what if they would need more help from outside to get out of this circle? money that is spent elsewhere could be used here instead. and maybe there should be more laws regarding fire arms in the US. i imagine it must be hell to be a policeman in a place where everyone could pull out a gun if he feels just a little bit threatened.
It's such a multi-faceted problem that it requires a multi-pronged approach imo. Decades ago Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when he was still an academic, wrote a huge treatise based on the premise that many of the problems of the minority communities, excluding Asians, both East and South Asian, and also to some degree the Middle Easterners, was because of the state of the black family. The causes are myriad: the legacy of slavery, when family bonds were broken, and men, especially, could be sold away from their women and children and took no responsibility for them; reconstruction, when black women could get jobs as domestics, but men had a harder time getting and keeping jobs; well intentioned welfare programs that gave more money to single women supporting children than to intact families; perhaps even, in part, a cultural legacy from Africa, where it was accepted that men might have children by more than one woman; a cultural feeling that for a man to wear a condom was to declare he wasn't a man and that the more children he fathered, the more "manly" he was.
Then, flash forward again to welfare programs, and the fact that the factory jobs which propelled poor black men to the north for good paying jobs have dried up, devastating both the poorer blacks and whites, and that welfare payments are high enough that they're barely less than what people black or white can make at minimum wage jobs at fast food outlets, markets, etc. It's cultural as well, certain jobs are looked down upon in our society, for blacks and whites. Immigrants from Haiti have made more progress than American blacks because they were willing to take those jobs, working three jobs at a time to get a stake and be able to buy a small house, start a small business. Immigrants from Central America have done the same thing to a certain extent, although they have their own gangs and violence problems too. They are mainly the people I see working these service jobs now, working their way up to managers etc.
Even European immigrants took that route. My nanny for seven years was a Portuguese immigrant. She saved every penny while she worked for me, as did her fiance, who broke his back working construction. In fact, she married out of my house, and my son was her ring bearer. Once she got married, she cleaned two houses a day for cash. With that money and what she had saved they bought a broken down two family house, lived in one, and rented out the other. More work, more savings, and then they bought a second house, so now they could live rent free. She had only one child, and one Portuguese woman in her neighborhood watched the children of five other women who continued to work, for which they paid her. I asked her if she wasn't tired, wouldn't think of slowing down. She wouldn't think of it; she saved enough to buy a house in Portugal. Was it easy? No, it wasn't, but she learned English, got a driver's license, pays the fees to send her daughter to a Catholic school, and tells me that she lives better than she ever did in her little rural village, and has no desire to ever go back. It can be done, but you have to work incredibly hard, the mother and father have to stay together, work together, take care of their children, and above all, no alcohol abuse, no drugs etc.
Which brings me to what really precipitated the downfall of the inner cities, and that's drugs, and particularly crack. The difference was that it was so damn cheap and so damn addictive. People would sell their souls for the relief it gave. Families fell apart, mothers gave birth to crack and heroin addicted children and on and on. Why do you think our health statistics for all kinds of things, including the health and life expectancy of young children is below that of Europe. That's why there are so many poor grandmothers trying to take care of their children's children; their children are either in jail or addicted to one drug or another. Single mothers are trying to raise sons alone, with no man in the house. I know people don't want to hear it, but you can't socialize young boys into wholesome behavior when there's no father around, and they see no future where they make good money except selling drugs. And what do you need to sell drugs, to protect yourself when you're selling drugs? You need guns, or at least knives. To belong you need to belong to a gang, and the initiation rite is to kill someone.
Drugs are not innocuous. When they flood in over our southern border with impunity, ever cheaper, and derivatives are even cheaper, when anyone with a few chemicals can open up a meth lab, then anyone with psychological issues, anyone dealing with depression because he feels ill equipped to deal with the demands of an increasingly less manual labor intensive society, anyone facing what they think is a bleak future, and that increasingly includes the white working class, is in danger from them.
That's why Black and Hispanic communities like Harlem and the South Bronx turned from communities with middle class areas, with black owned shops and community centers, with vibrant cultural and entertainment venues to the hell holes they are today. It looks like bombed out Beirut up there, and cops didn't blow up the buildings or set the fires. Those middle class blacks, anyone with talent or luck, managed to get out to middle class black communities or racially mixed communities and the poorly equipped to deal with life as it is now have been left behind.
A gun is a way to feel powerful, to protect yourself and your drugs. They're easy to get, and not, trust me, because gun shops sell them or because the rules are lax in terms of getting a gun in most states. The people in the inner cities don't get their guns that way. They wouldn't be able to pass even the most lax standards. For one thing, anyone with a criminal record can't buy them. They buy them on the black market, and the source is from over the border with Mexico. A strong border would not only stop illegal immigrants, it would stop drugs and guns from flooding our inner cities, and it would stop the human sex trade as well, or at least put a serious dent in it all. That's why cities like Chicago, for example, which have very tight gun restrictions, have so much gun crime.
Rudy Giuliani tried to address the problem in NYC by instituting what was called "stop and frisk". If people looked suspicious, i.e. congregating on a corner where money was changing hands, they were stopped and frisked for illegal arms. Gun violence and homicides went down precipitously in New York City, precisely in the black areas where it was most a problem. Bloomberg, the next mayor, continued the program, but times changed: it became racist, a violation of civil liberties, and it was discontinued under the Democrat mayor, and Bloomberg had to do a humiliation tour to say mea culpa for ever permitting it.
Is there racism still in America? Yes, there is. Are there some white policemen who are racists and harass young blacks? Yes, there are. Do young white men dressed in gang clothing and hanging out drunk and high on street corners also sometimes get harassed by white, and black and brown police officers? Yes, they do. Are there some bad cops out there who are sadists? Yes, they are, and they have to be weeded out or prosecuted. Sometimes they got past the screening; sometimes they're turned and hardened by what they see; sometimes they're corrupted by the astronomical sums of money floating around connected to the drug trade. Do black defendants still get harsher sentences than white defendants? Overall, yes they do. However, if the study were done of lower class or underclass whites I know you'd see the same thing. Believe me: I've seen it. When you have no money you get government appointed lawyers who are either incompetent or just out of law school, which is the same thing.
So, does the system share some of the blame when things go wrong? Yes, it does. However, there are deep rooted, horrific issues in these underclass communities which the "new" black and white radicals never acknowledge or address, and blaming "racism" for everything is not the solution. Most importantly, to get back to the original point, removing the police presence or even decreasing it in these areas would be criminal. You would be dooming all the innocent people left. Anyone who doesn't see that is living in la la land.
