Slow Burn

Fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina ignites crime debate. This is a headline from the BBC, which, as one might guess, is based in Britain. So they can be forgiven for thinking that the stabbing death of Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte Area Transit System train, ignited a debate, when, in fact, this is a fire that's been burning for decades now. That fire being the tendency of "White America" (to the degree that there is such a thing) to regard the Black population of the country as agents of violence and anarchy, who, through their actions, contribute to a sense of lawlessness and unease, and therefore are legitimate targets to be cudgeled with the Rule of Law.

For all that Republican state legislators in the Southeast are railing against law enforcement officials, prosecutors and judges that they perceive as being "woke" (which here is really just another way of saying "soft on crime"), the fact of the matter is that "Prison" is not the correct answer to: "How do we keep the mentally ill, even those with criminal records, from hurting people?" It is, however, a convenient answer, especially given that Donald Trump is currently President of the United States, and Democrats are considered to be insufficiently harsh when it comes to criminals Black Americans, by the stereotypical Trump voter. (Not that Democrats hold a monopoly on this; a Trumpist acquaintance of mine, back during the campaign, sought to induce me to support the President's election by talking up Mr. Trump's moves towards "criminal justice reform," which seemed to be little more than a euphemism for "letting Black people out of jail early.")

The point behind Black Lives Matter was, at least in part, to attempt to shift the perception of Black Americans away from a constant, looming, threat to decent law-abiding people, and to just people, like anyone else. And part of the tragedy of Black Lives Matter was its abject failure in that regard. But, as will most tragedies, more than one failure goes into them, and here, perhaps the biggest failure that lead to the tragedy of Ms. Zarutska's stabbing was the withdrawal of the Federal government from mental health treatment back in the 1980s. President Reagan intended it, at least publicly, to be a devolution of responsibility from Washington D.C., to states and communities. States and communities, it turned out, that had no intention of picking up the tab, and numbers of mentally ill people were left to fend for themselves, or to the sympathies of others.

Black people, like transgender people, are easily-vilified Others, especially for Conservatives, when crimes occur, because they help bolster the narrative of the People being preyed upon by the undeserving Other, who are in turn being abetted by a willfully perverse Élite, who allow the predation in return for ill-gotten votes. And I think that part of the reason for this is that focusing on who commits a crime (so long as it's someone else) offers the possibility of a "low-cost" solution. Mainly because someone else would be paying it. Whether it's a push to keep Black people with criminal records in jail, possibly for life, primarily as a form of incapacitation, or declaring gender dysphoria a serious enough mental illness that it warrants banning transgender people from owning guns, the debate around crime in the United States has tended to want to avoid being about "what" in favor of a focus on "who." And this is a fire that's been burning for a long time. There's no end to the flames in sight.