Criminals Cost a Lot

By Patrick Hall

Disproportionate criminal behavior, which often defines many inner-city communities, comes at a significant cost to the majority of its residents. Quite a few of these costs are discernible.  For example, you may have added security at your local Dollar General, which becomes an extra expense passed on to the customer.  Not far from my residence the State Liquor Store often maintains visible security, unlike State Liquor Stores in other parts of town. Also, rapid criminality or hoodlums place limits on the types of products and services available at an inner-city Wal-Mart, Publix, Safeway, or Kroger. Once more, these same establishments in more affluent areas don’t have these security concerns. But the fact of the matter is, that suburban stores can keep thousands of low-priced and bulky items like barbecue grills, home and garden items outside the store. They provide their customers with more choices. The foyer in many of these businesses can also display all types of soft drinks, and chips, as well as a menagerie of products virtually unguarded. These same establishments located in less prosperous neighborhoods cannot. This is a direct cost or expense precipitated by criminal or hoodlum behavior. In larger urban areas like Philly, Baltimore, Chicago, or St. Louis a preponderance of the criminality is initiated by young black men. Broadly speaking, they are the cohort, that orchestrates much of the chaos. Current FBI and DOJ statistics show, that Blacks are responsible for most felonies, such as retail theft, armed robbery, and a host of other misdemeanors nationwide.  In inner-city communities, blacks are responsible for over 70%. Remember, Blacks make up only 13% of the United States population. Even more tragic is that over the past 10 years, many felonies have been reduced to misdemeanors making inner city areas even less hospitable. In a growing number of cases, hoodlums are quickly released or not even charged because well-placed (Progressive/Liberal) DAs, judges, and lawyers don’t enforce, and have largely neutered the law. They are proponents of the fallacy propagated in our nation's Law Schools and Criminal Justice Programs known as “restorative justice.”  The effect of these liberal soft-on-crime policies has been a lot of dead people, many of them black. But no biggie. Democrats and kind-hearted suburban liberals (both white and black) don’t have to live near the chaos they create. As long as they are not called racist or insensitive toward whatever group they deem oppressed.  It’s classic Dietrich Bonhoeffer's “grace on the cheap.”

Phil Ochs, a 1960s folk singer had a song about Liberals, that was popular during my early college years. It was entitled Love Me, Love Me, Love Me, I’m a Liberal. The most discordant example of liberal public policy is the notion of sanctuary cities. This policy adopted by many cities nationwide sounded compassionate, and magnanimous, if not somewhat self-sacrificing. It was the ultimate in virtue signaling for many Democrats. These same municipalities are now flooded with “illegal immigrants” crying for help.  Many Northern cities like New York and Boston, which touted themselves as sanctuary cities, were kicked in the butt by reality. Martha’s Vineyard a very affluent township of 30K and home of Barack Obama, immediately called in the National Guard and had a busload of illegal immigrants removed. Cities on the Southern border from Yuma, Arizona to Brownsville, Texas, who are dealing with literally millions of illegal migrants because of Biden’s Open Border policies, are being swamped.  Check the previous statement. For all practical purposes, the United States at this time has no Southern border.

The point is bad policies and not enforcing the law have their costs.  A lot of innocent people get abused and many times killed by rampant criminality. This always seems to happen when you tie liberal progressive ideas and get destructive real-world outcomes. For many Liberals, (mostly Democrats), public policies don’t have to work as long as they sound good!  Besides the sanctuary city fantasy, the reparations crowd, student loan forgiveness, defunding the police, no cash bail, as well as transgender women (i.e., biological males) competing in women’s sports, are examples of horrendous directives that sounded good to Progressive Liberal Democrats. However, there is a clever, if not devious strategy that politicians like Obama and Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) understand quite well. It is a lot easier to program a bad leftist idea into the system than to get it out again. It’s similar to trying to fire a federal government employee.

Even in my working-class neighborhood, residents oftentimes refer to our local Wal-Mart as the Ghetto Mart. This characterization may sound unfair and an easy moniker, that screams racism to the ears of perpetually offended (i.e., white and black liberals.) However, the criminality occurring both inside and outside the store, especially during the evening hours is another world when compared to Wal-Mart's and other establishments in less sketchy parts of town.

In many larger communities, such as Philadelphia, St. Louis, Seattle, and Chicago, everything must be tied down or placed behind bars or plexiglass.  The recent smash-and-grab mobs that have become ubiquitous in cities nationwide have taken criminality to a whole new level. Far too many blacks are perpetrators of this brazen lawlessness.

In addition, these businesses must hire or install additional security which comes at a cost.  As we see the tragedy unfolding in places like Philly or San Francisco, many stores have just closed or moved out of crime-ridden precincts. In many cities like Baltimore and Chicago residents live with bars on their doors and windows. They also have dogs in their yards and guns in their homes.  These are palpable costs of unfettered criminality.  

Also, despite what you might hear from the BLM and the Defund the Police acolytes, many urban residents including most black people don’t live in grave fear of the police.  Criminals are an existential danger.  Many of them are black hoodlums who commit 90% of the murders in the inner city, 60% of all murders nationwide, and virtually all of the petty crimes that are endemic features in most inner-city communities. The police and many who live in these urban communities are acutely aware of these truths. Subsequently, the police “criminally profile” those individuals who are most likely involved in some form of maleficence. So, when a robbery or homicide occurs at an inner-city Dollar General, the police don’t waste their time questioning or arresting 87-year-old Korean grandmothers. They “criminally profile” those who are most likely involved in some form of criminality.  And yes, all African Americans pay for the lawlessness of their hoodlum brethren.

 The problem is not profiling, criminal, or otherwise. It is the continuing self-destructive behavior and attitudes all too common within the black underclass. In Post Civil Rights America, the main obstacle to racial equality has little to nothing to do with racism, but culture and behavior.  If the truth dared to be told.  It is the men and women of law enforcement who have saved more black lives than the Al Sharpton’s, BLM Global, Congressional Black Caucus, and various Progressive Democratic constituencies, including the first Black President.