Is it? Definitely the most visible thing was the "defund" thing, but certainly in my circles I saw a lot of interest in reparations, housing reform, health care justice, etc, all with an eye toward addressing the generational economic issues that have led to or at least greatly exacerbated community violence.

There's nothing wrong with holding the police to higher standards than criminals.

> The BLM movement is quite silent regarding other black deaths

There's an expectation that the police will investigate regular crimes and bring the criminals to justice. For crimes committed by police, there's no such guarantee. Why is it wrong for a movement to focus on watching the watchmen?

In any case, what are protests and rallies going to do against gang violence? You need social programs to keep kids out of gangs, provide poor families additional assistance, improve living standards and so on.

"You need social programs to keep kids out of gangs"

A cohesive home with both the mother and father present, where moral values are taught, is more effective than a sad, government-run program.

> A cohesive home with both the mother and father present

Which can be torn apart by crime, police brutality, over-policing, or criminalization of being poor; get a parking ticket, fail to pay it, go to jail, lose your job, rinse and repeat.

(A sign seen at a BLM protest sums it up: "You kill our fathers, then make fun of us for not having one")

> where moral values are taught

I'd wager that the vast majority of parents and guardians teach their kids not to lie, cheat, steal, or hurt other people. How much those teachings take root depends a great deal on the child's environment and peer group. Don't believe me? Then why do parents pay so much money for a "good" school district? The moral values they impart should hold even if they live in a "bad" neighborhood, right?

> sad, government-run program

Who said anything about government-run? Churches, community groups and local clubs like the Rotary Club, even police departments (this last one is the government, I'll give you that) run after-school and youth programs to keep kids busy and engaged in productive pursuits.

Secondly, if both parents are working long hours, you need someone to keep an eye on the kids after school. Some people have grandparents or other relatives but not everyone is so lucky (the grandparents themselves might be working long hours; generational poverty is a thing). Absent that support, the external factors I mentioned above begin to dominate.

Again, I don't understand the hate for a movement that, at its core, claims to want to hold government servants accountable for the crimes they commit. That's generally considered a good thing across political lines.

When the law enforcement institutions are a demonstrable enemy of your community, and seen as a threat rather than a resource, lawlessness will naturally result. The intra-community violence is a symptom (a serious symptom, but a symptom nonetheless) of the systemic problem.

One sees the same thing in refugee camps, which I think are directly analogous.

The only alternative explanation is "these types of people are violent and lawless by nature", which I do not accept.

> The only alternative explanation

No it isn't. In addition to seeing law enforcement as a threat, there are other forces that couple explain disparate murder rates - such as the rate of drug use, the rate of single parent households, the level of lead in water.

Your comment reads perilously close to "Either you believe <party line> or <be racist>, no alternatives, so I choose <party line>." There are a hundred other explanations.

If the level of lead is higher in black communities, that certainly falls under the umbrella of "systemic problems." I also think a lot of this is interrelated. Without any sort of trust in a law enforcement system, of course there's going to be higher drug use.

With a large number of black people being incarcerated due to systemic justice problems, of course you're going to have a higher rate of single parent households (and this is something that can propagate through generations).

Those things you listed aren't really "other forces" that can explain disparate murder rates. They're all part of the same issue.

I wrote poorly: my intended meaning was "the only alternative to a systemic root problem". Lead in water is a good counterpoint because although it's "systemic" as in "the water system", it's not what most people mean by systemic in this context.

Drug use and single parenthood, though, are in line with my intended (not what I wrote) meaning, though. One has to ask why there is higher drug use and single parenthood, and it seems to me that the end result of asking why will be "systemic issues" or "nature of the people".

Of course, which systemic issues will remain a difficult question, and the answer will probably be a bit of a bunch of things. But overall, my comment was attempting to answer why I think BLM supporter focus on law enforcement violence, and "are silent" on black-on-black violence - it's because the latter is seen as a symptom, the former a cause.

The American Cancer Society is quite silent regarding heart attacks.

