Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Trying to understand reason Black on Black crime stats are used to discredit BLM—wouldn’t high rates of crime impacting an identifiable community still roll up to a societal failure to serve that community? As US citizens, it’s not just “their problem” isn’t it “our problem”?

Obviouslly it doesn't discredit anything; I think the frustration is that crime exacerbated by *underpolicing* is the most dangerous element in a lot of poor/working class neighborhoods where POC disproportionately live

I think it can be disappointing to people who live/have lived in those neighborhoods to see the national conversation constantly cater to whichever event is trending on twitter rather than their neighborhoods' unreported chronic problems, esp if they get attacked for complaining

The same communities are both under- and over-policed. Baltimore averaged 300 murders a year for the last 5 years. Only 418 murder arrests total (over 1,000 murders were unsolved). But there were 456 arrests for gambling and 1,781 for prostitution. https://data.baltimorecity.gov/Public-Safety/BPD-Arrests/3i3v-ibrt …

They are overpolicing a bunch of minor, easy-to-solve offenses while underpolicing actual crime.

It's hard to paint with a broad brush bc police departments are so heterogenous, but hard or soft quotas & fines/confiscations that can fund the depts seem like corrupting factors. LEO shouldn't be funding themselves with police activity, but nobody else wants to fund them