"Is this a football team or a political organization?" USA Today writer Jarrett Bell posed the question in reference to the Baltimore Ravens players and staff who sent a letter to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell urging him to bring the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 to the Senate floor for a vote. In other words, they want to handcuff America's cops.
Bell concluded, "It’s a football team, made up of American citizens who care enough to use their tremendous platform. If they don’t see the action they’ve demanded, apparently it won’t be for lack of trying."
Lately teams like the Ravens have acted more like political organizations -- misinformed and pushing the agenda of the Marxist organization Black Lives Matter.
The Ravens are concerned about much more than the George Floyd Policing Act, which in June passed the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives, 236-181. Bell explains the rest of the NFL team's demands:
"The Ravens, bless ‘em, urged for the arrests of police responsible for the killing of Breonna Taylor and shooting of Blake. They want Mitch McConnell to bring the George Floyd Policing Act to a vote on the Senate floor. They want to see an end to qualified immunity while holding police more accountable in court, in addition to banning chokeholds and no-knock warrants. They want sentencing reform."
Bell says the Ravens are showing guts with a bold call to action and providing a lesson on social justice for the NFL. On closer examination, it doesn't take any intestinal fortitude to go with the flow in a league whose leadership has already sold out to social justice activism.
The real questions Bell, the media at large and pro sports social justice warriors is when will they focus on the real problems?
Will these leagues and their athletes with their combined billions of dollars address family breakdown and fatherless in the inner cities?
Will they address rampant inner-city crime, including the sexual misconduct charges that brought Kenosha police officers out to arrest Jacob Blake? And Ferguson officers to arrest the lawless Michael Brown? As well as the people wanted on drug charges that brought Louisville police to an apartment where Breonna Taylor was shot? Drive-by killings by minorities in the inner city are also a huge problem, and white cops aren't pulling the trigger.
Will the change that athletes are demanding throw out the Democrats on whose watch occur never-ending killings in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, et al out of office?
No they won't. Sports figures want to vote Donald Trump out of office, give felons the right to vote and handcuff the police.
Heather Mac Donald, an expert on crime in the U.S., and author of the book "The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law Enforcement Makes Everyone Less Safe", wrote an article in USA Today in June proving that the Ravens, LeBron James and all the other sports figures are wrong. There is no epidemic of white cops killing blacks in America.
MacDonald's research revealed that African Americans committed 85.5 percent of felonious assaults on whites, and whites committed 14.4 percent of felonious assaults on blacks. There's actually more justification, MacDonald says, for the existence of groups named "White and Hispanic Lives Matter."
MacDonald also found that white police officers are 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.
If Black Lives Matter activists want to save blacks from urban violence, they should put their efforts into rebuilding inner-city culture, MacDonald said. They can start by strengthening marriages and families.
The myths of systemically racist public safety officers are driving the social justice agendas of Black Lives Matter, sports leagues and athletes. The Baltimore Ravens would do well to look at crime in their own inner-city back yard before pointing fingers at the cops left to clean up the messes of violence.
