Another O’Reilly Factor, another round of whitesplaining to an African American about racial profiling. In this case, the African American was the father of the late Hadiya Pendleton. You may recall that Hadiya was the 15 year-old honors student who was shot and killed in Chicago days after performing in President Obama’s 2013 inauguration ceremony. As in other instances, I believe O’Reilly meant well but…
O’Reilly started with a Talking Points Commentary about the Stop-and-Frisk policy in New York which, not surprisingly, O’Reilly supports. In response to a recent federal ruling against the city’s program, O’Reilly intoned, “The unintended consequence of a slow down in stop-and-frisk could be death.”
I will grant that I like O’Reilly’s proposed solution, that police record why they stop any given individual. “But throwing out stop and frisk would be madness,” he said. However, the judge did not throw out stop and frisk; she said the New York City version of it needed to reformed.
Then O’Reilly let loose his animus against African Americans, again under the guise of looking out for them (even as he demonized some of their esteemed figures). “Just look at Chicago," O'Reilly said. "The violence there could be stopped by flooding the zone with police on literally every corner of dangerous neighborhoods. But if the city did that, you’d hear the howls of indignation from the racial hustlers who would rather see kids die than admit there is an acute social and criminal problem in many poor precincts. A very tough statement, but it’s true.”
If you watch O’Reilly, you know that “racial hustlers” means Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton. I can just imagine the O’Reilly howls of indignation if one of them alleged, say, that O’Reilly would rather see kids die than have universal health coverage. But I digress.
What O’Reilly didn’t mention is that Chicago already has a stop-and-frisk policy and it’s one that the police superintendent says will not be affected by the New York ruling. However, after suggesting that if only Chicago were more like New York, the murder rate would drop, if not plummet, O’Reilly brought on Hadiya’s father, Nathan Pendleton.
Pendleton told O’Reilly that targeting minorities for stopping-and-frisking is “just totally unfair.” The solution, Pendleton thinks, is tougher gun laws.
I’ve got no problem with O’Reilly disagreeing but instead of presenting any statistics or studies to support his position, he insultingly announced that while it’s not needed in neighborhoods like his own, African Americans should just buck up and accept the humiliation.
“(Violent crime) isn’t all over the place. Not my neighborhood in Long Island, OK? You don’t have drive-by shootings there. You don’t have gangs there. The affluent white neighborhoods are protected from this kind of madness,” O’Reilly said. After noting that the two men charged with Hadiya’s murder were “gangsters who were looking to kill other gangsters,” O’Reilly continued, “This has been going on for years in Chicago, in certain neighborhoods. Not on the Gold Coast, alright? Not in the suburbs of Chicago. It’s going on in your neighborhood, it’s going on in poor, black neighborhoods. So I say that you flood the zone with police. … And then the police use the stop-and-frisk tactic to discourage criminals, to discourage them from bringing guns onto the street. …Now, it would work in Chicago but they simply won’t do it because of social pressure. So in light of what happened to your daughter, do you think you might reconsider?"
O’Reilly has no credentials in law enforcement, crime fighting, sociology or anything else that might make his off-the-cuff pronouncement any kind of authoritative. And he certainly has no credentials in being black. But that didn’t stop him from being an expert on that, too. “They’re patted down and then they’re allowed to go on their way. Granted, it’s an annoyance. It’s an intrusion and you could construe it as an insult. But if you look at where the crime is and where the problems are, they’re not gonna be pattin’ white people down in Bloomingdale’s. …We have to pay a price sometimes.”
Of course, what he really meant is that African Americans have to pay a price sometimes.
As for not patting down white people in Bloomingdale’s, O’Reilly should take a gander at the hilarious Daily Show segment that makes a rather persuasive case for exactly that. It’s the second video below.
That’s why Mark Morial subjected himself to O’Reilly’s lecturing without getting as PO’d as you or I would and why Sharpton would even have lunch with the guy, etc.
No, Bill-O, it’s false. He hasn’t got a clue about what’s going on with African-American leaders (otherwise known as “racial hustlers” in O’Reilly-speak) in those black communities. All he knows is what he sees on Fox, and Fox doesn’t cover the black community.
He might want to start by looking up an effort/organization called Chicago Defenders, just for one thing.
“…We have to pay a price sometimes.”
Translation: "African Americans are going to have to give up their freedoms and liberties like they did in the 1950s, a time where they “knew their place” in society and freedom of speech was MUCH MORE TIGHTLY CONTROLLED (i.e. via vicious rottweilers, pit bulls and fire hoses).
Um… No, Bill. The howls of indignation would be from how much that would cost them as taxpayers. As is, Chicago runs roughly 90 officers per shift, per precinct. The median salary is $53,500 a year per officer.
Ok, so now you want there to be enough to assure one on every street. That’s $53,500 an officer, plus added supervisors, plus the cost of an expanded precinct if necessary, plus the cost of added transport, equipment, insurance, overtime…
My God, Bill- Do the math on that, tell me it won’t bankrupt the city!