[A] wide-ranging movement is already under way to transform the criminal justice system in order to avoid a disparate impact on blacks. This push will jeopardize the country's two-decade-long crime drop.

The pretext for the current decriminalization movement is the half-dozen highly publicized deaths of blacks in encounters with police over the past nine months, including the recent case of Freddie Gray in Baltimore....

The criminal justice pendulum is swinging against personal responsibility and toward the use of race and poverty as an excuse for noncompliance with the law....

[A] two-tiered system of justice that winks at lawlessness when it is committed by officially favored victim groups will make life miserable for the millions of law-abiding residents of poor communities and erode the public-safety gains from proactive policing.