Systemic Racism

Heather McDonald is a serious journalist who has spent years studying, researching, and writing about crime, policing, and the impact of race. She discusses Hillary Clinton's claim that "systemic racism" determines how people are treated by our criminal justice system. Clinton, who never told a lie she didn't like (and she tells many), would have us believe that African American men are more likely than whites to be incarcerated for identical crimes. The media loves the narrative and reports her claims without serious evaluation, taking them as the truth. Hillary's lie works well for her base who tend to allow emotion and belief to supercede hard facts. Her lie also helps her cement the support of the African American community, who under the Democrats, have become increasingly prone to perceive themselves as victims.

Unfortunately, hard facts, years of research, and everyday reality indicate that Hillary Clinton is either woefully misinformed or downright dishonest. Heather McDonald writes:

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.

To say, as Clinton did last night [at the first Presdiential debate] , that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant’s criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware’s prison population presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.

Clinton also complained that “too many young African-American and Latino men end . . . up in jail for non-violent offenses.” In fact, the majority of prisoners in the U.S. are serving time for violent felonies. The enforcement of low-level public order offenses in New York City during the mayoralties of Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg actually lowered New York State’s prison population by intervening in criminal behavior early, before it ripened into a serious felony.

As the Democrats continue the drumbeat of "systemic racism," arguing that stop and frisk and similar measures are "unconstitutional" (they are not), police have begun to back off in their policing of the inner city. This "has already produced the largest one-year surge in homicides in urban areas in nearly a half-century."

Clinton's empty solution is "bias training" for police officers. Again McDonald comments:

Clinton reiterated her call for “implicit-bias” training for officers. The premise of such training is that police officers are shooting black males out of such bias. Yet, four studies have come out this year alone that demolish this charge. They show that if there is bias among police officers in their shooting decisions, it works in favor of blacks and against whites. “Implicit-bias” training, based on a lie, is a grotesque waste of resources at a time when officers are desperate for more hands-on tactical training that will help them make those crucial shoot/don’t shoot decisions in the field, or avoid being put into such an excruciating situation in the first place.

Hillary and her supporters worship at the alter of political correctness—facts be damned, results ignored, and reality jettisioned to feed a dishonest narrative. The problem is this: Hillary, when elected, will use her false narrative to develop policy that will be celebrated by her Stepford wives supporters and the media. Only one thing—It won't solve any real problem and will likely make matters much, much worse for the same African Americans who will give her 90+ percent of their vote.

UPDATE (9/29/16):
-----------------------
During the first presidential debate, Hillary Clinton suggested that because of "systemic racism" and "implicit bias" all police officers required "retraining." Damn, that sounds a lot like Moa Tse Tung's communist China in the middle of the 20th century.

David French comments:

...that’s the magic of “implicit bias” and “unconscious racism.” Skepticism of its existence is proof of its existence, and you can just “know” that Crutcher or Philando Castile or Michael Brown or Keith Scott [vicims of police shootings] would be alive today if they had been white. In other words, the very existence of the incident proves the racism. The denials of racism prove the racism. And everyone who’s “keeping score” or “gets it” knows the real truth.

Indeed, it is this politicized metaphysical certainty that breeds premature calls for “justice” and for “retraining.” If you don’t believe what the radicals think you should believe, you must be taught to believe something different — on the government’s dime, of course. Hillary wants to fund the retraining, and the NAACP wants to make it mandatory — complete with sanctions if your perceived biases don’t disappear. How will the thought police know the actual police are biased?

If they don’t believe the “right” things. Spend any time on campus, in diversity training, or on progressive websites, and you’ll see that disagreement with leftist cultural critiques is all the proof anyone needs of racism and other forms of bigotry. Evidence, experience, and probabilities are completely irrelevant when it comes time to cleanse the mind of “bias.” There are those on the Left who simply refuse to look at a case on the facts. They insist that they have knowledge about the inner lives and motivations of the relevant parties that is unknown even to the parties themselves. They use this alleged knowledge to stoke unrest and violate civil liberties. And they have an ally in Hillary Clinton. She’ll fund all the re-education we need.

Increasingly, the Democrats, now ruled by leftist thought, work hard to divide and balkanize the country. This works well for them as a political strategy, but it's enormously irresponsible as a cultural/sociological phenomenon. Then again, Hillary Clinton traffics in lies, so her lie about "systemic racism" doesn't bother her a bit.