By William K. Black
July 28, 2016 Kansas City, MO
The best way to lose friends and be vilified in America is to talk frankly about race, racism, violent crime, politics, gender, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and prosecuting police officers. I am writing a series of articles on these subjects. In the course of this series I employ my “hats” as criminologist and a professor who teaches economics, law, and regulation plus my spousal hat where I draw on my wife and her co-author’s work on employment and marriage. As criminologists, we are used to upsetting people from all parts of the political spectrum. The one-sided stories that dominate the discussion of these difficult issues virtually always deliberately exclude unpleasant and analytically critical truths long documented by criminologists. I hope to show you how my field has found the answers to the challenges of policing in the United States to be complex and often paradoxical.
