Blacks call police for help 7 times as frequently as whites and other inconvenient truths

On Thursday, Los Angeles became the first U.S. city to make good on its threat to beginning defunding its police force. The initial phase of the plan, as Hans Bader noted, will cut the city’s police department budget by $150 million.

It might be useful for Americans who unquestionably accept Black Lives Matter as a civil rights group and believe the myth that America is a fundamentally racist country to engage in a little thought experiment à la Frank Capra. What would it be like, they need to ask themselves, if the police had never been born?

One American city, New York, has already been treated to a taste of that alternative reality. It came in 2014, after a crazed gunman assassinated two NYPD officers as they sat in their patrol car. The killer explained to authorities that it was payback for the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown.
As Jeff Dunetz reporyed at the time, New York’s finest made 66% fewer arrests in the week following the utterly senseless murders of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu.

“I’m not writing any summonses,” one member of the force is quoted as saying. “Do you think I’m going to stand there so someone can shoot me or hit me in the head with an ax? I’m concerned about my safety. I want to go to home to my wife and kids.”
 
He was not alone. An NYPD supervisor remarked, “My guys are writing almost no summonses, and probably only making arrests when they have to — like when a store catches a shoplifter.”
Noting that these actions arose not out of spite or to make a political point, J.E. Dyer reminded us:

The bargain of the public with law enforcement doesn’t involve law enforcement officers offering themselves up as sacrifices, so that the public doesn’t have to grow up, behave like adults, or get its house in order.

That’s not the function of the police, any more than it’s the function of soldiers to die so that politicians and the public don’t have to adopt better national security policies. We don’t suit up either our military or law enforcement professionals to go forth and serve as bullet sponges, so that the rest of us can remain ‘innocent’ and disengaged, at liberty to focus on video games, race politics, and Kardashians.

Perhaps the most tragic part of eliminating police is that the segment of society this “reform” is meant to help — the black community — would suffer the most grievously. After the murders of Ramos and Liu, residents of the largely black Brooklyn community they had been patrolling complained about the wait times for police to arrive when called. As former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani points in this interview with Fox News Channel’s Bill Hemmer, black people call the police for help seven times more frequently than whites do. And with good reason. As Giuliani also notes:

 [In] 70 percent to 75 percent of the homicides in New York City, the victims are African-American and the perpetrators are African-American.

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Liberty Unyielding