WATCH: Shapiro: How Do You Solve Crime In The Black Community?

During the Q&A after his Wednesday night speech at the University of Connecticut, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro was asked what the solution was to crime-ridden black neighborhoods. Shapiro started by delineating the causes of crime, largely the skyrocketing rate of single motherhood (which he also noted has skyrocketed in white communities), and the absence of a strong police force in those black neighborhoods. He then articulated a three-pronged solution: increased policing; a cultural focus on fathers staying in the home and mothers not bearing children out of wedlock; and an individual commitment not to commit crimes that should be inculcated not by the schools, but by parents.

The exchange went like this:

Questioner: “One of my questions is you talk about this culture between black and black violence. What is your solution, then, to that?”

Shapiro: “Don’t commit crimes.”

Questioner: “I feel like there’s a bigger issue.”

Shapiro:

My broader solution, really, is that these communities require more police, not less. There’s a woman named Jill Leovy, she writes for the LA Times; she’s actually on the Left, and she wrote an entire book about how a lot of the disparities in crime, particularly in black communities, were due to racism, but not in the way that we think of racism, like white cops going in and beating people up in black neighborhoods, but because white people basically said to black neighborhoods, “Take care of yourself. If there’s high violence in your areas then you take care of it yourself.”

That leads to higher tribal levels of violence in any society, right? Whenever there’s not an enforcement mechanism in place to actually stop crime, then the crime rates go up. And in fact, the “broken windows” theory in New York City has saved an enormous number of black lives because the police were actually present and active. You need more active present police hunting down people who kill other people, that’s part of the problem; part of the problem is that you actually need fathers to stick around. This is true in white communities and black communities. One of the great tragedies of the last four decades in the United States is that the single motherhood rate has risen not just in the black community, from 20 percent in 1960 to over 70 percent now, but in five percent in the white community to over 40 percent now. That’s a huge jump in both communities; young men, particularly, do need a male influence there to curb them. As a man who was once young, I can attest to this. So I think that’s another aspect.

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