There are plenty of groups working on Black maternal and infant mortality, drug and gang violence in the Black community, etc. If you want to work on that feel free to volunteer/give money. The criticism that "movement A isn't doing anything about topic B" is just sort of silly, as I can always come up with some worthy topic that movement A isn't addressing, no matter which movement.

I've never understood this point. White people are mostly murdered by other white people. Black people are mostly murdered by other black people. This should be obvious...most murderers know their victims, and they know them well enough to have a motive to kill them. When a police officer wrongfully kills a white person, we don't go around telling white people that they shouldn't care about police murders because more white people are killed by other white people than the police. Why does it matter when discussing black people murdered by police?

Here's something that you should consider: the police murder problem in the US is massive. If our police had the same rate of killings as German police, we would have about 45 deaths at the hands of the police every year. But we actually have over 1000. And black people are twice as likely to be killed than white people by our murderous police. Why shouldn't we complain about that?

Because the black homicide rate is really high. It can be a bit easy to forget this, caught in the abstract. The movement isn't called "the police shouldn't kill people" - it's called "black lives matter". I'd expect a movement named "white lived matter" to focus on all-up issues for white people.

> black people are twice as likely to be killed than white people by our murderous police.

Among young people (18-45), black people are ten times as likely to die by homocide (27.6% of deaths vs 2.8%). From the [CDC](https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/lcod/men/2017/nonhispanic-w...).

Giving yourself a broad focus "black lives" and then ignoring the number one category of death among young males (homicide) - it's a bit odd.

Imagine if you ran across the "Cancer Matters" institute and it turned out they don't study lung, breast, or prostate cancers (the three most common and deadly). Instead they study just one specific subtype. What would you think?

Edit: just a small comment, but I'm more trying to "explain the argument" than make it myself. Asking if organizations are "pure enough" to their purposes is a common tactic on all sides, and it's clear that _some_ who ask this don't do so in good faith, trying to set the bar impossibly high. People have wildly different perceptions of BLM, in part because BLM is different organizations in different cities. I don't mean to endorse those impossibly high bars, only to _explain_ that the criticism is that BLM is not meeting the bar to some folks in terms of actions matching the mission/label. I'm trying to answer in good faith - assuming that the question was asked in that same good faith - as a legitimate request for explanation.

This is all a whataboutism. You don't like the slogan because you want it to be about one thing, but the movement is focused on another thing.

But, would you believe that the two things are related? Black people have been subject to overpolicing since, well, police forces were formed expressly to recapture escaped slaves. The police have had an enduring impact on black populations, ensuring that black people are significantly overrepresented in prisons. Poverty is a spiral, and folks with a criminal history can't get honest work so they return to crime. Kids without good role models are apt to end up in jail before they're adults. Extreme levels of black on black crime are a natural, I'd say unavoidable consequence of the circumstances. And the police, the courts, the prisons, maintain the hedges of that spiral into poverty.

If you've been listening to BLM activists and have only heard anti-police rhetoric, and missed the points about systemic poverty, and the entire remainder of the criminal justice system, then either you haven't been listening very carefully, or you've been getting your information from a biased source that's filtering the message down to what they want you to hear.

Black on black crime is absolutely, horribly, heartwrenchingly, problematic. It harms our entire society. But you don't fix that with a stronger police force. We've tried that. You fix that by addressing the inequities across the board, starting with the criminal justice system.

If you want to dig past the abstract, crime is far more predictable by poverty rate than it is, or ever has been, by race. In fact, crime rates among poor whites are virtually indistinguishable from those among poor blacks. But the racially segmented crime rates are higher because black poverty rates are higher.

And why is that? Ask any sociologist and they'll have the same answer: systemic racism. This shows up in hundreds of different ways: redlining, wage gaps, resource availability, etc.. The criminal justice system as a whole, and cops in particular, are a huge part of this. Cops Terry Stop black people at higher rates than white people. Cops detain black motorists at higher rates than white people. Cops arrest black people at higher rates than white people for the same crimes. They are prosecuted at higher rates than white people for the same crimes. They receive longer sentences than white people for the same crimes. And they get wrongfully convicted (as evidenced by exonerations) at higher rates than white people. And we have an extremely ugly history of making laws that are intentionally targeted at criminalizing black people...giving cops more ammunition to continue this oppression.

