About a decade into a federal consent decree requiring the Los Angeles Police Department to hire more minority officers, theLAPD’S Rampart division was employing gang members in uniforms.
As the story of Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson’s shooting of Michael Brown begins to look less clear-cut than we were led to believe by Brown’s friend, Dorian Johnson, the “voices of oppression” on MSNBC now say the real issue is that there aren’t enough blacks on the Ferguson police force.
As Brown may or may not have said seconds before his death: I give up.
If the Ferguson police are forced to hire more minorities and women for the sake of diversity, the one thing we can be sure of is that more black people will be murdered, raped and assaulted.
Someone’s got to say it, so it might as well be me: I’m against more black people being murdered, raped and assaulted.
In a massive, detailed 2000 study of the effect of court-ordered affirmative action plans on police departments, economist John Lott found that the more minorities on a police force, the higher the rates of murder, manslaughter, violent crime, robbery and aggravated assault will be. Violent crime increased by a minimum of 3.3 percent every year after affirmative action policies went into effect—and the spike in crime was highest in black neighborhoods.
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