he Movement Against Police Violence ISN'T Ignoring ‘Black-on-Black Crime’

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/article/the-movement-against-police-violence-isnt-ignoring-black-on-black-crime/

Drawing a false equivalency between the amount of police-enacted violence and violence directed at police, Comey traces a growing divide between the community and the police force due to increased awareness of police violence. That divide, he contends, results in the police pulling back their crime-fighting resources from communities most affected by violence.

As activist and data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe points out, this position rests on a few different fallacies: first, that police are being less aggressive out of fear of being the next cop to have their tactics publicly scrutinized, and secondly, that aggressive policing leads to a reduction in violent crime. There is no evidence to support this, and if a nationwide decrease in police aggression is indeed underway, someone should tell the girl who was body-slammed and dragged by Officer Ben Fields at Spring Valley High School in Columbia, South Carolina, for her refusal to give her cellphone to a teacher. If aggressive policing, which includes the kind of violence recently caught on film, led to less crime, that would mean that the only thing law-enforcement agencies have come up with to reduce violence is the use of more violence, and the violation of people’s rights. In other words, the only way to prevent violent crime is martial law.

Instead, invoking the “Ferguson Effect” is an attempt to discredit the newly revived grassroots movement for racial justice. Governor Chris Christie, for instance, recently accused the movement of supporting “lawlessness” and “calling for the murder of police officers.” But this isn’t new. In some ways, it’s a twist on the way in which “black-on-black crime” has been used to deflect our attention from the ways in which police have been used to subjugate and dehumanize black communities. People who would rather not talk about that point to violence within those communities as the “real” issue. That further pathologizes blackness—as if there is something uniquely abhorrent about black people killing other black people. In fact, because America is highly segregated, it is more likely that a person of any race will commit violence against a person of the same race than a different one. More often than not, violent crimes are committed where a person lives and against someone the person knows. If there is “black-on-black crime,” there is also “white-on-white crime.” This is not unique to black people.

<snip>

What McWhorter misses is that this new generation does care about so-called “black-on-black crime,” though it refuses that misleading phrase. Many of the organizations currently lumped together under the banner of Black Lives Matter have as one of their platform goals an end to violence within the community—and not just gun violence among young black men, as “black-on-black crime” is often imagined, but also sexual violence, intimate-partner violence, and violence against trans and gender-nonconforming people. But, they do not, as McWhorter and others have, see the police, prisons, and the carceral state as part of the solution.

[Igel]

1. Think of it as "turnabout is fair play."

If you aren't always jumping up and down, screaming in unison with some folk they assume you're at best apathetic to their cause and typically at odds with it.

If you're concerned about police violence overall, it means you don't care about black lives.

If you're concerned about the truth in a court case or even when just a media story that might involve a hate crime and therefore waiting for all the facts, it means you're a racist pig for not shouting in unison with those who know better. That can include a white-on-black killing. It can include arson at a black church.

If you're all BlackLivesMatter and whenever the disproportionate murder rate between races/ethnicities is brought up--it doesn't matter if most of the reports of perps' descriptions are given by people as the same race or ethnicity as the perp and victim--then you're a race-baiting bigot and those giving the descriptions must be racist. True but irrelevant stats are dredged up as evidence that there is no problem. Most crime is like-on-like, and the proportions of in- and out-group murders are about the same. (Not the frequency, of course, but that doesn't matter until it's appropriate, but only one side gets to decide appropriateness in a kind of neo-separate-but-equal revanchism.)

Suddenly, though, some have decided that when a black linguistics prof makes this very claim it's a valid point that needs to be refuted.

The difference is the skin color and therefore how safe or trustworthy the person making the point is. Everybody is equal but some are more equal than others.

[eridani]

2. The point of the OP was that BLM focuses police violence, but sees it as interconnected--

--with violence in the black community of all kinds.