Posted on 04/03/2019 4:40:24 AM PDT by Kaslin
Sometimes, during my drive to work, I listen to Clarence Maurice Mitchell IV, host of the Baltimore's WBAL C4 radio show. Mitchell was formerly a member of Maryland's House of Delegates and its Senate. In recent weeks, Mitchell has been talking about the terrible crime situation in Baltimore. In 2018, there were 308 homicides. So far this year, there have been 69. That's in a 2018 population of 611,648 -- down from nearly a million in 1950. The city is pinning its hopes to reduce homicides and other crime on new Police Commissioner Michael Harrison.
Another hot news item in Baltimore is the fact that Johns Hopkins University wants to hire 100 armed police officers to patrol its campuses, hospital and surrounding neighborhoods. The hospital president, Dr. Redonda Miller testified in Annapolis hearings that patients and employees are "scared when they walk home, they're scared when they walk to their cars."
Philadelphia's Temple University police department is the largest university police force in the United States, with 130 campus police officers, including supervisors and detectives.
In 1957, I attended night school at Temple University. There was little or no campus police presence. I am sure that people who attended Johns Hopkins, University of Chicago, and other colleges in or adjacent to black neighborhoods during the '40s, '50s and earlier weren't in an armed camp. In the nation's largest school districts that serve predominantly black youngsters, school police outnumber, sometimes by large margins, school counseling staffs. Again, something entirely new. I attended predominantly black Philadelphia schools from 1942 to 1954. The only time we saw a policeman in school was during an assembly where we had to listen to a boring lecture on safety. Today, Philadelphia schools have hired more than 350 police officers. What has happened to get us to this point? Will hiring more police officers and new police chiefs have much of an impact on crime?
No doubt hiring more and better trained police officers will have some impact on criminal and disorderly behavior -- but not much unless we create a police state. The root of the problem, particularly among black Americans, is the breakdown of the family unit where fathers are absent. In 1938, 11 percent of blacks were born to unmarried women. By 1965, that number had grown to 25 percent. Now it's about 75 percent. Even during slavery, when marriage between blacks was illegal, a higher percentage of black children were raised by their biological mothers and fathers than today. In 1940, 86 percent of black children were born inside marriage. Today, only 35 percent of black children are born inside marriage. Having no father in the home has a serious impact. Children with no father in the home are five times more likely to be poor and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school and 20 times more likely to be in prison.
Our generous welfare system, in effect, allows women to marry the government. Plus, there is shortage of marriageable black men because they've dropped out of school, wound up in jail and haven't much of a future. Unfortunately, many blacks followed the advice of white liberal academics such as Johns Hopkins professor Andrew Cherlin who in the 1960s argued that "the most detrimental aspect of the absence of fathers from one-parent families is not the lack of a male presence but the lack of male income" Cherlin's vision suggested that fathers were unimportant and if black females "married the government"; black fathers would be redundant.
Most of today's major problems encountered by black people have little or nothing to do with racial discrimination and a legacy of slavery. People who make those excuses are doing a grave disservice to black people. The major problems black people face are not amenable to political solutions and government anti-poverty programs. If they were, then they'd be solved by the more than $20 trillion dollars nation has spent on poverty programs since 1965. As comic strip character Pogo said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
In the end I look in the mirror and see the truth about myself that I need to change.
Blaming others is a dead end street.
Didn’t Bill Cosby say the same thing, only to be chided by the black community?
Too bad the cops let so many illegals into our country. So much for ‘law-enforcement’, i give ‘em the laugh now.
Brilliant! Just brilliant!
I remember a long car trip where Williams was subbing for Rush. His guest for most of the show was Thomas Sowell. That was an amazing collaboration of minds.
“Blaming others is a dead end street.”
So we should hold murderers blameless, then.
L
He’s right on.
C4 should be appointed to replace Catherine Pugh as Baltimore mayor.
I don’t disagree with Dr. Williams. To control the current Baltimore crime problem:
Stop, the decades+ Balt. frequent flyer program. Catch the perps then 15+ yr. sentences, which are then plea downed to 6 months.Perps back on the streets. This a politician, judges & lawyers problem. They know it & won’t change, because crime is big $$$$ in Balt..Much of this crime level in Balt. is perp on perp.
C4’s (Mitchell) daily show on WBAL radio gets calls all the time about the above. The powers that be still do NOTHING!
Food and water goes into a city and crime and violence comes out. Pre globalism cities made something of value and were self sustaining.....
Of course his infamous quote is now censured by the pc language nazis, but he nailed it, and them.
Welcome to your "Great Society"!
“the more than $20 trillion dollars nation has spent on poverty programs since 1965”
About the size of our national debt, isn’t it?
But look at all the good things we have to show for it.
Thank you LBJ and all the other social engineering, massive government, buy-the-votes politicians.
What times I’ve caught both of them on the air,my IQ seemed to go up a few points.
Both brilliant minds.
I guess you think the decades of the Democrats blaming white people, subsidizing sloth, illegitimacy, bad life choices etc. with our tax dollars is not a contributing factor the third world shithole culture that exists in most big cities.
Yes indeed. And Sowell has come out of retirement to write a few columns lately.
Pressed into service by his conscience I suppose.
Holding people responsible for their criminal actions is not the same as blaming others around you for your failures. Failure to differentiate between the two tends to confuse people. If people find themselves blaming others, isn’t it possible that they see the long term daily evil done to their families and to them individually by the welfare system? Welfare, and all the government intrusion that results, has caused unimaginable harm to their families, social institutions, and their jobs. I believe they often are accurately blaming those government entities that impose these social losses upon them. This situation is not hopeless, and the phasing out of welfare over the next several decades would make a world of difference to individuals, families and cultures hurt by the truly dreadful government welfare system. Walter Williams is right. Government is never and can never be enough and blaming others is a dead end street.
In the 1960s the Left put blacks on welfare, set up laws guaranteeing widespread family destruction, and passed a law allowing the mass immigration that put blacks more than anyone out of work.
A few generations later of none of these issues being resolved, here we are, with inner city black communities being less safe than Afghanistan.
Blacks should forget reparations and instead file a class action lawsuit against the Democrat Party. But oddly instead of recognizing the problem, they vote for more of it.
We took away their rice bowl. I won’t blame the victim.
That is the answer although the flip side of that is there are not enough prisons and we would have to wrestle demonicrat exorbitant pension funds away from them to finance the policy. So basically it ain’t gunna happen
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