The great lie of the summer has been the Black Lives Matter movement. It was founded on one falsehood--that a Ferguson, Mo., police officer shot a black suspect who was trying to surrender--and it is perpetuated by another: that trigger-happy cops are filling our morgues with young black men.The reality is that Michael Brown is dead because he robbed a convenience store, assaulted a uniformed officer and then made a move for the officer's gun. The reality is that a cop is six times more likely to be killed by someone black than the reverse. The reality is that the Michael Browns are a much bigger threat to black lives than are the police. "Every year, the casualty count of black-on-black crime is twice that of the death toll of 9/11," wrote former New York City police detective Edward Conlon in a Journal essay on Saturday. "I don't understand how a movement called 'Black Lives Matter' can ignore the leading cause of death among young black men in the U.S., which is homicide by their peers."
Actually, it's not hard to understand at all, once you realize that this movement is not about the fate of blacks per se but about scapegoating the police in particular, and white America in general, for antisocial ghetto behavior. It's about holding whites to a higher standard than the young black men in these neighborhoods hold each other to. Ultimately, it's a political movement, the inevitable extension of a racial and ethnic spoils system that helps Democrats get elected. The Black Lives Matter narrative may be demonstrably false, but it's also politically expedient.
Mr. Riley concludes:It's the black poor--the primary victims of violent crimes and thus the people most in need of effective policing--who must live with the effects of these falsehoods. As the Black Lives Matter movement has spread, murder rates have climbed in cities across the country, from New Orleans to Baltimore to St. Louis and Chicago. The Washington, D.C., homicide rate is 43% higher than it was a year ago. By the end of August, Milwaukee and New Haven, Conn., both had already seen more murders than in all of 2014.
Publicly, law-enforcement officials have been reluctant to link the movement's antipolice rhetoric to the spike in violent crime. Privately, they have been echoing South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, who said in a speech last week that the movement was harming the very people whose interests it claims to represent. "Most of the people who now live in terror because local police are too intimidated to do their jobs are black," the governor said. "Black lives do matter, and they have been disgracefully jeopardized by the movement that has laid waste to Ferguson and Baltimore."
But the left has no interest in discussing ghetto pathology. Summer movies like "Straight Outta Compton" are too busy glorifying it, and summer books like Ta-Nehisi Coates's "Between the World and Me" are too busy intellectualizing it. The Black Lives Matter crowd has become an appendage of the civil-rights industry, which uses the black underclass to push an agenda that invariably leaves the supposed beneficiaries worse off.
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