Earl O. Hutchinson

Conservative blogs, websites, newspapers and pundits are at it again, screaming that young black males are killing each other with abandon in city after city. They repeatedly toss out the supposedly raging murder violence in Baltimore, Chicago and New York City as proof that black- on-black carnage has mounted to national epidemic levels. It makes no difference that murder rates have drastically plunged in most big cities during the past two decades, and that Chicago and Baltimore are glaring aberrations to the consistent steady national decline in murders.

Their real punch line is this: Let a white cop gun down a young black, and civil rights leaders storm the protest barricades demanding arrests, prosecutions and throw-the-book-at-’em jail sentences for the man or woman with a badge accused of the slaying.

This is an idiotic charge. It deliberately ignores the fact that civil rights leaders and organizations have staged countless marches, rallies and walks against violence in black neighborhoods. They have lobbied hard for tougher gun laws and enforcement and have lobbied business leaders and elected officials to radically boost spending on education, job training, drug counseling and diversion programs for young black people, and for greater support programs for needy families.

The blame-the-victim blinders on this aren’t tied tight out of ignorance or misinformation, but out of a cold, calculated and cynical agenda. This ploy has been the perfect rationale for the wild spending on and expansion of jails and prisons. It spurred a massive ramp up in spending on more police, judges and probation and parole officers. It cowered state and federal lawmakers into trying to outdo each other in shouting the loudest about getting tough on crime and torpedoing every sane and sensible initiative on crime reduction. This also included the scrapping or radical overhaul of the blatantly race-tinged drug sentencing, three strikes laws and the harsh sentences for non violent offenders.

The prime reason that lawmakers, particularly GOP lawmakers, have finally made some glacial movement toward pushing for a so-called “smart” approach to crime prevention is because of the skyrocketing and increasingly prohibitive cost of locking up tens of thousands of petty drug and non violent offenders for years, if not decades. But even this movement toward more humane and cost-effective measures for dealing with crime is fragile to say the least. It still turns on public perceptions about crime, especially black crime. This tracks directly back to how the media plays up, or rather sensationalizes, violent crime. When that happens, it simply deepens public belief and fears that inner city neighborhoods are lawless, violent, out of control killing zones that must be dealt with as if they were ISIS controlled rebel territory.

This ploy has always had a hard political agenda behind it. Nowhere is this more glaringly evident than in New York City. The target there is a conservative’s favorite whipping boy­ — outside of Hillary Clinton — and that’s New York Mayor Bill de Blasio. He gets the blame from New York police unions every time an NYPD officer is killed or assaulted for allegedly mollycoddling anti-police violence protestors. Now he’s getting it for allegedly falling asleep at the wheel on the uptick in the city’s murders. While the issues of terrorism and security have largely replaced the old-fashioned pander to law and order on the campaign trail in the past few presidential elections, it still lurks just beneath the surface of national politics. It only takes one well-placed and prolonged panic story on the alleged new murder wave in America to reignite it as the issue of national concern again. The black-on-black murder myth will always be the prime candidate for doing just that.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst.