Heather MacDonald makes the point that the Liberals look at Problems as Structural, the Conservatives look at them as Behavioural. “We are not living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of black men. The core flaw of any left wing anti cop rhetoric or the mass incarceration meme is the failure to find the proper benchmark for evaluating police behaviour. Inevitably, policing is compared to population ratios. So let’s say in New York City, about 50% of all pedestrian stops are of blacks. Blacks are about 23% of the population. Black Lives Matter activists or an academic often would say that shows the police are Racist. Wrong Benchmark. The benchmark is Crime. Policing is crime driven. Blacks in New York City commit 7% of all Shootings. If you add Hispanic shootings to black shootings, you account for 98% of all shootings in New York. Whites are 34% of the population, they commit 2% of shootings. So that’s the basic fallacy.” Excellent point, and of course looking at it Structurally and labeling as Racist, Stops the Job Being Done. Ms MacDonald elaborates, “They will not ever accept a behavioural explanation that there are behaviours, cultures that are different that explain poverty rates, say conservatives, maybe to a fault are not particularly open to structural explanations and we’ll see behavioural reasons. So, for instance, when you look at Poverty, the biggest driver in American poverty today is having children out of wedlock. If you are a single mother, the chances are really High that you’re going to be Poor and your child is about Five Times more likely to be poor than if he were a child of married parents. And there’s a whole set of choices for Good or Bad that people can make that almost Guarantee that you can become Middle Class. It’s very simple. Three simple things you can do – graduate from high school, wait until you’re married to have a child and work at a job full time. Any job, low minimum wage job. 70% of people who do that are Not Poor. So that to me is the basic difference. So the benchmark problem in policing comes from not being willing to look at behaviour. And I think that is true for everything in society. We have the most dangerous conceit out there is this disparate impact analysis that says that any neutral policy that has a disparate impact on racial groups must be Biased. Again, that is the analysis that only makes sense if you don’t look at behaviour!”
Heather MacDonald – The Diversity Delusion Part 3
