TWO SYSTEMS OF BELIEF.

Another week, another seemingly mundane police investigation goes wrong, and again the punditry retreat to their predictable quarters.

Scott McKay notes that the absence of the success sequence early in life sets young men up for trouble.

Daunte Wright dropped out of high school, then fathered a child out of wedlock he couldn’t support with minimum-wage jobs and petty drug dealing. He had borrowed $50 from his parents to take his car to a car wash and had his girlfriend in the car with him, with expired license tags. He was stopped by the police, resisted arrest, and then attempted to drive away — which raised the likelihood that he would expose his girlfriend to bodily harm. She was apparently injured when, as he bled out following being shot by Officer Potter, he crashed the car attempting a getaway.

In other words, this is someone who chose to be a penny-ante John Dillinger. He ended up with the full ante.

It's possible that there's a lot more law enforcement activity, and a lot more by way of the petty stuff that goes on in the more distressed neighborhoods, but Mr McKay isn't done.

Great kids don’t fight with and then flee the cops. Great kids don’t bring the police around because they’re waving guns. Great kids aren’t arrested for aggravated robbery or for dealing drugs.

Or, in the community Daunte Wright came from, maybe they do. Maybe that’s great.

If so, that’s a lot bigger problem than the incompetence of the politicians and police in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota.

But that isn’t something you’ll hear much about, is it?

You aren’t even allowed to talk about the fact that this 20-year-old kid had already messed up his life and may have been well on his way to becoming a career criminal. Daunte Wright had perpetuated the cycle of out-of-wedlock childbirth, academic failure, the inability to learn and deploy a marketable skill, and escalating criminal behavior that so horrifically afflicts the black community in this country.

If Daunte Wright’s life was “great” and not substandard, then we will never be rid of these tragedies. And they’re all fundamentally the same — career criminal on the fringe of society, a failure in life, involved in drugs (if not high at the time; we’ll know later what the toxicology report shows), likely faced with prolonged jail time upon arrest and resisting arrest.

How do you prevent deaths like Daunte Wright’s? You try to prevent young men from living lives like Daunte Wright’s.

But you aren’t allowed to say that.

I wonder if he'd be able to engage in a civil conversation with a local diversity officer.

Vernese Edghill-Walden, chief diversity officer for Northern Illinois University, said she doesn’t think incidents like what happened to Daunte Wright or George Floyd are anything new and are just becoming more visible.

“The world has seen that institutional racism exists, that it is not something that people of color made up and that it happens every day,” Edghill-Walden said.

I'm not sure of the chain of causation by which enforcement of licensure or counterfeiting or shoplifting laws in distressed neighborhoods becomes institutional racism, but that's where we are.

Corrine Wickens, a literacy professor at Northern Illinois University and DeKalb resident, said she is regularly asked whether DeKalb is safe.

Wickens said people usually ask the question after seeing safety bulletins about gunshots in the 800 block of Ridge Drive in the city. She said she wonders if it’s a messaging problem from the university, that it could be a dichotomy of Black drivers afraid of getting pulled over by police in the area, and an outside group which generalizes the area as being unsafe. She said she thinks it could be like predominantly white folks considering employment in the area but deterred from public safety alerts creating a reputation for the area.

The neighborhood the professor refers to is a cluster of apartment complexes and fraternity houses, and it might be where the Section 8 housing is.  It's a different neighborhood than the faculty ghetto closer to the university.  So it goes with zoning codes.

Edghill-Walden said crime will happen where there is poverty, food insecurity and unemployment. She said one of the purposes of the DeKalb Area Belonging Council, a community group expected to be created in the next month, is to help people understand it’s not a problem exclusive to DeKalb.

Edghill-Walden said she has found as an African-American woman in the community that crime is racialized, meaning residents sometimes associate crime or crime-prone areas to race.

“There’s crime in Sycamore,” Edghill-Walden said. “There’s crime everywhere. But when we racialize it and assume that it only happens in one community, it’s a problem. So an active solution would be that not only people of color but, more importantly, our white allies help to minimize that perception. So part of that is the work that we all have to do in helping our neighbors understand that.”

Alexander, who also lives in the 800 block of Ridge Drive in the Annie Glidden North neighborhood, said it was “disheartening” to hear people still generalize the area as unsafe without considering why the area is distressed.

“As somebody that’s very prominently in the 800 block, I see people at their best and their worst,” Alexander said. “I’ve gotten involved in several confrontations and I’ve stopped them. ... There was an incident of two people fighting with weapons and I stopped them from fighting. ... So knowing that a lot of the reasons that there’s so much anger is literally due to food insecurity, it’s due to having terrible landlords, to unsafe conditions. I mean, I know that I’m able to empathize with them on a way that other people aren’t necessarily able to do so. So hearing everything that I’ve heard today is a little jarring, to say the least.”

That strikes me as a research opportunity for somebody.  How often do arrests for what look like minor offenses in distressed communities with other population mixes turn sour?  Or might there be more aggressive policing in some communities than others, and is that pattern one that can be broken down on the basis of race or ethnicity?

Might be interesting to see, for instance, Mr McKay to do such reporting, perhaps rather than writing an apology when he's accused of blaming the victim (a phrase that, I submit, a lot of people throw around despite never having read the eponymous book.)