Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky is capable of occasionally making true statements, like the following:
Given these developments, it is almost impossible for many Americans not to feel like their government is targeting them. Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.
This is part of the anguish we are seeing in the tragic events outside of St. Louis, Missouri. It is what the citizens of Ferguson feel when there is an unfortunate and heartbreaking shooting like the incident with Michael Brown.
Anyone who thinks that race does not still, even if inadvertently, skew the application of criminal justice in this country is just not paying close enough attention. Our prisons are full of black and brown men and women who are serving inappropriately long and harsh sentences for non-violent mistakes in their youth.
It shouldn’t be necessary to back something so obvious up with citations, but that is what Paul Mirengoff of Powerline demands.
Paul uses the occasion of the Brown tragedy to say that “given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.” But Paul makes no attempt to show that the disparities in question — presumably pertaining to conviction rates — are the result of “government targeting,” as opposed to disparities in the commission of crimes. Blacks may feel targeted, but U.S. Senators shouldn’t lend credibility to that feeling by disparaging our justice system unless they provide meaningful analysis to back it up.
It is particularly unfortunate that Paul uses Brown’s death to peddle the “government targeting blacks” narrative. Brown wasn’t killed due to government targeting. He was killed, from all that appears, by a bad cop.
It’s nice that Mirengoff is willing to say that a “bad cop” was responsible for the killing, but it will be interesting to see if he maintains that position after learning that Michael Brown may have been legitimately targeted for stealing cigars from a convenience store.
As should be obvious, the dispute in Ferguson is about a lot more than whether Michael Brown had committed a crime or not. We don’t have a death penalty for shoplifting in this country for a reason.
The response of law enforcement to legal protests in St. Louis County is what caused Sen. Paul to write about the militarization of police departments. And widespread racial profiling is just a fact of life in this country that should not be a contentious subject. If it irritates people on the right to point it out, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening.
But, if Powerline wants to maintain that blacks commit all the crime in this country and therefore deserve the system as it exists, they can go right ahead and keep making that argument. It won’t win them the votes they need to maintain that system.
