Births to teen mothers; families headed by single women; violent crime; where police recorded gunshots; people age 25 and older without high school diplomas; the unemployed; people living below the poverty line; and welfare and food stamp recipients.
There is no mention [in King's analysis] of incidents of police brutality or, indeed, of any police conduct other than the entirely passive act of "recording gunshots." (Later in his column, King mentions juvenile arrests, but does not suggest that the police force is in any way to blame for them).
King...thus recognizes the reality I noted immediately following Gray's death: the Baltimore protests are not really about the police. As he puts it, the ills of Baltimore and Washington "exist without factoring in police relations."
So what are we to conclude?
It is difficult to imagine how community relations with the police force, whatever its racial composition, can be other than rocky given the ills King cites. After all, the police force bears the nearly impossible burden of maintaining some semblance of order in neighborhoods plagued by social pathology, family destruction and generations of dependency.
And, I would add, rampant drug abuse.
Here's the bottom line. The police are tasked with enforcing law. Law is to society what parents' rules are to families. When in one generation after the next we have half-families -- homes with no marriage and no father -- what we're going to get are children with no discipline. Children with no discipline become adults with none. And when that happens, what you get is -- Baltimore.
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