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BLM movement left black communities ‘worse off’, experts say: ‘Criminals have the run of the place’

May 12, 2022 | | Print Article

While Black Lives Matter may have started out as a call for positive change in black communities, the movement which has actively pushed for the defunding of police departments across the nation, has not benefited black Americans in 2022 according to some experts.

In fact, says Manhattan Institute’s Jason Riley, those communities are now worse off than they were before the activist group came to the often violent forefront of the national debate on race relations.

“I would argue that, on balance, these communities are worse off because by [BLM] overemphasizing the role of police, they’ve changed police behavior for the worse,” Riley told Fox News Digital. “In other words, police do become more cautious. They’re less likely to get out of their cars and engage with people in the community. And to the extent that police are less proactive, the criminals have the run of the place.”

 

Though Riley acknowledged that “police brutality still exists, bad cops exist” and stressed he has “no problem with raising awareness about police misconduct,” he noted that “97, 98% [of Black homicides] do not involve police at all.”

Retired Vanderbilt University political science and law professor, Dr. Carol Swain, agreed with Riley’s assessment, stating that “an intelligent observer would be hard-pressed to identify any area in American society where BLM’s activism has benefited the Black community.”

“What BLM has done is pervert the criminal justice system by engaging in activities that have resulted in a growing trend of trials by media,” Swain explained to Fox News Digital. “BLM has intimidated juries and judges. It’s leaders have no interest in due process or the presumption of innocence.”

“Black Lives Matter” first became a hashtag on Twitter following the controversial death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman in 2013 and swelled into the well-funded, anti-police organization it is now during subsequent high-profile cases involving police shootings, including the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Missouri and the death of Freddie Gray in 2015.

But it was the notorious death of George Floyd in 2020 that catapulted BLM into the national spotlight, as news anchors, celebrities, and politicians praised its destructive rioting in liberal-run cities as “mostly peaceful protests.”

To this day, notes Fox News Digital, defunding the police “remains on [BLM’s] list of seven demands on the group’s website.”

“We know that police don’t keep us safe — and as long as we continue to pump money into our corrupt criminal justice system at the expense of housing, health and education investments — we will never be truly safe,” BLM stated in July 2020.

In the years since, BLM leaders have had their own housing issues, when revelations that the organization had been partying in a multi-million-dollar Los Angeles mansion it had purchased with donated funds began to surface.

Meanwhile, where woke mayors in Democratic-run cities have caved to BLM demands, crime has skyrocketed.

“In 2020, the year George Floyd was killed during an interaction with Minneapolis police, Black murders jumped by a staggering 32% compared to 2019, according to FBI data,” Fox reports. “Overall, Black murders increased by 43% that year compared to the prior 10-year average.”

According to the CDC, gun-related homicides disproportionately affected black Americans in 2020, surging by a staggering 39.5% over 2019 statistics.

The pattern of rising violence following a police-involved incident has become known as the “Ferguson Effect,” as “police pull back while violent crime spikes precipitously,” the Manhattan Institute’s director of the policing and public safety initiative, Hannah Meyers, told Fox News Digital in a previous interview — this, even as Gallup polls from the time indicated black Americans wanted to keep the police around.

“A Gallup poll from August 2020 found 81% of Black Americans wanted ‘police to spend [the] same amount of or more time in their area,’ compared to 19% reporting police should spend less time in their neighborhood,'” according to Fox News.

It’s an indication, said Riley, “that these activists are not in step with the people who actually live in these violent communities.”

“You have to remember the overwhelming majority of people who live in these communities are law-abiding,” Riley said. “You’re talking about a very small percentage, mostly men, and mostly young men that are causing all this havoc in these communities. Many of these people would leave these communities. They can’t afford to move anywhere else, so they’re forced to deal with this.”

Swain points to progressive policies, which she says have encouraged the removal of personal accountability from the equation.

 

“BLM does not want young Black men and women to know the importance of individual choice in determining how an encounter with police will end,” she said. “Instead of modeling lawful behavior, BLM and progressive politicians in Congress seem to hold the regressive belief that Black people are always right even when they are clearly wrong.”

“Many progressives — White and Black — hold a dangerous belief that Black people are justified in challenging and disobeying lawful police orders,” Swain stated. “This encourages a dangerous double standard that erodes the rule of law and contributes to more criminal behavior.”

Change in the black community will come, says Swain, “when enough of its leaders push for a return to the values and principles of older generations who appreciated the sanctity of human life and took pride in their communities and self-betterment through individual effort and ingenuity.”

Swain points to the Woodson Center — which, according to the organization’s website, works “to empower community-based leaders to promote solutions that reduce crime and violence, restore families, revitalize underserved communities, and assist in the creation of economic enterprise” — as a more productive alternative to BLM.

“We need fewer chapters of BLM,” Swain added, “and more exemplary organizations like the Woodson Center, which has an outstanding record of changing lives and giving hope to the least among us.”

Melissa Fine
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