If you missed the shameful display put on by some students at Brown University this week, you can read a comprehensive report at Legal Insurrection.

As a follow-up, we recommend reading this post from Minding the Campus by Heather Mac Donald.

The Blissfully Unaware Hecklers at Brown

The nauseating combination of ignorance, self-righteousness, entitlement, and boorishness that characterizes campus  politics today was on appalling display yesterday at Brown University, as a massive crowd of students prevented New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly from addressing the school. Kelly had come to Brown to talk about the New York Police Department’s unmatched success in lowering New York’s crime rate.  The students, however, heckled him off the stage, shouting that Kelly had “institute[ed] systemic racism” in the city through the NYPD’s contested stop, question, and frisk tactics.

The protesters of course take for granted that they can go about blithely squandering their parents’ tuition money at Brown without fear of getting shot, robbed, or raped.  Nor do they have to navigate through a gauntlet of drug dealers on their way to the store or while picking up their mail.  Residents of New York City’s poorest neighborhoods by contrast endured just such constant fear and disorder until the NYPD embraced proactive policing and other revolutionary reforms in the early 1990s, reforms which Kelly perfected.  When every criminologist predicted that the NYPD’s 1990s crime drop had bottomed out, Kelly drove crime down another 31%, in the process saving another 5000 minority lives.

The Brown students have zero understanding of the massive disproportionality in crime commission in New York and other American cities.  In New York, for example, blacks commit nearly 80% of all shootings, though they are 23% of the city’s population, while whites, 34% of New York residents, commit around 2% of all shootings.  Such a disparity means that policing will be concentrated in minority areas and will result inevitably in disproportionate police activity, including stops.   The police focus on minority neighborhoods in order to protect the many law-abiding residents there; if the police ignored those areas, only then could they rightly be accused of racism.

Read it all at the link below.