Alexander: If Obama Ruled the Nation, It Would Look Like Baltimore

A few years ago, I wrote a column entitled, “If Obama Ruled a Nation, It Would Look Like Detroit,” focusing on the urban decay and corruption in cities that have been under Democrat control for generations, as well as the national implications of that decay.

The most recent FBI crime stats bear out the relationship between Democrat “leadership,” crime and poverty.

For example, the 10 most dangerous cities in America with populations above 200,000 are all managed, top to bottom, by Democrats. They are: Detroit, Oakland, Memphis, St. Louis, Cleveland, Baltimore, Milwaukee, Birmingham, Newark and Kansas City.

Notably, most of these cities are also subject to some of the most stringent gun control laws in the nation. And five of them — Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Milwaukee and Newark — are among the most impoverished in America. (Not coincidentally, the other cities on that list are also managed, top to bottom, by Democrats. They are: Buffalo, Cincinnati, Miami, El Paso and Philadelphia.)

In fact, almost all of the top 50 most dangerous and impoverished cities have been under Democrat control for many years.

This week, Baltimore, the most recent site of urban upheaval, ostensibly to protest “police brutality,” is back in the news. In May there were 43 homicides in the city, the deadliest month in more than four decades.

And the rising crime rates — a reversal of almost two decades of decline in violent crimes — are plaguing other urban centers nationwide, including New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who authored “Are Cops Racist?”, is on the mark with her analysis on the crime reversal, calling it the “Ferguson Effect.”

She writes in The Wall Street Journal this week, “The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months. Since last summer, the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest — including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month — have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.”

Mac Donald continues, “Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder … embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media pump out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cellphone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force. … Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice. Proposals aimed at producing more cop convictions abound.”

Continued here