After Katrina, Peter Brimelow mentioned that as a student in England, he "was very influenced by Ernest Van Den Haag's argument in National Review that the 1960s riots were caused, not by racism, but by a failure of white politicians' will to provide...moral guidance, i.e. police power." That was the old National Review. Van den Haag was saying the same thing in the 90s:
The crime-and-punishment theory of riots, by now established media lore, holds that arson and looting by poor blacks and Latinos are deserved punishment for society's many sins, including racism and the callous neglect of inner-city problems. The proposed remedies usually include handouts, such as subsidies for rebuilding, and promises to sin no more. These responses fully express our guilt feelings, but they are not likely to discourage future riots. On the contrary, the handouts may be seen as rewards, certainly not as deterrent penalties. As Sigmund Freud discovered quite a while ago, guilt feelings can aggravate problems and seldom help solve them. Poverty, joblessness, and the other "root causes" often mentioned may contribute to riots. But so may sunshine. Had there been no poverty in Los Angeles, or had it rained, there might have been no riots. But neither poverty nor sunshine "caused" the riots, or, for that matter, the tennis matches that took place at the time. These are contexts, or occasions, certainly not sufficient (or root) causes.
The L.A. riots were triggered when a jury refused to find white police officers guilty, although they were shown on a widely seen videotape to have beaten a speeding black motorist to within an inch of his life. They continued beating him after he had stopped resisting and was lying on the ground. Unaccountably unprepared for the ensuing mayhem, the police tried to control it only after it became uncontrollable...
Causes, Alleged And Actual, Of The L.A. Riots, By Ernest van den Haag , Southern California Law Review, May, 1993, 66 S. Cal. L. Rev. 1657
The LAPD was "unaccountably unprepared" because they didn't want to be seen as racist. Are police forces preparing for potential "Trayvon Riots"?
