Jack Dunphy writes:

The real tragedy of this episode is that the genuine danger faced by blacks in America is not posed by racist police officers but rather by other blacks, particularly blacks armed with guns and lacking any moral constraints on using them. Black men make up only about 4 percent of the nation’s population, but in 2004 they accounted for 35 percent of its homicide victims, a figure I suspect has changed little since then. And the great majority of these black victims, as Mr. Gates surely knows, are killed by other black men.

But such facts just aren’t “box office” for Mr. Gates, who feigns indignation at his arrest but must be inwardly gleeful that his victim ticket has now been punched, courtesy of the Cambridge Police Department.

Several aspects of Mr. Dunphy's argument puzzle me. It is certainly a tragedy that many black people are murdered at the hands of other black people, but why is that "the real tragedy of this episode"? Whether or not it was justified, what does the arrest of a black Harvard professor on disorderly conduct charges have to do with the black murder rate? ]]>