Cincinnati’s Rolling Riot
The history of the late 1960s and 1970s has just been crammed into a few months in Cincinnati.

July 20, 2001 1:00 p.m.

he history of the late 1960s and 1970s has just been crammed into a few months in Cincinnati — with a race riot, and roiling anti-cop sentiment that intimidates the police into backing off tough enforcement. The result is a rolling riot of violent crime that primarily victimizes blacks.

This was the dynamic that made America's major urban centers nearly unlivable for decades — a dynamic from which cities like New York have recovered only recently.

Lately, black agitators and go-along liberals have been trying to beat back this progress with the club of charges of "racial profiling," and other police excesses. If anyone doubts that this crusade is ideological in nature — simply a political hit against the cops that does nothing to help minorities, and in fact endangers their lives — he need look no farther than Cincinnati.

Since the riot, according to the New York Times, "there have been 59 shooting incidents in the city with 77 gunshot victims, compared with 9 shootings and 11 victims in the comparable three months last year." So, this is the fruit of the anti-police riot and the general drubbing of the police — with accusations of racism and civil-rights lawsuits — for aggressively patrolling black neighborhoods.

There are complaints that the Cincinnati police have instituted a sort of work-stoppage in response to all the criticism. There has been, for instance, a 55 percent decline in traffic stops in Cincinnati, which should delight the police critics since these stops are so associated with "racial profiling" and "Driving While Black."

But like the anti-cop activists in New York — who complained about lax enforcement after the Central Park disturbances in the wake of last year's Puerto Rican Day parade — Cincinnati's cop critics can't decide whether the police are racist for policing too much or not enough. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter: The only important thing is that, one way or another, the police are being called racist.

In the wake of the Cincinnati riot, the supposedly devastating statistic about the cops was that in the last six years all 15 suspects killed by Cincinnati police had been black. But, according to the Times, all but one of the 77 gunshot victims in the last three months in Cincinnati have also been black.

This should prove a simple point: that violence and mayhem mostly affect black urban neighborhoods, so that arrest, shooting, and other statistics will show an overwhelming racial disparity. This doesn't mean the cops are racist, but that they are doing their job, and ultimately saving black lives.