New Economic Perspectives

Part 5 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing

William K. Black
August 5, 2016     Bloomington, MN

I explained in my two prior columns the blood libels against “whites” as a race and law enforcement officers (LEOs) made by the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson.  Dyson was particularly vitriolic in complaining that whites refused to “condemn” LEOs who shot blacks until they knew whether the LEOs had acted criminally or even improperly.  Dyson portrays this adherence to due process and the rule of law by whites as an outrageous moral failure.  This column explains two famous incidents that played critical roles in shaping our society’s view that we should celebrate the moral courage required to maintain respect for due process in circumstances where much of the public is baying for its destruction.

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Part 4 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing

William K. Black
August 2, 2016     Bloomington, MN

Part 3 of this series began the explanation of the hypocrisy of the New York Times in its treatment of the sociologist Michael Eric Dyson’s blood libels against police and whites as a race.  Part 3 focused on the terrible timing of Dyson’s op ed in the NYT.  The ambush murders of Dallas law enforcement officers (LEOs) falsified Dyson’s blood libels while the ink was still figuratively wet on his op ed.

I first need to reprise for the reader the NYT’s hypocritical attack on former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani while ignoring Dyson’s blood libels.

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Part 3 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing

By William K. Black
July 31, 2016     Bloomington, MN

This is my third installment in my series of columns about race, crime, and policing.  I chose as my initial example of dangerous blood libels a New York Times contributor’s op ed.  I use also a NYT editorial about blood libels involving crime and race that demonstrates the editorial board’s hypocrisy and analytical failures.

The New York Times Spreads a Blood Libel Against LEOs and Whites

On July 11, 2016, the editorial board of the New York Times denounced a man for propagating “racial myths,” through a “garbled, fictional statistic,” “false equivalencies,” “defam[ation],” and “race-baiting.”  There were only three problems with the editorial.  First, the man they were denouncing made his unscripted remarks on an interview program, while the New York Times invited one of their editorial contributors to write an op ed dated July 7, 2016 that exemplified the characteristics that the editorial denounced.  The writer of the op ed presented no data, so he did not present a fictional statistic.  The racial myths, race-baiting, and false equivalencies of the op ed were so much worse than the talk show participant that his defamation degenerated into blood libels against LEOs and whites as a race.

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Part 2 of my series on Race, Crime, and Policing

By William K. Black
July 31, 2016     Bloomington, MN

My introductory column in this series laid out the blood libels against police, policing, blacks, and whites that are doing so much harm to America.  This second installment provides a brief historical overview necessary to begin the discussion about the blood libels against Black Lives Matter, law enforcement officers (LEOs) and whites as a racial group.  I repeat my warning from my introductory installment that criminology produces hard truths and nuanced explanations that upset almost everyone.

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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.

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