Wrong lesson from that “teachable moment.”

As Harvard Prof. Gates’s reaction to the assistance of Officer Crowley in Cambridge, Mass., shows, there are some bizarre attitudes that blacks have toward law enforcement.

This is not quite the lesson from that “teachable moment” in that encounter that certain persons had in mind.

The officer came to assist the professor by investigating a possible illegal entry of his residence and was met with an outburst from the professor that sounded like something that would come out of the mouth of a crack dealer being rousted for the 50th time in one month by a beat cop, not something from the mouth of a safe, well-off professor of something or other at Harvard.

Robert Weissberg has some interesting ideas why blacks (in high black-on-black crime areas) have similar attitudes to police officers trying to deal with horrendous crime in their neighborhoods. After a high-visibility crime, the black community responds positively to increased police efforts, but when there is an inevitable mistake by the police, the response of the community is -- almost invariably -- misdirected into pathological pathways seemingly designed to restore crime rates to “normal.”

This skewed response is so tragic because of the horrendous violent crime rates in the slums inner city:

[B]lacks commit an inordinate amount of violent crime. In 2005, for example, blacks were seven time more likely than whites to commit a homicide. Second, blacks themselves are typically the victims of this violence—between 1976 and 2005, 94 percent of all blacks killed in a homicide were killed by other blacks. In 2008, homicide was the leading cause of death for black males aged 10-24 and the second leading cause of death for women of that age. This pattern is true for other violent crimes . . . .

Entire neighborhoods, whole cities like Newark, NJ, and Detroit, MI, resemble bombed-out Berlin in 1945 due to self-inflicted mayhem, while law-abiding black residents suffer unemployment, boarded up stores, vandalized housing, dangerous schools, and all the rest thanks to rampant criminality.

When Sharpton and Jackson go back home after putting on their morality plays, the killing revives and the despair settles back in.

But the Mafia teaches a lesson . . . .

"Black on Black." By Robert Weissberg, Takimag.com, 9/14/09.