The body of a junkie ex-con who had robbed a pregnant woman at gunpoint
was placed in a golden coffin on a horse-drawn hearse while a nation
whose cities were burning watched.
Cannon Hinnant was laid to
rest quietly in a small funeral home across the street from a gas
station. The mourners, some driving pickup trucks, parked out front and
made their way through the puddles to hear his youth pastor eulogize the
5-year-old boy who had been shot in the head.
The deaths of
George Floyd,a 46-year-old Minneapolis black ex-con strung out on drugs,
and Cannon Hinnant, a 5-year-old white boy from a small city in North
Carolina, are both symbols.
Floyd’s death during a struggle with
police led to nationwide race riots, the destruction of statues and
stores, hundreds of millions in damage, severe injuries and deaths, and a
political inquisition. Hinnant’s death has been ignored outside the
local and conservative media.
The
out-of-context video of Floyd dying of cardiac arrest while high on
Fentanyl became evidence of police racism, not just by the white officer
restraining him, but across the country. And Cannon Hinnant’s murder at
the hands of a black felon while riding his bike on a grassy winding
street became evidence of a racist double standard and out of control
crime.
The truth is that Floyd and Hinnant’s deaths were symptoms of the same crisis.
After
Floyd’s death, it became fashionable to speak of crime and policing as
inventions of white supremacists and symptoms of white fragility.
Cannon’s small head proved fragile when he was shot, but Hinnant’s
father regularly invited Darius Sessoms, his killer, for meals or a
beer.
Sessoms had been in and out of prison. The common theme was
drugs and guns. Year after year, he would go in for 3 months for
possession, and then
out again, he appeared to have stolen a gun, and then
he had begun maintaining a house for drug activity.
It's
a familiar story in Wilson, North Carolina, a half-black and half-white
city of under 50,000 which has seen huge drug busts over the years and
where
the crime logs focus on drug-related crimes by men with three names and no future.
In
the age of drug apps, a former president who casually mentioned using
cocaine, and a partnership between leftists, libertarians, and some
GOPers to decriminalize drugs, focusing on the drug angle is considered
politically incorrect. And yet it’s always lurking there anyway.
No
one familiar with street level crime was surprised to find drugs in
Floyd’s system or Sessoms’ drug charges. This is the world inhabited by
police officers who patrol the streets and answer calls, knowing each
time what they’ll see before they even arrive at the scene.
The
Defund Police movement is right in one regard. We’ve outsourced managing
the collapse of our society to men willing to deal with the worst
elements of it for $28,000 a year. We have, justly, spent a great deal
of time talking about the psychological traumas of veterans, but very
little dealing with the state of mind of the men and women fighting the
war on our own streets.
But the Defund Police movement and its
allies, including top Democrats, insist that there is no crisis.
Everything from the drug war to the concept of private property was
invented by old white men to keep young black men down. There is no
crime problem, only an enforcement problem.
After trying out this
theory for a few months, freeing thousands of criminals, refusing to
arrest or imprison new criminals, and tying the hands of police, the
crime rate skyrocketed. And black elected officials, from the moderates
to the radicals, have come out for law enforcement. Every poll shows
solid majorities of black people want the police to stay right where
they are.
The drug war and its massive police presence were not invented by white racists, they were lobbied for and
demanded by black communities
who wanted to end the violence. That painful lesson is being relearned
at a great cost in human lives. And it’s a long way from over.
After twenty years of hard work and success, too many people forgot what made us safe.
The
unhappy truth is that Cannon Hinnant is dead because his killer wasn’t
in jail. And George Floyd is dead and a nation is on fire because he
wasn’t safely tucked away in prison.
Criminal justice reform didn’t do anyone any favors. Not the criminals or their victims.
Democrats killed Cannon Hinnant, they killed George Floyd, and they’re killing American cities.
Instead
of dealing with the disaster, the Democrats continue to treat dead
criminals like saints while ignoring their victims. They feed racial
narratives, filling headlines with ‘white’ perpetrators and ‘black’
victims while ignoring stories like Cannon’s murder that don’t fit their
racial narrative.
The media is pumping out a steady diet of
black victims and white perpetrators. Even if the perpetrating usually
seems to involve calling the police in a potentially dangerous
situation. But the police forces, many of them run by or filled with
minorities, aren’t oppressing black communities, they’re protecting
them. Because there are
plenty of black Cannons.
Three children are shot
on average every week in Philly. The cops aren’t shooting them.
In
under a decade, criminal justice reform turned the country’s biggest
cities into hellholes. The Democrat media is frantically trying to keep a
lid on the biggest scandal in a generation. Even while gang members are
racking up a body count that we haven’t seen before in this century,
the media keeps shouting that black people are being terrorized by white
cops.
That must be why, in a recent Gallup poll,
81% of black people
wanted more or the same amount of police. But just having the police
patrol neighborhoods isn’t the answer. Arrests are meaningless unless
the perpetrators are held until trial, instead of being put back on the
streets. Trials have to end in serious prison time for violent
offenders, gang members, and drug dealers.
Bail reform, drug decriminalization, and the rest of the criminal justice reform disaster must go.
Organized
crime in America is largely controlled by gangs, some foreign and some
domestic, it’s time we stopped believing the lies that they’re socially
deprived oppressed youth, and started treating them like Al Qaeda,
instead of a bunch of social welfare cases.
America has to go
back to the hoary cliche of the drug war that liberals and libertarians
hate so much. And the southern border has to be secured against the
cartels and China.
George Floyd was high on fentanyl. The source of the deadly drug is often China.
If
Obama hadn’t given China’s drug trade a pass while making sure
Americans needed an ID to buy cough syrup, the entire Floyd case might
never have happened. The more America goes after foreign drug
industries, the less it needs to spend time policing Americans.
Just like Islamic terrorism, we can fight it at the source, or we can try controlling it at home.
If
China were shipping IEDs to America that were killing 30,000 people a
year, we would have a national response. But it’s just pushing chemicals
that are killing
30,000 Americans a year.
The drug war, like the war on terror, is a two way street. Unilaterally surrendering doesn’t work.
We gave up on the war on drugs. And the People’s Republic of China is winning the war on us.
None
of this is what the media wants to talk about because it strikes at the
heart of the governance failures of their political party. Instead it
wants to convince Americans to double down on the same policies that
killed Cannon Hinnant, that killed George Floyd, and that are killing
tens of thousands of Americans every single year with bullets, knives,
and overdoses.
The Democrats embraced criminals, championing
their voting rights, their employment rights, and their right not to be
locked up for committing crimes. They need to be held accountable.
America can belong to the criminals or to the citizens.
We’ve
seen what a country that belongs to the criminals looks like. In
Chicago, the city is raising bridges to keep the mobs of looters out of
downtown. In Portland, armed mobs besieged a federal courthouse. In New
York City, the streets are empty at night. In Minneapolis, the only
security comes from private security. Everywhere in the big cities there
is fear and death.
The answer lies with the same old three Ps: police, prosecutors, and prisons.
It
begins with the simple truth that if Sessoms hadn't been living on
Archers Road, Cannon Hinnant would still be alive. The justice system
exists to protect children like Cannon from criminals like Sessoms. The
Democrats have reversed the equation, fighting to protect criminals from
their victims. America will belong to its people again when the
criminals are back in prison.
Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and
Islamic terrorism.
