Crime Killed a Quarter of a Million Black People

By Daniel Greenfield April 17, 2023 @Sultan Knish Blog

Over the last decade, BLM, and assorted leftist and libertarian groups dismantled our criminal justice system. Police forces were defunded, pro-crime prosecutors refused to lock up criminals, federal and state prison systems released tens of thousands of them, and a wave of legislative decriminalization legalized everything from shoplifting, to drug dealing and mugging.

The pro-crime policymaking that eliminated public safety and cost over 3,000 lives in 2020 alone was done under the guise of fighting racism. Statistics which showed that black people were more likely to be arrested, imprisoned or shot during criminal encounters with police were used to spread conspiracy theories falsely accusing the criminal justice system of systemic racism.

What all of these racist conspiracy theories popularized by politicians, the media, and the entertainment industry ignored was that black people were also far more likely to be crime victims. Even as the BLM riots got underway, black people in surveys were strongly opposed to police defunding. The opposition was so vehement that Democrats not only abandoned the issue, but claimed that they had always been opposed to it and ran against their own position.

Despite years of false claims portraying black people as victims of a biased criminal justice system whose police forces are descended from “slave catchers” who repress minorities at the behest of white suburbanites, surveys of black people continue to tell a very different story.

A Pew survey found that while only 33% of white Democrats wanted to reduce crime, 63% of Hispanics and 66% of black people thought that fighting crime should be a priority.

And that’s nothing new.

Leftists and libertarians lied that the War on Drugs was racist when it was actually pushed by black groups, including the NAACP, which demanded the death penalty for drug dealers.

That same Pew survey showed that while only 38% of white Dems answered that reducing the availability of illegal drugs should be a priority, 57% of Hispanics and 60% of black people believed that it should be.

Now a Kaiser Family Foundation survey shows that black people are far more likely to suffer from crime than white people. The survey, meant to generate support for unconstitutional gun ban measures, instead unintentionally demonstrated that crime hurts black people more.

The KFF survey noted that “three in ten black adults (31%) have personally witnessed someone being shot”, “one-third of black adults (34%) have a family member who was killed by a gun” and (32%) say that they worry all the time about themselves or a family member being shot.

One in six of black adults say they don’t feel “safe at all” from gun violence in their neighborhood, compared to 2% of white adults. 1 in 4 also bought a gun to protect themselves.

Gun violence is just another way of saying crime.

Black people are disproportionately affected by crime. Pro-crime policies led to the deaths of an additional 2,244 black people in 2020. According to a Johns Hopkins report, “in 2020, one out of every 1,000 young black males (15–34) was shot and killed” and, “more than half of all black teens (15–19) who died in 2020—a staggering 52%—were killed by gun violence.”

CDC numbers showed that homicide is a leading cause of death among black men under the age of 20, and from the ages of 20 to 44. White men are killed by guns at the rate of 3.15 per 100,000 while black men die at the rate of 48.16 per 100,000. Pro-crime policies increase crime and kill thousands of black people. That’s what a real disproportionate impact looks like.

Every time pro-crime politicians free criminals, pro-crime prosecutors refuse to prosecute violent offenders, and legislatures eliminate bail, the impact is felt most strongly in the black community.

Law enforcement isn’t racist, but getting rid of it is. When a community depends more on a particular service, losing it has a clear disproportionate impact. Keeping the peace, arresting offenders and dispensing justice is one of the few primal duties of government. The breach in the social contract when the government fails to provide peacekeeping services is devastating.

Most crimes are committed by repeat offenders. The only way to interrupt the cycle of violence is to lock them up. Successful tough on crime policies in the 90s made cities safe once again and led to an economic boom in inner cities. Manhattan’s Harlem went from a danger zone to hosting Bill Clinton’s office, but in 2022, crime increased 44%. The Clinton offices have mostly moved down to the Wall Street area, but where they remain in Central Harlem, crime is up 32%. Next door in West Harlem, it’s up 133%. That means Bill is less likely to tour the Apollo Theater, but it also means that the mostly black residents are the ones feeling the worst of it.

Pro-crime activists have spent years regaling us with the suffering of convicts while caring very little about the shattered lives they have left in their wake. Foundations, protest groups, activist organizations and even PACs have spent hundreds of millions lobbying for criminals, fighting for their release and remaking our system to favor perpetrators, not victims. Their political success has come with a very high cost. And much of that burden has fallen on black people.

It is hard to think of any single policy in the last generation that has done more harm to black people or claimed more lives than the pro-crime agenda. Pro-crime activists have falsely claimed that police shootings of black men are a form of genocide. They’re not. Crime is.

One study counted 286,075 firearm deaths among black people from 1990 to 2021. That’s over a quarter of a million deaths. Some of them are due to suicide, but suicides are much lower among black people than white people, and the majority of black gun deaths were homicides.

And seeing a quarter of a million deaths, the pro-crime Left wants even more bodies.

Those quarter of a million deaths have been largely self-inflicted, but, much as with the welfare state, they were aided and abetted by white liberal policymakers who had come to believe that what the black community really needed was for the government to enable its criminals.

Racist liberal condescension continues to destroy black communities, families and lives.

2020 demonstrated that tough on crime policies can save thousands of black lives and, over time, perhaps even hundreds of thousands of black lives. Pro-crime policies are a racist disaster which reduced black people to criminals and then set out to free criminals to help black people.

That’s why 1 out of every 1,000 young black men are dead.

Pro-crime policies are racist. They enable a crime epidemic that has killed more black people than the total number of battlefield casualties for all races in the Civil War. More black people died in the year of Black Lives Matter than our entire death toll in the Iraq War.

Can it get worse than this? In 1991, 12,226 black people were murdered. For the first time, more black people were killed than white people. The numbers are trending that way once again. While the Left claims that highways and dress codes are systemically racist, their pro-crime policies are a racist program that promises liberation but offers only mass death.  

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.