Speaking truth to hustlers

Heather Mac Donald has an excellent essay up on the City Journal website about the police shooting of Sean Bell outside a strip club last month. In it she offers this advice to the Black "community leaders" who have summarily found the police officers guilty of first degree murder:

If the city’s black advocates paid even a tiny fraction of the attention they pay to shootings by criminals as they pay to shootings by police, they could change the face of the city. If demonstrators gathered outside the jail cell of every rapist and teen stick-up thug, cameras in tow, to shame them for their attacks on law-abiding minority residents, they could deglamorize the gangsta life. Think you’ll find Sharpton or Barron patrolling with the police in dark housing project stairways, trying to protect residents from predators? Not a chance. Among the crimes committed in minority communities since last week’s police shooting of Sean Bell there has been a 26-year-old man fatally shot in the Bronx; another man hit by stray bullets; a sandwich shop in Brownsville robbed by thugs who fired a gun; and three elderly men robbed at knifepoint by a parolee in Queens. Those minority victims who survived will have to rely on the police and the courts, not the race “advocates,” for vindication.

There is, of course, no chance whatsoever that detestable oxygen thieves like Sharpton, Jackson or Barron will do anything that could be remotely helpful. To actually fix the problems in the Black community would deprive them of their power base.

To see how the other Black "leaders" would react to any sane suggestion of how the Black community could reform itself and end its misery just look at what happened to Bill Cosby back in 2004 when he dared to stand up in a public forum and tell the truth.