Perspectives on the impact of the Gates incident

Heather MacDonald: "Obama's Ignorant Attack On Cops"

Excerpt:

"President Obama’s ignorant attack on the police during his July 22 press conference for picking up blacks and Hispanics 'more frequently and often time for no cause' jeopardizes the public-safety gains in every city where the police have brought crime down since the early 1990s.

When activists and politicians, not to mention the President of the United States, accuse the police of bias, some officers decide that proactive policing is not worth the risk to their jobs and reputations. It’s easier to wait for someone to be shot than to try to get that gun off the street before it is used. No government welfare program has come close to effective policing in reviving inner-city neighborhoods.

If President Obama wants to continue that urban success story, he should acknowledge the value of policing and the hard work of the countless inner-city officers who tell themselves every day they go out on patrol: 'I work for the good people of this neighborhood.' "

Harry Stein: "Unteachable"

Excerpt:

"What are we meant to be taught? Well, what else? That for all of the progress we seem to have made on race, black people understand, in ways whites can never fathom, that racism is alive and well in America.

With each such incident, however, fewer and fewer of us are playing along. This time, more than ever, we’re learning other lessons. One of them: for all the talk from his starry-eyed acolytes, in the media and elsewhere, about Obama’s being 'post-racial,' the president clings to the discredited and deeply damaging view of America as fundamentally racist, seeing his fellow blacks as perpetual victims justifiably suspicious of cops and other establishment authority figures.

So when it comes to race, it’s facts be damned. Indeed, while Obama is so famously cautious and deliberative it took him months to decide on the family dog, his now-infamous off-the-cuff comment on the stupidity of the Cambridge police made it clear that on this issue, the former community organizer wholeheartedly embraces the black victim/racist cop trope.

....We’ve also been reminded, once again, that the media are to be trusted even less on race than on other contentious issues. The New York Times, for one, seems always to have a racial-profiling feature prewritten and ready to slap onto the front page. Yet somehow these features never seem to include the vast store of documentary evidence contradicting the fervently held view of minorities as victims of racist cops.

Perhaps the most telling media moment during the Gates brouhaha was the observation by an NPR anchor—only slight paraphrasing here—that opinion was divided over whether the police were to blame or there was fault on both sides.

'Teachable moments' never teach these people anything."

Not that truths like these will make any difference to the "raaaaaaaacism"/"hate crime"/race baiting crowd nationally and locally.

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