HEATHER MACDONALD ON "RACE RELATIONS" (S0-CALLED)

MacDonald offers politically incorrect observations triggered by the Obama- Gates-Crowley incident.  Excerpts:

 . . . Nothing Obama said on Friday retracts his assertion that it is a “fact that blacks and Hispanics are picked up more frequently and often time for no cause.” That charge is the real outrage of the president’s reckless entry into Cambridge Burglarygate; the back-and-forth over who dissed whom is a sideshow. Even if Obama announced tomorrow that Sergeant Crowley had in this case acted appropriately, his previous assertion that “we” need to “improve policing techniques so that we’re eliminating potential bias” would still be the takeaway from this surreal episode.

On Friday, Obama declared that he wants to have a “teachable moment” about “relations between police officers and minority communities.” Here’s a good place to start teaching: expose the reality of black crime. It is preposterous to talk about urban policing without talking about crime, yet that is what anti-cop activists, politicians, and reporters have managed to pull off for years. They focus public attention on police-stop and arrest data while keeping crime rates carefully offstage. But

nearly everything that the police do, especially in this age of data-driven policing, is a function of criminal behavior. Attend any Compstat meeting in New York or Los Angeles and you will hear police commanders intently and passionately debating how best to deploy officers to disrupt ongoing crime patterns; race never comes up.

When liberals and left-wingers ponderously refer to “race,” as in Attorney General Eric Holder’s admonition this February that “we, as average Americans, simply do not talk enough with each other about race,” or as in Obama’s observation in his Wednesday prime-time press conference that “race remains a factor in the society,” they mean: racism and skin color. But it is differential behavior, not skin color, that “remains a factor in the society.” I’ll be ready to concede that “race,” defined as Obama and Holder would have it, “remains a factor in the society” when the same proportion of black children as white children are raised in two-parent, married households yet the black poverty rate remains much higher than that of whites. I’ll be ready to concede that “race remains a factor in the society” when black crime drops to white and Asian levels without proportionally reducing the black prison population. Until then, I’ll remain skeptical that all those problems that are now subsumed under the rubric of “race” are primarily the result of white Americans’ reaction to skin color.   

[Read the whole thing. . .]

Note: The material in this post originally attributed to Victor Davis Hanson.  Unless I am going blind, that was how the Corner originally posted it.  I have changed attribution in accordance with the latest sourcing.