Murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double what they were in May last year, and higher than in any May in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the number of arrests is down by more than 50 percent.
None of this should be surprising. In her carefully researched 2010 book, "Are Cops Racist?" Heather Mac Donald pointed out that, after anti-police campaigns, cops tended to do less policing and criminals tended to commit more crimes.
If all this has been known for years, why do the same mistakes keep getting made?
Mainly because it is not a mistake for those people who are looking out for their own political careers. Critics who accuse the mayor of Baltimore and the Maryland prosecutor of incompetence, for their irresponsible words and actions, are ignoring the possibility that these two elected officials are protecting and promoting their own chances of remaining in office or of moving on up to higher offices.
Racial demagoguery gains votes for politicians, money for race hustling lawyers and a combination of money, power and notoriety for armies of professional activists, ideologues and shakedown artists.
Not only Attorney General Holder, but President Obama himself, has repeatedly come out with public statements against the police in racial cases, long before the full facts were known. Nor have they confined their intervention to inflammatory words.
So let's not be so quick to say that people are incompetent when they say things that make no sense to us. Attacking the police makes sense in terms of politicians' personal interests, and often in terms of the media's personal interests or ideological leanings, even if what they say bears little or no resemblance to the facts.
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