodate the new reality of large numbers of blacks living in this gray area.
* This data is congruent with Goldstone’s well received state-centric model of revolution/breakdown, which focuses on the interaction of fiscal duress, intra-elite division, and potential for mass mobilization. The establishment of any city that’s around 1/4 or more black will have include black patrons in uneasy tension with the police and business elite, and of course persistent fiscal problems. There’s a perennial possibility of “creating space for violence”, especially when there’s a similar configuration at the national level.
* It’s the Sixties all over again regarding law enforcement and criminal justice. The babyboomers either don’t remember their own and their parents’ mistakes, they are happy with the results of hundreds of thousands more dead, or they are embarrassed by their mistakes and thus will say nothing. It’s not as if this hasn’t happened before.
Miranda was a serial rapist. Terry v. Ohio was determined because experienced police officers actually can spot a criminal by his body language and actions, locking up criminals is the only thing that keeps them from committing crimes.
If you clamp down on the police you free the criminals. If you support the criminals you embolden the criminals. If you make them victims they will responsibility for nothing and create more criminals. Half of them already believe in “The Plan” and “The Uprising”. The question is not why they are acting like they’re “half devil and half child” it’s why more of them are not joining them in their collective wilding.
