Do you believe this?
1. “Black Americans are disproportionately arrested and imprisoned because cops are racist.”
Then, of course, you believe this:
2. “White Americans are disproportionately NOT arrested and imprisoned because cops are racist.”
This is a logical contraposition, which means the truth of the second proposition derives, of necessity, from the truth of the first.
Many Americans believe Proposition 1 fervently. It appears to them infallible and beyond discussion, like a bull uttered by Pope Woke and displayed to the world with the wax seals of the Archbishops of Grievance hanging from silk threads.
Let’s follow this mad syzygy a little further. If both these propositions are true, white crooks must be going wild. Across the Fruited Plain, white hoodlums must be out of control. They must be invading homes, molesting children, stealing at gunpoint, beating wives, cracking heads and perforating friends and enemies with bullets large and small. Furthermore, they must be doing all this with impunity because, if both propositions are true, it means that cops are laying off white thugs in order to top up the jails with black ones.
Post hoc propter hoc, from sea to shining sea, thousands of victims must be weeping and gnashing their teeth. If they call for police, they must hear something like this:
911: “What is your emergency?”
Woman: “My boyfriend slashed my face with a broken bottle. Now he’s stomping the baby!”
911: “What race is your assailant, ma’am?”
Woman: “He’s white. Please send somebody!!!”
911: “Sorry. We’re at quota for white criminals this month. We’re only arresting black crooks for the next two weeks. Call back then if lover boy is still cutting you and kicking the kid. Toodles!”
Of course, this isn’t happening and everyone knows it. What people don’t understand, or wish to acknowledge, is that the commission of crime, not the arrests therefrom, is disproportionate to each race’s ratio in the population. We know this definitively, but not from the cops, who have a lamentable history of “juking” statistics for political and funding reasons. We know this from the group everybody, i.e., the media, the popo, the academy and the lords of non-profits, ignore. These nonpersons? The victims.
Twice each year the U.S. Census Bureau, not the Department of Justice, interviews between 44,000 and 77,000 households and asks if anyone has been the victim of a crime. These interviews are compiled into the National Crime Victimization Survey.
Interviewers always ask victims the race of their assailant. If black criminals were proportionate to their ratio in the population, the assailant percentage that black victims report would be 13.4. It isn’t. Black Americans, in fact, report that 70.3 percent of their assailants are black. That is 525% higher than their ratio in the population. Black Americans are not being disproportionately arrested for crimes; they are disproportionately committing crimes. The people saying this are the little guys, the men, women and children who are bludgeoned, beaten, stabbed, car-jacked, shot, robbed, raped and burgled.
Yeah, those guys.
I suggest an absurd argument—White Crooks Gone Wild!—to rebut the disproportion polemic for several reasons:
1. Arguing from statistics is tricky, also boring. The Bureau of Justice Statistics, from their remote, West Virginia ziggurat, produce millions of pages of crime statistics every year. This is Too Much Information. (TMI!)
2. Few elected officials, and fewer police chiefs, know how to argue. They were never debaters in school, never learned to argue both sides of a proposition, and couldn’t spot a logical fallacy if it slapped them upside the head. When The Left starts with the disproportion and racist rants, officials become shamed and confused.
3. The primary tactic of The Left is to shout and accuse. Statistics, true or not, they will denounce as racist trickery. Absurdity, such as “White Crooks Gone Wild!” will stun them, briefly anyway.
Ultimately, we must refuse to concede that The Left’s tirades about racism and disproportion in arrests have anything to do with actual crime, criminals or victims. They do not. In every city where The Left controls policing, violence and crime are up—horribly. More, not fewer, black citizens in those cities are being brutalized and killed. The downtowns of Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York and Minneapolis resemble the burned-out dystopias of bad science fiction.
The racial disproportion and the all-cops-are-racist arguments, however, have everything to do with seizing power and obtaining lucrative university posts, highly compensated government and corporate jobs, and fat stipends from the titanic sums raised from lefty billionaires, non-profits and trendy-wokey corporations.
We can observe this currently in the actions and gross revenues of Black Lives Matter, which raised a reported $90 million in one year alone. The impoverished citizens of Ferguson, MO, where Michael Brown was shot, humbly requested that BLM make a donation to repair riot damage in their city. Good luck with that, Ferguson. I doubt BLM will give anyone a cut of their swag much less a ride in those beautiful Lexus SUVs they favor.
The way to argue with The Left is attack the real agenda: power and money. Accuse the race-baiting Left of being:
1. Cruel—More people of color die when they come to town.
2. Greedy—They use the poor and people of color to amass fortunes that they do not share.
3. Power Hungry—They want to mandate, not help. They rise by trampling the poor whose broken backs they use as stepping stones to higher office and lucrative jobs.
It’s a pity that our elected officials, unlike the nation’s founders, no longer read Cicero in the original. His orations against the tyrant and conspirator Cataline are a textbook on how to take on brazen bullies with principled offense, not shame-faced defense.
Requiescat in pace, Marcus Tullius.
(In school, the author read Caesar and Cicero but, shamefully, not Virgil and Ovid.)