Jason Riley Speaks To An Underlying Issue In the Ferguson Debate

This comes way of The Blaze:

Since the Meet The Press panel promptly cut Riley off in the middle of his response to anchor Andrea Mitchell’s question, we reached out to Riley and asked him what he would have said had he been allowed to speak freely. Here is what he told us [emphasis Riley’s]:

I don’t see how you reduce these tensions going forward between these inner city communities and the police…in an environment where the black crime rate is what it is. I mean that is what is driving this.

Blacks are only thirteen percent of the population, but they are responsible for something like half of all murders in America. Half. I mean all manner of violent crime, all manner of property crime, you see black arrests at two or three times their numbers in the population. And until you…address that black crime problem — that black criminality — I don’t know how you’re going to address these other issues that people want to talk about, involving tensions between the black community and law enforcement, or involving racial profiling and so forth.

What is driving those tensions is black crimes. What is driving those perceptions of young black men are these crime statistics.

And if you want to change those perceptions, you need to change the behavior driving those perceptions. And that is not a conversation a lot of people, black or white, want to have. They want to talk about incarceration rates, but not crime rates. They want to talk about tensions in the black community, but they don’t want to talk about the behavior driving those tensions….

…listen to the interview…