Some Black Lives Don’t Matter

Another cell-phone video that didn’t make it to CNN or MSNBC: Last November, 33-year-old Antwan McNutt beat a man to death with a bottle of liquor on the South Side of Chicago. Onlookers took video and posted it to Facebook; no one intervened to help. McNutt, who was charged with murder this week, has prior convictions for manufacturing and delivering a controlled substance, attempted aggravated carjacking, possession of a stolen motor vehicle, and battery and resisting arrest, according to DNA Info. But he was back on the streets committing more mayhem, contrary to the “mass incarceration” conceit that black males are targeted with endless draconian punishment for minor transgressions of public order.

We rightly hold our police officers to the highest standards of conduct. Had a cop beaten a black man to death it would justifiably have been international news, especially if the beating had been caught on video. Likewise, if a white man had beaten a black man to death, it would have been international news and cause for public mourning and admonition. But the routine taking of black lives by other blacks generates no interest in the mainstream media. Forty-three hundred people, including two dozen children under the age of 12, were shot in Chicago last year. Had 4,300 white people been shot, there would have been a revolution, and the media would have set up headquarters in the city to cover the breakdown of law and order. But because the victims were nearly all black, few pay attention—besides the police.

Nor have the Black Lives Matter activists, who pour out by the thousands, sometimes to riot, in the case of alleged officer misuse of force, ever protested the killing of blacks by other blacks. If one-one-hundredth of the attention that has been paid to phantom police racism over the last two decades had been devoted to rebuilding the black family, no one would be talking about policing today. Policing is an epiphenomenon of crime. If you want fewer police in your neighborhood, make sure that people are not killing each other.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of the bestselling The War on Cops.