Serious questions about the rule of law in the United States

Heather MacDonald writes in City Journal,

The Chauvin jury may have pondered not just the destruction of American cities following any acquittal but its own safety. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune had published profiles of jury members minus their names on Monday, during closing arguments in the trial.

The “summer of protest” had sent the message, according to Biden: “Enough. Enough. Enough of the senseless killings.”

Biden was not referring to the senseless killing of seven-year-old Jaslyn Adams, gunned down in a Chicago McDonald’s over the weekend. He was not referring to the four dozen black children who were killed last year in their beds, front porches, back porches, at barbecues and family birthday parties, and in their parents’ cars. He was not referring to the dozens of blacks killed every day in drive-by shootings—more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined—even though blacks are only 12 percent of the nation’s population. Those thousands of black deaths get no attention from the Black Lives Matter movement and its most fervent press acolytes because the homicide perpetrators are other blacks, not the police or whites.

…The idea that blacks are frequently and disproportionately gunned down by the police is an optical illusion created by selective media coverage. If the press chose to ignore police shootings of blacks and focus exclusively on police shootings of whites (which are twice as numerous), Americans would think that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings of whites.

Last year, the United States saw the largest percentage increase in homicides in the nation’s recorded history, thanks to depolicing. The crime wave has continued unabated in 2021. It will worsen. The Minneapolis verdict will not change the poisonous narrative about a racist criminal-justice system. That narrative ensures that encounters between black suspects and the police will remain fraught. Black suspects will continue to resist arrest, increasing the chance that officers will escalate their use of force. If a suspect death ensues, more riots will follow.

The victims will initially be, as always, the thousands of law-abiding blacks in vulnerable urban neighborhoods who yearn for more police protection. But the power of riot ideology—the blackmailing of American institutions with the threat of black rage—is too advantageous to give up.

Americans should be deeply concerned about the future of the rule of law.

REad more here: https://www.city-journal.org/chauvin-verdict-and-americas-troubled-rule-of-law