On black violence, woke lies, and right-wing rage

My teeth hurt even to write this. But we need to face it honestly.

You’ve seen the photo.

A man stands behind a woman, his arms raised in a frenzy. She sits, focused on her phone, oblivious to the danger behind her. He is about to slash her neck and leave her to bleed to death.

The man is black. The woman is white.

And their races are no coincidence.

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(The truth, even when it hurts.)

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Black men commit a huge amount of violent crime in the United States.

Every statistic confirms this fact. Black people made up almost 47,000 of the 81,000 murder suspects whose race was known to police in the last five years, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.¹ Most of those killers are men.

Put another way, black men, who make up about one-fourteenth of the American population, commit over half of the homicides.

In some cities, the disparities are so stunning as to nearly defy belief. St. Louis has about the same number of black and white people, about 130,000, along with 40,000 Asians and Latinos. So far this year, St. Louis police have identified 83 murder suspects. None are Asian or Latino. Three are white.

The other 80 are black, 73 men and seven women.

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(See for yourself.)

SOURCE

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I wish this racial gap didn’t exist.

Every American suffers from it. Black people suffer more than white, because most crime is intra-racial, a fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone. People usually commit violence against family members, friends, or people in their neighborhoods. So black people are far more likely to be the victims of violent crime, as well as its perpetrators.

Nonetheless, the crime gap is real, and has been for generations. Whether violent crime is rising or falling, black people are far more likely to commit it.

For a long time, we simply didn’t discuss this fact. Everyone knew it. Maybe people didn’t know the exact statistics, but everyone broadly knew the overall trends.

No one talked about it.

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Guess what?

I think that silence was probably the right move.

I know, probably not what you expected from Mr. Unreported Truths.

But who gains from highlighting black criminality? Obviously, police departments must deal with reality, by focusing their officers and detectives on the neighborhoods where most crime happens. But focusing on the racial disparities in crime seems… unlikely to help race relations. And although rates of black criminality are higher, the vast majority of black people — like the vast majority of white people — do not commit violent crime.

Better, then, to arrest and incarcerate and simply ignore the intersection of race and crime whenever possible.

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Except the left wouldn’t agree.

For the last 20 years, the left has spun two demonstrably false narratives on this issue.

The first is that large numbers of black men are in prison for nonviolent drug crimes. I examined this argument closely for Tell Your Children, and it is almost totally a myth.

It exploded after the publication in 2010 of a book called “The New Jim Crow,” by civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander. It has been repeated ever since, even though criminal justice professor John Pfaff exploded it in a book called “Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration - and How to Achieve Real Reform” in 2017.

Pfaff — who is a liberal — pointed out that any serious cuts in prison populations would have to include the release of many violent offenders (a tack he favors). Depending on the criteria, many if most of those offenders would be black.

Now, one can argue that prisons are inhumane and expensive and that a country as wealthy as the United States should have better alternatives even for violent criminals and that no one should be defined by their worst day. Those are honest arguments. I generally don’t agree with them, but they are honest.

But pretending that our prisons are filled with black men in there for smoking pot is not an honest argument.

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(Some men you just can’t reach. Note: Most prisoners don’t look like this.)

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The second myth, even more maddening, is that the police are constantly shooting black men, and unarmed black men in particular.

In reality, between 2015 and 2024, American police shot and killed about 180 unarmed black people (and 222 white people), according to a database from the Washington Post. Obviously, any police shootings need to be investigated, and if there is evidence officers acted without justification, they should be prosecuted.

But the context here is important. Over the same period, close to 100,000 black people died of homicide — and, again, the vast majority died at the hands of other black people. The statistics could not be clearer: Police officers of any race present a far smaller threat to black men than other black men do.

Unfortunately, the left will not simply acknowledge that fact. Instead, the legacy media, has spent the last decade offering saturation coverage of every case it can find in which police officers, particularly white officers, have killed black men.

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These demonstrably false narratives were central to the broader effort to “reform” the criminal justice system, a goal the left justified by arguing that violent crime had fallen so much from its 1980s peak we ought to close the prisons and replace police with social workers.

In reality, at least four big factors seem to have led to the fall in crime. First, we did lengthen sentences and put a lot of violent people in prison in the late 1980s and 1990s. This may come as a shock to progressives, but incarcerating criminals keeps them from committing more crimes.

Second, cell phones and apps made drug dealing a delivery business. When you don’t have to sell on corners, you don’t have to fight for them.

Third, opioids replaced stimulants as America’s preferred drug class. Opioids cause many, many problems, but their users are generally too zonked (the preferred clinical term) to commit violent crime.

Fourth, investigative technology improved. It’s tough to be a serial killer these days. Watch that DNA!

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Still, throughout the 2010s, the “Black Lives Matter” anti-incarceration and -police stories gained momentum. To the left, falling crime didn’t signal longer prison sentences had worked. It signaled they were unnecessary.

Then, following George Floyd’s death, calls to “defund the police” exploded. Democratic politicians and prosecutors in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia signaled they would not routinely enforce a wide range of laws or back police who used force in arrests. Many police officers retreated from their work, knowing that they might face lawsuits or worse if they were forced to fight with a suspect.

Within months crime exploded. Murders in the United States rose 30 percent in 2020, the biggest one-year spike ever. Big sections of downtowns in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles became almost impassible, filled with open-air drug use, aggressive panhandling, and street crime.

The post-Floyd crime wave ended the open calls to defund the police, but it didn’t end the left’s general dishonesty about race, crime, and policing.

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(The conversations we need to have. Even when we’d rather not.)

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But the left doesn’t control what we see and hear anymore. The center of gravity is on social media, and social media, particularly X, has moved increasingly to the right.

Now the right is responding to the left’s misleading arguments about crime and race in the most inflammatory possible way. Commentators with huge audiences are highlighting cases in which black men have committed unprovoked crimes against white people, especially white women, especially young white women.

Thus the image of Decarlos Brown Jr standing behind Iryna Zarutska, about to strike, now viewed hundreds of millions of times — if not billions — on X.

I don’t know how to put this genie back in the bottle. These images are powerful because they’re real. They cut to a truth about crime in the United States that the left will not acknowledge. But they cannot help but inflame anger about race. At least some people posting are using them for just that reason.

Would greater honesty from the left stop them? Of course not.

We need strict laws against recidivist violent criminals, and we need to enforce those laws. We need to give police more tools to get floridly psychotic people off the streets, particularly when drugs are fueling their psychosis. Those people are almost by definition dangerous to themselves and others. Ideally, we’d send them to civil confinement for treatment. But if they’re breaking laws against, say, public nudity or harassment, we should not be afraid to send them to jail.

The left needs to accept that a lot of those people are going to be black.

But I wish the right wouldn’t say so out loud.

1. In another 26,000 cases, the race of a suspect was unknown or not reported.