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January
13
2020

This Is What 'Diversity' Has Gotten You
Karl Denninger

You can't argue with the numbers.

The number of murders has gone up and down.  Note that the population of the United States has continually risen, so the number of murders, assuming that the rate per person remains the same, should be a continually-upsloping line growing at about 1% a year.

It isn't.  In fact the number of murder peaked around 1990.  It is materially lower now than then, despite all the screaming of the various scolds, and we're 20 years further down with more people in the nation.

However, what has changed is the clearance (that is, the number of people who murder and get caught) rate.

Why?

Well, it's not hard to figure out.  First, most of the uncleared murders are black people being murdered, and most black people who are murdered are murdered by other blacks.  That's a fact and while Twatter and others may not like it, the FBI's data says it's true.

But why are those who murder blacks not caught?

Well, what's happened to our police forces?  Are they all that much smaller?  No.  In fact they're larger.

But what has changed?

Cop shops no longer look like Dragnet.  They did, but they don't any more.

And guess what -- they're not clearing crimes like they used to either.

Correlation is not causation, but the fact remains that serious crimes are not being cleared.  Whether that's because we're hiring and promoting based not on competence but rather on "social justice" or whether it's something else is unknown.  But what is known is that when you go from clearing 83% of homicides to 59% you're doing it wrong and it needs to change or we may as well fire 'em all and keep the tax money for ourselves.

The argument has often been made (and indeed the cited article tries to make the case) that there are special competencies in non-majority-white people who make a more-diverse force more effective.  Well, this may well be true.  And indeed President Johnson ran a commission in which he tried to make exactly that argument.  Ok, so we added a great deal of diversity since -- but we got worse results, not better ones.

Again, correlation is not causation but if you make a change and get a negative result honest people back that change out to see whether testing that theory -- that the change was causative instead of merely correlation -- bears out.

That was, of course, never done.

You can't claim special competence if you're unwilling to test it, especially when the evidence suggests it's not competence but rather incompetence that got added into the mix.

This much I can tell you fore sure, however -- that graph does not lie and the competence of our police forces has gone straight into the crapper since the 1960s.  Anyone who thinks that a going from 83 out of 100 murderers being busted to 59 out of 100 is acceptable, given the screaming about pensions, benefits and salaries when it comes from the so-called thin blue line can blow me.

Never mind places like Chicago, where clearance rates in the 1960s were in the ninety percent range and today it stands right near 11%.  This, as so-called "diversity" has become the buzzword -- and you can find the exact same pattern in most major cities and metropolitan areas.  Oh, and that includes releasing serious offenders because they're "diverse" too.

Now certainly there are exceptions -- NYC being one of them, although NYC is also a city that has refused to report clearance rates during certain years.  Was that because they're that bad?  That's unknown.

Mr. Denninger, recent author of the book Leverage: How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World, is the former CEO of MCSNet, a regional Chicago area networking and Internet company that operated from 1987 to 1998. MCSNet was proud to offer several "firsts" in the Internet Service space, including integral customer-specified spam filtering for all customers and the first virtual web server available to the general public. Mr. Denninger's other accomplishments include the design and construction of regional and national IP-based networks and development of electronic conferencing software reaching back to the 1980s.

He has been a full-time trader since 1998, author of The Market Ticker, a daily market commentary, and operator of TickerForum, an online trading community, both since 2007.

Mr. Denninger received the 2008 Reed Irvine Accuracy In Media Award for Grassroots Journalism for his coverage of the 2008 market meltdown.