Possibility? Certainty!

So the implication is a very high black murder rate when you consider this together. The data on victims is pretty much unassailable, and the crossover homicide data is strong.

This strongly supports the other data showing a high black crime rate in general.

If you live in a big city you are a direct victim of crime. Often. It’s ubiquitous. The large majority of it goes unreported. If you leave something marginally valuable unattended and out of the line of sight for more than a few minutes it will go missing. If you leave something valuable unattended in a secure location that can be somewhat easily breached it will be taken.

Park your car on the street overnight with an expensive pair of sunglasses (or, heaven forbid, a briefcase or purse) visible on the front seat. The window will be smashed and your property gone when you go to start your car the next morning. Your kid leaves his bicycle on the sidewalk to run inside for lunch. It will be gone when he returns, 30 minutes later.

Here’s an example. One day I was having an animated conversation with a friend after football practice. We continued all the way to his house, then I walked home. As I was eating dinner with my family I remembered I had ridden my bike to practice. I was so deep in conversation with my friend that I had forgotten it at school, chained to a bike rack, in a very public location next to the football field. I knew it was likely already stolen, but I told my dad and he drove me to the location as soon as we finished eating. The chain was cut and it was gone. Maybe 3 hours, all in daylight, in a public place with constant foot and auto traffic.

That is life every hour of every day in a big city. Anything of value that can be taken will be taken.

Dave L., perhaps in Texas the police respond to misdemeanor theft cases and arrest the perpetrators. In California, because the prosecutors simply release thieves, police have stopped bothering to arrest them.

The felony theft threshold in Texas is $2,500, more than 2.5x that of California. It was at that level when I went through the police academy in 2016, but I’m not sure when it was last changed. (TPC 31.03(e))

So why doesn’t Texas have the same rampant theft problem as California? (Although, I think Austin/Travis County are trying hard to catch up.)

(As an aside, Theft from a Person is a separate crime, which is a felony no matter the value of the item stolen (as some schmuck who stole a $10 MAGA hat off a man’s head discovered)

I admit I’d never heard (or even heard of) such a joke, either. But some of the things that some of the race-hustling commentators come out with are really quite astounding. PA+Cat, is it possible that that article you mentioned was tongue-in-cheek at all? I find it hard to tell sometimes with some of these writers.

And how did that arise? My one-word answer has long been “slavery”: Most of the miasma in the U.S. — and indeed across Western societies more generally — ultimately originates in the (unfounded) guilt trip over slavery. Recently, Roger Kimball wrote masterfully about this fundamental point, concluding what I had. For those who missed it, here are his three key paragraphs:

“If chattel slavery hadn’t existed in the United States, the Left would have had to invent it. What we mean is that the idea of slavery has become so dear to the disciples of identity politics that without its moral sanction they would be lost. Absent the original sin of slavery, the entire racialist racket that holds our society hostage would sputter to an inglorious halt. The race hustlers promoting ‘affirmative action’ (i.e., race- or sex-based discrimination) would be out of business, as would the real-estate magnates and firebugs of Black Lives Matter. Ditto the angry historical fantasists behind The 1619 Project. Forget that most societies practiced slavery throughout history. Is anyone asking for ‘reparations’ because their ancestors may have been enslaved by the Egyptians, the Persians, the Greeks, or the Romans? Forget that slavery ended in the United States more than one hundred and fifty years ago because Abraham Lincoln prosecuted a brutal civil war to keep the country together and end the ‘peculiar institution,’ which was not peculiar at all. (When, by the way, will slavery end in Islamic society, or India, or China?) The world has had numerous long-distance trades in slaves of different phenotypes. Most of the West African slaves who made their way to America were sold into servitude by black African slavers.

“Those impolitic facts are what the Bolsheviks of old called ‘counterrevolutionary.’ That is, they are politically “false” even if empirically true. The wardens of wokeness tell us that they hate slavery and its legacy. Doubtless in one sense they do. But they are divided in their minds. They also cherish the historical fact of slavery. For one thing, they understand that it is their irrevocable meal ticket. They also perceive that it is an imperishable source of emotional power. Because it is a wound that can never heal, it is also a sin that white society can never expiate—which is why they tell the world that the legacy of slavery is ubiquitous and ineradicable. But if that were true, why should anyone have ever bothered to campaign against it? It would be like campaigning against the onset of night.

“We understand that to ask such questions is to be guilty of ‘racism,’ the cardinal tort of our age whose almost aphrodisiac power is ultimately guaranteed by the inexhaustible well of victimhood that slavery, or the exploitation of the idea of slavery, has dug. Martin Luther King Jr. famously dreamed that people would be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. That is now regarded as a reactionary, indeed a racist sentiment. After all, to judge people by their character, by what they actually do, would upset the entire racialist concession. From now on, race is everything, character a dispensable epiphenomenon. And the ultimate power source, the inexhaustible kernel of animus that fuels the racialist requisition, is the historical accident of chattel slavery in the United States.”

Whole thing here: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2023/1/the-mob-comes-for-madison