To justify his request, Clemon Young, Jr. invoked a study allegedly showing that black drivers in California were stopped at higher rates than nonblack drivers.
After the RJA had stalled in the assembly, its author, San Jose assemblyman Ash Kalra, found a moribund bill in the California Senate, removed its language, and inserted the RJA text.
The question of whether actual crime commission or racism on the part of law-enforcement personnel is responsible for black overrepresentation in prison is distinct from the question of why black crime rates are so high.
The advocates want to change the subject and put those claiming the existence of crime disparities on the defensive, lest others also break the taboos around black crime.
In California as a whole, blacks are 11 times as likely to get arrested for homicide as whites, even though a greater proportion of white homicides are domestic, and thus more easily solved than gang shootings.
While the California District Attorneys Association singlehandedly fought RJA passage, the state's progressive prosecutors share the RJA worldview that, in Ash Kalra's words, "In every aspect of the justice system, there is bias." Several such progressive prosecutors started dismantling the sentencing practices targeted by the RJA even before getting sued.
Why should police and prosecutors try aggressively to incapacitate murderous black gangs when their efforts can be undone on the basis of tendentious statistical analyses? Unless California voters reverse the Racial Justice Act, the state is about to become more violent and the promise of equal justice under the law less credible.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/californias-looming-crime-catastrophe
Comments
Post a Comment