By Victor Davis Hanson in PJ Media
In the last few days, the local
Fresno community was outraged — or at least was reportedly to be so — at the
vandalism of a local Islamic cultural center.
The police authorities almost
immediately, and without waiting for the full evidence to be collected,
declared the minor burglary and damage the apparent dividend of illiberal dark
forces. The chief of police, without compelling evidence, and without
explaining why a secular medical building was also trashed in the spree, rushed
to hold a press conference. He declared the broken window and moderate trashing
of the center’s interior, not just a “hate crime,” but in fact a “brazen hate
crime.”
What next followed was Fresno’s
comic version of what now is normal race and gender news. Almost immediately it
was learned that there was a video of the suspected perpetrator in mediis
rebus. Mr. Asif Mohammad Khan was a Muslim, with a record of mental
disturbances, and had attended the center. He claimed that he had vandalized
the buildings as part of payback to other center attendees who, he claimed, had
bullied him — and reportedly was known to be an admirer of Osama bin Laden. The
“brazen” hate crime and the atmosphere of intolerance vanished with the local
morning fog. The FBI, of course, is still “investigating” a possible “hate
crime.” But they too will quietly go away in short order.
But just a few days earlier, there
was another Fresno crime captured on video, both violent and in theory fueled
by racial animus, or at least more deserving of a FBI second look at such a
possible catalyst. At a local municipal bus stop an elderly man with a walker bravely protested that a large youth was bullying a smaller teen. The video
captures the thug in response yelling at the defender, then striking the man to
the pavement. The latter hit his head on his walker and momentarily lost
consciousness.
The attacker was a large, rather
young African-American; the victim a 62-year-old white man. What followed was
no police hectoring. No lectures about the safety of the city’s bus stops. No
police chief warnings about interracial tensions. No brazen hate crime sermons
about the hale and young attacking the elderly or disabled. Indeed the police
initially did not even consider the attack a crime, but rather a “fall.” Only a
chance bystander’s video of the incident led to a reinvestigation and the
suspected perpetrator’s arrest.
Unlike the city’s failed effort to
turn the Islamic center vandalism into a teachable moment, this really was a
teachable moment, perhaps in two unfortunate regards. One, heroism is rendered
foolish. So far no one in the city has stepped forward to congratulate a
disabled senior’s heroic (and apparently successful) efforts to divert the
bullying of teenager onto his own person. His only reward was to have been
knocked out by the attacker, and the crime initially not considered a crime,
but his injuries due supposedly to his own clumsiness. Second, the
disabled victim is lucky he was not armed. Had he pulled out a legal, concealed
weapon when the bully approached him to attack, and fired in self-defense, we
would have another Trayvon Martin hate crime, and charges that a climate of
racial intolerance had led to the death of another unarmed African-American. In
comparison to all that, a head injury is apparently preferable.
In some cynical fashion I sympathize
with local officials and the police. To rush to judgment on the pseudo-“brazen”
hate crime at the Islamic center is to win laurels and careerist points; to
deplore the truly brazen beating of a solitary old white guy trying to protect
the weaker from a much larger African-American thug who fled the scene is to
court social ostracism and career implosion. Note well that there is no
downside for the police chief in feebly retracting his shoot-from-the-hip
damnation of supposedly local hatred that fueled the vandalism. He just
shrugged, made inoperative his prior false news release, and went on.
I don’t doubt that there are
occasional hate crimes against various ethnic and religious groups. After all,
the United States is still a great experiment that seeks to unite the world’s
tribes into a coherent whole. And never has that gambit been more problematic
in the age of hyphenation and the salad bowl in lieu of the melting pot.
But right now, discussion of crime
is too often constructed as an ideological tool to serve larger political
agendas. We see that cycle with the unproven feminist assertion that 20% of
coeds will be raped on campus during their undergraduate tenures — when the
government’s own statistics show that women on and off the campus have less
than a 1% chance of being sexually assaulted in any given year. If the former myth
is true, then the engine of feminist studies, counselors, and therapeutic
curricula is fueled; if the latter fact is canonized, then society can in part
be thankful that such violent sexual assault has declined from far higher
percentages during past decades.
Surely most neither believe nor act
as if the Stanford campus is a more dangerous place than is East Palo Alto, or
the Columbia dorms more perilous than a nearby Harlem public housing project.
The Duke lacrosse case, the Rolling Stone fiasco, the mythographies of
Lena Dunham all teach us that it is far more dangerous to be falsely accused as
a sexual predator than to falsely accuse the innocent as a sexual predator.
People are human and therefore make the necessary adjustments.
In the age of Ferguson, the tragedy
of Eric Garner, and a host of other politicized crime incidents, is there any
resolution in sight? None that I can see given the nature of the fuel that
feeds such fires. Had the police chief of Fresno been publicly shamed for such
false allegations, he might not be so eager to rush to judgment next time. Had
the bus stop thug been charged with a hate crime — and I do not count out that
the victim’s race, age, and feeble health encouraged the attack — perhaps a
larger message might be sent about such altercations.
My pessimism is not ideological but
empirical. The stuff of the recent protests are weary police of the inner city
confronting hundreds of thousands of times a week a small subset of the
population (perhaps African-American males between ages 15 and 50 constitute no
more than 2-3% of the population) who account for nearly 50% of violent crime.
For such a formula for disaster to dissipate, either one of two things would
have to occur. One, the police will silently avoid such confrontations, to the
degree that they can mask their noncompliance without career repercussions.
That is, when a call comes in that an African-American young man is walking
down the middle of the street and is a suspect in a recent strong-arm robbery,
they will simply avoid him, or when complaints are voiced that a large
African-American vendor is illegally selling cigarettes, with a history of 30
prior arrests, they will not answer the call. Unfortunately I think such the
repercussions of that adjustment will be higher crime rates, especially in the inner city.
Two, the nation would have to have
the Eric Holder-coveted national dialogue of race, rather than a name-calling
sessions about “cowards.” The purpose would be to address the foundations
of young black criminality — the break-up of the family, the pernicious role of
federal subsidies, a value system that deprecates academic learning and
idolizes sports and acts of supposed masculinity, the misogyny and racism of
popular rap and other cultural expression, the neglect of the inner city by the
rest of America, the legacy of racism on the individual psyche, and on and on.
Yet to have such a discussion, not to mention their remedies, would put the Al Sharptons and others out of business. Moreover, the entire Obama
electoral strategy was to galvanize the black community to register, turn out
at the polls, and vote in monolithic fashion for Obama, as the emblematic black
candidate. Because there was no margin of error in such calculus (given that
racial chauvinism turns off one voter for every voter it attracts), if the
cases of Skip Gates, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and the Eric Garner were not
politicized, others would have to be invented to create the needed outrage and
solidarity that translates into political clout.
There are tragic self-corrections in
politics. For the next few years, police will weigh the dangers of intervening
in incidents in which African-American youths confront authorities, and too
often abdicate — until crime rates inch back up, cities like New York revert to
their 1970s status or present-day Chicago, the public demands recalibration, and we go back to
proactive policing. Similarly, bloc ethnic voting will create backlashes or
counter-movements in kind (will there be a day when conservative black Congress
people outnumber those in the Black Caucus?) and we will see ethnic
candidates run as individuals, in fear that appeals to the color of our skins
rather than our character spell suicide.