One of the more asinine narratives currently on promotion in newly woke social media is a condemnation of any approach “tough on crime”, hostility towards the concept of policing itself and a touch of prison abolitionism. Crazy SJWs want you to believe that the very maintenance of a police force to stop and catch murderers, rapists, thieves and other such rogue elements is itself inherently racist. They argue that sentencing for serious offences should be made more lenient (if not gotten rid of entirely) and that funding for police forces ought to be reduced. Unfortunately, such crackpot insanity is gaining growing legitimacy in mainstream leftist groupthink; if it ever becomes policy it will kill far more people than deadly police shootings do.
The statistical fallacy that SJWs rely on to support this line of argument is overrepresentation. People of colour are overrepresented in the prison population as a proportion of the population’s demographic makeup; therefore, the judicial system must be racist against them. But x does not equal y, and there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this beyond “systemic racism”: ethnic minorities are also overrepresented in the perpetration of certain crimes. You can have vigorous debates about why—be it poverty, alienation or perhaps a lack of integration, but an effective and truly non-racist system of law enforcement must prosecute offenders regardless of their race. Black, white or Asian, nobody should be let off lighter purely on the basis of their race. Furthermore, why do SJWs judge the welfare of ethnic minorities by the plight of criminals, whose lifestyles an overwhelming majority of other law-abiding ethnic minorities, despise and disavow? As a percentage of the aggregate BAME population, those engaged in crime is miniscule, so why should their interests be equated to the interests of brown and black people as a whole?
There’s another side to these statistics nobody’s mentioning: people of colour are overrepresented as victims of crimes too. According to a Metropolitan Police Freedom of Information request, 58% of knife crime victims in 2018 were ethnic minorities—in a city where 60% of the population is white. This trend holds consistent across other categories of crime. The depolicing of BME communities that SJWs want will only make life there less safe, empowering vicious street gangs at the expense of the law-abiding. The problem for many minority communities is not too much interaction with police, but (after police budget cuts due to austerity) too little. This is partly why many inner-city council estates are virtually run by wicked hoodlums who literally traffic children from their community as young as 11 in “county lines” to sell narcotics in other regions of the United Kingdom. How can any self-professed advocate of BME rights apologise for brutes who cause pain and suffering to mostly BME families?
Yet for some reason, SJWs appear blind to the reality that after decades of liberalisation in our criminal justice system since the 1960s, manifested in the explosion of cautions, suspended sentences and early release of violent offenders (some of those released going on to kill, as shown by the London Bridge attack) has been disastrous for BME communities. Why don’t SJWs campaign against the post-code wars that have left entire generations of poor working-class BME teenagers socialised around, traumatised by and accustomed to criminality in their local areas? They’re all for smashing up shops in the name of justice, just not delivering it in the courts. Living such a reality is dispiriting and crushes ambition. Until ethnic minority neighbourhoods are as safe as white neighbourhoods, there can be no pretence of racial equality.
There are plenty of genuine issues surrounding police conduct which can be discussed without invalidating the critical work they do to maintain public order and safety. White middle-class liberals pontificating about this on the internet do not live in or understand the dynamics of high crime areas, whether they be mostly white-working class or mostly people of colour. Strong law and order is not only compatible with, but also is a precondition of, victory against prejudice and discrimination.