African-Americans' Changing Attitudes Toward Crime

Kelefa Sauneh's article entitled "Body Count," in the September 14, 2015 issue of The New Yorker is based mostly on a review of what Nelrisi Coates, a writer for The Atlantic magazine, had to say about the changing attitudes of African-Americans toward crime and the response to it. Coates's article, in turn, is focused largely on what  Michael Javen Fortner, a professor of urban studies and the author of "Back Select Majority," has to say about African-Americans and crime. Fortner's focus is on New York City in the nineteen-sixties and the early seventies, when crime rates shot up, creating a demand in African-American communities for more police officers, more arrests, more convictions and longer prison sentences.

In 1962, a coalition of civic leaders asked President Kennedy to "mobilize all law-enforcement officers to unleash their collective fangs on dope pushers and smugglers." A 1973 New York Times poll found that about three-quarters of New York City blacks and Puerto Ricans "thought that life without parole was the proper sentence for convicted drug dealers."

The drug laws proposed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller and passed by the New York state legislature sharply increased the penalties for various drug crimes: Possession of four ounces of heroin, for instance, would result in a minimum sentence of fifteen years to life. Contrary to what was happening in various African-American communities, where the call was for tougher sentences for convicted criminals, most, if not all African-American legislators did not cast an affirmative vote for the Rockefeller drug laws. As of recent times, the push has been on to significantly lessen the penalties for drug use and possession, because long prison sentences are creating a severe financial strain on New York financial resources.

Professor Fortner wants us to see African-Americans not merely as victims of politics but as active participants in it, too. Although Fortner makes a strong case that African-Americans were once in favor of tough enforcement of laws and stiffer punishment of offenders, the Atlantic writer Nehrisi Coates supplies a corrective. Coates says the term "black-on-black crime" ignores the fact that most violent crime in intraracial, and also obscures the government policies that gave rise to segregated African-American neighborhoods and their higher crime rates.

Coming down to current reality, the Web site calledbypolice.net has been tracking media reports of police shootings since 2013; it finds that blacks are three and a half times  as likely as whites to be killed by police.

ADDENDUM: Capital Punishment Errors - The administration of capital punishment is notoriously prone to error. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a hundred and fifty-five death row inmates have been exonerated and it stands to reason that innocent people still face executions.