Let's Have a National Conversation About the American Ghetto

From Michael Grable, at American Thinker, "A National Conversation about the American Ghetto":

The Left has long argued ad populum that disproportionately white police forces and disproportionately black prison populations prove American law enforcement institutionally racist.

That's essentially the perception behind, for example, the Left's long campaign against racial profiling as a police engagement technique.

Media sensationalism this year about two black deaths at the hands of white policemen inflamed the argument, while the president of the United States, the attorney general of the United States, the mayor of New York, and race-hustling entrepreneurs from Al Sharpton on down to any brother in the street with a bullhorn jumped on the black-while-walking bandwagon.

Here, however, is one standup law-enforcement professional, Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke, Jr., who begs to disagree.

Sheriff Clarke publicly condemns anti-police populism as the Left's deflection of an urban reality with which he's professionally all too familiar and for which the Left's all too politically responsible. "This deflects," says Sheriff Clarke:

against the real thing that we need to have a conversation about in this country and it's the American ghetto. And that's where most of the policing unfortunately has to be applied. The American ghetto has chronic poverty, high unemployment where people can't find meaningful work, and kids shackled to failing public schools ensuring that they won't reach their God-given potential. This creates a permanent underclass in this country and ensures that this group of people will continue to live life at the bottom. That's the kind of conversation that we need to have, as to how these failed liberal government policies have led to the creation and emergence of the welfare state. And that characterizes the American ghetto. Let's have that conversation and get off this nonsense that it's the policing profession that needs to be transformed. There's nothing wrong with the policing of, or institution of, policing in America.

The very civil rights movement with its war on poverty which was to have rectified American racism has, instead, perversely perpetuated it in the creation of a permanent underclass living life at the bottom of an urban ignorance, criminality, and violence which most requires the very policing against which its political beneficiaries now rail. That's a pretty "fundamental transformation" of at least one aspect of America. And it's a transformation of which no American should ever be anything but ashamed...

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Sad that.