NYT Discovers Crime Wave but Goes Silent on Black Lives Matter’s Role

The New York Times this past weekend decorated a chunk of its Web site with an emotive snapshot of social disruption on Cleveland’s east side. But the yarn had a big fat hole in it.

The story described a high state of angst among east siders resulting from sustained “gunfire and car crashes” caused in turn by “the combined impact of the pandemic and the recession that have battered the country.”

No doubt this is true, as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough.

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For months, the Gray Lady has offered sympathetic, if not outright promotional, coverage of Black Lives Matter-linked street violence and looting. It has engaged in #DefundThePolice agitation and championed successful efforts to intimidate urban police forces generally. And still the paper seemingly hasn’t tumbled to the clearly foreseeable consequences of such activism.

It’s certainly not just Cleveland that’s suffering. While year-end totals largely are incomplete, Minneapolis was on track for a 72 percent increase in murder compared with 2019, an apparent new high. And records, or near records, for murder were set in cities from Seattle to Louisville to Milwaukee to Philadelphia and all across New York state’s Mohawk Valley, as upstate cities struggled to cope with the effects of anti-public-safety polices handed down by Gov. Andrew Cuomo and the Legislature.

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So while no serious person denies that young minority males are doing almost all the shooting, it turns out that virtually all the victims are minorities, too. This seems far more relevant to a debate over racism in policing than “the pandemic and the recession,” significant though they may be.

Let’s face it: Criminals by definition push against social boundaries, as defined by the penal law, and when they find flagging resistance, they are going to push all that much harder. That is, when you demonize your cops, you motivate your criminals, who may be malevolent in spirit and cold of heart, but who aren’t necessarily stupid.

One would think that The New York Times, which has developed trends-in-the-news stories to an art form, would have picked up on this one. Alas, not so. {snip}