In the 1960s, 90% of murders were solved. That fell to 75% in 1980, and 60% in 2000. In the year of Black Lives Matter, the homicide clearance rate fell so low that it became a ‘coin flip’.
The media reported that only 50% of murders were being solved. What was less reported was that this mainly reflected a drop in solving black murders. Homicide clearance rates for white people have actually improved since the 1980s and reached a high during the Obama administration even as black homicide clearance rates dropped catastrophically.
In the 70s, 80% of the murders of black people were solved. Under Obama, only 60% were.
As the Freedom Center had previously revealed in its investigative reporting, Black Lives Matter, its allied police defunding, decarceration and decriminalization movement helped lead to a nearly 30% surge in murders with 2,244 more black people being murdered.
Despite being assaulted in the streets, defamed in the media and lynched in the courts, police tried to keep doing their jobs, but crime was rising so fast that it was impossible to keep up.
Even the pro-crime Marshall Project noted that, “from 2019 to 2020, police across the country solved 1,200 more murders, a 14% increase. But murders rose twice as quickly — by 30%.”
And solving murders was a thankless job that put police careers and lives at stake.
Meanwhile, as David Horowitz described in his book, I Can’t Breathe: How A Racial Hoax is Killing America, many police departments at a community level, with no support and unable to cope, “responded by taking defensive measures” and became “less proactive in apprehending lawbreakers” which “led to sharply increased violent crime rates nationwide”.
Accusing law enforcement of racism and reducing police services in black areas had drastic consequences for society, but most of all for the black people who were being killed.
From the 1970s, murder clearance rates for white people and Asians increased by 5%, and by 7% for Indians, but fell by 20% for black people. Racializing law enforcement made police wary about operating in black areas. Crime rose in black neighborhoods and went unpunished until parts of those communities became ‘no-go-zones’ in which gangs operated with impunity.
Black Lives Matter and the embrace of police defunding provided some brutal statistics.
The CDC revealed that, “In 2020, one out of every 1,000 young Black males (15–34) was shot and killed” and “more than half of all black teens (15–19) who died in 2020—a staggering 52%—were killed by gun violence.” This, and not the occasional viral police encounter, is actual genocide. Democrats and black nationalists had redefined policing and prisons as a form of oppression for the black community. Removing that “oppression” killed thousands of black people in one year and claimed a nearly unprecedented death toll among young black men.
Much like pulling the fire department, ambulances or running water out of black areas, limiting access to full police services in the black community led to a catastrophic death toll.
In a press release proposing a new bill to fix low homicide clearance rates with more police funding, Senator Cory Booker claimed that “since the beginning of the pandemic, there has been a rise in homicide in every part of our country” and that “agencies in rural and urban communities alike lack the proper resources to solve such heinous crimes”.
The crime wave has nothing to do with the pandemic, except insofar as the pandemic was a pretext for springing criminals from prison to protect them from COVID, and has continued even after the pandemic. No police department has enough resources to cope with a 30% increase in murders especially when the perpetrators aren’t being arrested or locked up before they kill.
The press release on Booker’s own site admits that “people of color disproportionately suffer from murders and poor clearance rates in the United States. Despite comprising 13.4 percent of the U.S. population, Black victims made up at least 46 percent of those murdered in 2020, and local and national reports show that cases involving Black and Hispanic victims go unsolved at substantially higher rates than those involving white victims.”
This isn’t an issue “in every part of our country”.
Homicide clearance rates are lowest for drug and gang violence murders. Since those make up a disproportionate number of black homicides, what Black Lives Matter activism and pro-crime legislative measures by Democrats and Republicans have done is turn over black communities to drug dealers and gang members who have been allowed to get away with murder.
Homicide doesn’t even make the CDC’s top 10 causes of death for men in America, but it’s number four for black men. Among black men under the age of 20, homicide is the leading cause of death. Most young black men are being murdered. And it’s only getting worse.
Convincing black people that the police are evil while showing them that the perpetrators operate with impunity also makes it nearly impossible to secure cooperative witnesses. And without those, murder cases are much less likely to be solved in any meaningful fashion.
More black people keep being murdered and the perpetrators keep on killing.
Black lives can’t matter, if black murders don’t matter. And since the vast majority of black murder victims are killed by black perpetrators, there’s no way to stop black murders without arresting and locking up black perpetrators. As David Horowitz wrote in, I Can’t Breathe: How A Racial Hoax is Killing America, “The false charge of ‘systemic racism’ is a convenient cover for the Left’s inability to identify actual racists directly responsible for inequalities in American life.” The inequalities in bringing the perpetrators of black murders to justice and preventing future killings can be attributed to the systemic racism of denying black people police services.
America is not racist except when it falls under the sway of leftist racists who insist on discriminating against black people by carving out separatist enclaves where policing will be managed by community activists and gangs and enforced through “redistributive justice”.
“This delusional racial fantasy, so remote from the facts, remains a principal incitement for the Black Lives Matter movement. The fact that it is believed by so many people—and so many violent people—is a threat to the cohesion of America’s communities, and to the people caught in the crosshairs of the hate,” Horowitz wrote in I Can’t Breathe: How A Racial Hoax is Killing America,
Those in the crosshairs are dying at unprecedented rates. Black lives don’t matter until black murders matter.
{Reposted from FrontPageMag}
