Race is key.
by Ward Connerly
Earlier this year, the Justice Department of the Obama administration announced its objective to aggressively monitor the police departments of major urban cities. The purpose of this effort is to determine whether such departments are involved in racial profiling of blacks and Latinos and whether they are engaged in police brutality. Since that announcement, events have unfolded in some of those cities that reveal how misplaced that policy initiative actually is.
In Chicago, the District of Columbia, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, a group of “flash mobs” have unmercifully terrorized residents of those communities – attacking citizens, breaking windows of business establishments and stealing merchandise, and committing other random acts of violence. In each instance, the mobs have been overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, black youth. This fact has accounted for the failure of most of the news media to report either the events themselves or the racial background of the perpetrators. Several news sources have readily admitted that it is their practice not to mention the racial identity of those involved in criminal activity. Jim Stingl, a columnist for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, recently wrote, “This newspaper normally avoids mentioning the race of people involved in crimes, unless it’s part of a description to help apprehend someone at large.”