Black people being murdered in cold blood by police officers is merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to black oppression by the police. World War I wasn't started because people really cared about Austrian Archdukes...the explosion into full on war was a long time coming, and Franz Ferdinand was just the trigger. Just as well, BLM activists absolutely care about black people being killed by black people. But when a cop, who represents a daily oppressive force against black people trying to make their way out of poverty, brutally murders someone in cold blood, in broad daylight, and with dozens of witnesses begging him to relent, and then continues to choke a dead body for several minutes after he gave up the ghost....yeah, protesters have every right to make a big fucking deal about it.

BLM absolutely cares about black violence and crime. They know what the solution is: black economic mobility. And contrary to the experience of poor white people that also experience violence and crime problems, cops are a part of the problem, not the solution.

Just to be clear, to all the downvoters, this is an actual earnest conversation. I don't think any participant of this thread deserves the downvotes that it is getting. I do believe there is subtle racism here, but it isn't malicious racism, just the typical sort of everyday biases that present themselves in all people from time to time. We don't solve systemic racism by taking sides and lobbing pot shot insults. That does more damage than good.

> In fact, crime rates among poor whites are virtually indistinguishable from those among poor blacks.

This is untrue. From my prior research, virtually every analysis concludes the opposite - that income alone cannot explain the difference in crime rate between black and white Americans. Most studies show income as 30-60% of that regression, which is huge, but when comparing similar income brackets, African Americans have a higher crime rate than whites in almost all of them under $100k. To cover the full difference, it's necessary to bring in other factors (in particular, the rate of single parent households). Please cite a source for the claim you have made or retract it.

Are population density factored in? My guess would be that a higher proportion of poor white people live in rural areas, compared with poor black people, and out in the sticks crimes are more likely to go unnoticed (you're less likely to get picked up painting or even shooting stop signs than tagging walls in a city, I expect) or to not happen due to lack of opportunity (what, you gonna go on a pick-pocketing spree at the Piggly Wiggly checkout line?)

(I'm not saying that's definitely what causes the difference to persist when income-adjusted, I'm just curious if you found that to be factored in, somehow, in the research you've seen)

[EDIT] I guess for international readers or US readers who haven't spent much time in the country, I should clarify that shooting street signs, mostly stop signs, is a (perhaps surprisingly) common activity in the rural US. You'll see lots of bullet-holes in signs if you drive around a bit in that kind of area. It's the rural equivalent of putting bumper stickers on the back of them, I guess.

I don't doubt that you've found those statistics, as sociology is an incredibly difficult field from a methodology standpoint. Unfortunately there are problems with nearly all methodologies. There are two potential sources of the discrepancy in information here: how do you define crime, and how do you define poverty.

The definition of crime has a lot of data collection problems. Official crime rates are compiled by police reports, and if there is a bias in policing or prosecution, there will be a bias in reporting as well. There are methodologies that are used (all of which with their own problems that make them suitable for some analyses but not others) to allow for better analyses to be made. It is through these alternative methodologies that we can even make claims like "black people are twice as likely to be arrested than white people for possession of marijuana": pure collection biases hide the fact that black people and white people are consuming marijuana at similar rates.

The definition of poverty is also fraught, though not for systemic racism reasons. Poverty can be defined in relative terms or absolute terms. It can be based off of wealth, or it can be based off of income. It can be based on household income/wealth or individual income/wealth. It can be defined in terms economic mobility (the ability to change wealth over time), or point in time measurements. It can include social capital as well: some definitions of poverty take into account education availability, parental education levels, etc.

In fact, you mention single parent households, which is deeply tied to poverty. child abandonment rates have a strong inter-causal link with poverty: high poverty causes income earners to abandon their children, and children without income earners in the household not only live in higher poverty as a result, but are likely to perpetuate the poverty. And disparate policing certainly has its own contributors to poverty, because it takes parents away from children.

A good overview of the various methodologies and existing literature can be found here:

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226952/Sampson_...