Riley: Obama Playing with Fire

In Dallas, five policemen were killed in the worst racial violence this country has seen in decades. “Like others on the political left, Mr. Obama has made a habit of minimizing or ignoring the high black crime rates that obviously underlie tensions between poor minority communities and cops.” writes Jason Riley in the WSJ, author of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make it Harder for Blacks to Succeed. “More than 95% of black shooting deaths don’t involve the police, which would seem to undercut the notion that trigger-happy cops are hunting black men.”

Sadly, rates of murder, rape, robbery, assault and other violent crimes are 7 to 10 times higher among blacks than among whites, but liberals who don’t want to alienate black voters go to great lengths to explain away this behavior and focus instead on police conduct.

Yes, Mr. Obama has denounced what happened in Dallas, but he has also been winking at a Black Lives Matter movement that has spent the past two years holding rallies that call for (and sometimes feature) violence against cops. Like the president, these protesters maintain that the police are motivated by racial prejudice, not by the behavior of suspects. They insist that a biased criminal-justice system explains the black crime rate, not antisocial behavior. By indulging this narrative, Mr. Obama and his fans in the liberal media were playing with fire, and the Dallas carnage was the result.

Just last week, after the police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota that sparked the Dallas protests, the Washington Post ran a long feature sympathetic to the left’s racist-cops narrative. The story offered a detailed breakdown of police shootings by race, but nowhere did it offer a racial breakdown of criminal behavior. By focusing on one and ignoring the other, the paper showed that it is most interested in pushing a political agenda.