I think your argument about our law enforcement system would have made more sense years ago but not so much over the last two decades. Clearly, if police are targeting minorities it would show up as disproportionate criminal behaviors in the areas of “minor crimes” like drug possession, loitering, etc, but not violent crimes.
But when the criminal behavior statistics between violent crime and non violent crime do not show disproportionality, it undermines the argument of systemic racism. Violent crime is something police tend to respond to regardless of race and not the result of crimes arising out of racial profiling as your British examples illustrate.
Another factor that points to cultural factors rather than institutional ones is when you compare violent crime rates around the world, the same differences exhibited in world cultures are reflected in the US in neighborhoods comprised of people descended from those countries.
Violent Crime Rates by Country 2021 (worldpopulationreview.com)
Look at the FBI violent crime statistics and how eerily they reflect the ethnic cultural background of individual American neighborhoods. This is cultural and not racial, since once you integrate racial minorities with similar educations and incomes into predominantly non African American neighborhoods, the violent crime rate while slightly elevated decrease suggesting people seeking to escape the toxic culture of the inner city have already abandoned it before they move. In some instances, that move is not to a higher income community, but simply one with a different dominant culture.
In American, we have invested heavily in our community public school system and it has failed to produce any meaningful results. In America, we have six different school options for children… 1) community public schools, 2) state chartered public schools (most people don’t realize that “charter” schools are public and not private schools), 3) magnet schools (these are “schools within a school” (my daughter took the IB program in high school where 60 elite students took classes together out of student body of over 3200 students, others are math, science, or arts centered), 4) parochial schools, 5) private schools. In addition, a growing 6th option is home schooling (over 3–4% of children) increasingly being supported by both on line resources and public schools.
A future sixth option could be educational vouchers for “micro schools”. During the pandemic many of these “micro schools” were begun by parents who felt on line learning was inferior. A “micro school” is a “private school” comprised of 4–12 students who gather daily in the home of one of the parents and who take on line classes with a full time paid adult (ideally with a teaching degree) monitoring them and insuring social interaction between students. It works best for children 12 and under where specialized training by teachers in specific fields of study is not necessary.
Do not read my comments as being against traditional public schools. I am the product of public school. But I am concerned about failing public schools. All five of my children attended good public schools for most of their education including all of it after middle school.
No amount of money has worked to fix failing inner city public schools partly because a school system struggle to escape the toxic culture that surrounds it. They have tried and to some extent they have at least largely made schools safer than the surrounding community, but they still fail. In one such failing school system recently reported on our news, a student ranked in the middle of their class by passing three courses during their four years in high school! Two of three with Ds and one with a B.
So far the only thing that has worked is providing “an escape” for the children of those inner city parents who have “changed” their culture at home and want that change to be reflected at school. That escape takes different forms. My brother started a “state chartered public school” called BeLoved in Jersey City, you can “google” it. The school has a long waiting list of those parents who want their children to have a future.
Another form is bussing. When I lived in Hingham, MA, about 10% of the kids in our public school system were inner city children being bussed to our school. As a parent, I was fine with paying for my children and those inner city children attending our local public school, because the parents cared enough about their children’s education to put them on a bus to commute 40 minutes each way. Parental involvement is key, it is rare to have a “success” story without it.
A third options is vouchers. Catholic schools in Jersey City are subsidized by the the Catholic church so tuition is only $3,000-$10,000 per year after financial aid. In contrast, Jersey City spent on average $21,866 back in 2018 per child. Over 90% of children that attend the Catholic school graduate. Jersey City public schools graduate 67% of students, but that does not fully reflect the higher quality education students get at Catholic schools. The majority of Catholic school students in Jersey City are no longer Catholic or white. So their performance is not due to “race”.
A fourth option is home schooling. The resources available today are amazing. One of my grandchildren is a high functioning autistic child. He takes classes on line and wants to sit for the high school equivalency exam even though age wise, he is a sophomore. But this option really needs an “at home” parent to work well who is very involved in their child’s education.
But in all these solutions, parents are key and avoiding the community “toxic” culture which spills into the public school system is the critical. I know you believe that schools can overcome poor parenting and in a few instances it can. But so far, no amount of funding has worked… as noted, in Jersey City, community public school education costs more than most private school options and delivers far less.
A relatively famous African American principal (Joe Clark) of Eastside High School, achieved a miracle in education in the 1980s in a predominantly poor and violent African American school in Paterson, New Jersey. He did so by expelling 300 troublesome students (something that would not be allowed today). His philosophy was unless you are prepared to “expel” the “bad apples” they will ruin the “batch”.
Therein lies one potential solution, but I don’t think we as a nation have the courage to consider it. “Expel” students who bring the “toxic” culture of the community into the classroom. Rather than build a “work around” for 85–90% of students take on the those 10–15% and expel them and offer them alternative educational options outside the mainstream public school system (my thought is something more like a military school discipline structure including on site dorms). I say that only because I live just north of a Marine base and I am always amazed at how polite and disciplined those young men… I doubt they are all that way when they first enlist.
If these children want back in to the public school system, they have to demonstrate a willingness to learn through their academic performance and evidence that they have abandoned violence as a way to resolve differences.
Bottom line, maybe we can’t “help” every inner city child and have to give up on some of them to help most of them. If we can get most inner city African American children a good education and keep them safe growing up and away from gangs and drugs, then they have excellent odds of escaping the toxic culture of the inner city neighborhoods whether they leave them physically or not. But if we continue to pretend this is the product of racism and not culture, we won’t begin to address the real issues.
