Kelly: 'No question' people will die if stop-and-frisk ends 
 
 New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says there's "no question" more people would die if the city's next mayor ends the controversial stop-and-frisk policy, which a federal judge has struck down as unconstitutional. 
 
 "No question about it, violent crime will go up," Kelly said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press: when host David Gregory asked if more people would die. 
 
 Kelly defended the policy as part of every police officer's toolbox, not a specific program aimed at targeting young black and Hispanic men. The federal judge called the program "indirect racial profiling." 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: Kelly defends stop-and-frisk) 
 
 "Again, this is not a program," Kelly said. "This is something that's integral to policing. This happens throughout America at any police jurisdiction. You have to do it. Officers have to have the right of inquiry, if they see some suspicious behavior. So I can assure you, this is not just a New York City issue. It's an issue throughout America. And this case has to be appealed in my judgment because it will be taken as a template and have significant impact in policing throughout America." 
 
 The commissioner also defended the program as saving minority lives, not targeting them as suspects. 
 
 "We need some balance here," he said. "The stark reality is that violence is happening disproportionately in minority communities. And that unfortunately is in big cities throughout America. We have record low numbers of murders in New York City, record low numbers of shootings, we're doing something right to save lives." 
 
 Kelly also rejected the idea of drawing direct lines between stop-and-frisk and the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. 
 
 "I've dealt with this in many community meetings," Kelly said. "It's something that is very important in the African American community. I would also submit though that the Trayvon Martin case is a little bit different. These are two civilians. It clearly was a tragedy, but it didn't involve sworn police officers." ||||| President Obama made a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room Friday to share his thoughts on the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, saying it is important to look at the case through the lens of past discrimination. 
 
 "Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago," Obama said, during extensive and deeply personal remarks that lasted for 18 minutes. "And when you think about why, in the African American community at least, there’s a lot of pain around what happened here, I think it’s important to recognize that the African American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that -- that doesn’t go away." 
 
 Obama continued: "And I don't want to exaggerate this, but those sets of experiences inform how the African American community interprets what happened one night in Florida. And it's inescapable for people to bring those experiences to bear." 
 
 Obama spoke in a quiet and sometimes halting voice, without notes, touching on both his own experience as a black man and what he sees in his daughters, Sasha and Malia, and their relationship to children of other races. "There are very few African American men who haven't had the experience of being followed in a department store. That includes me," he said. 
 
 But he also struck a hopeful note, saying, "As difficult and challenging as this episode has been, things are getting better." 
 
 The president said that his daughters and their friends are "better than we are, they’re better than we were, on these issues. And that’s true at every community I’ve visited across this country." 
 
 “We should also have confidence that kids these days, I think, have more sense than we did back then, and certainly more than our parents did or our grandparents did," Obama said. "And along this long journey, we’re becoming a more perfect union, not a perfect union, but a more perfect union.” 
 
 Obama said he and his deputies were considering a few concrete policy options in the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, such as trying to train state and local law enforcement officials how to better deal with issues of racial bias, and exploring whether state laws such as "Stand Your Ground" might "encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations" rather than defuse them. 
 
 More broadly, he said he wanted to pursue a "long-term project" of "thinking about, how do we bolster and reinforce African American boys? And this is something that Michelle and I talk a lot about. There are a lot of kids out there that need help, that are getting a lot of negative reinforcement." 
 
 It is important, Obama said, for individual Americans to "do some soul-searching" about their own inherent racial biases, and ask, "Am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can?" 
 
 "That would, I think, be an important exercise in the wake of this tragedy," he said. 
 
 More on this story: 
 
 Full video of Obama's remarks 
 
 Full transcript 
 
 The Fix: President Obama's remarkably personal speech on race 
 
 Robert Zimmerman: 'I'm glad he spoke out today' ||||| Richard Cohen's column in Tuesday's Washington Post— arguing that George Zimmerman was right to assume Trayvon Martin was a criminal, because he was a black male—is racist and wrong. More important, it's wrong because it's racist. That is, it's not that Cohen is "wrong" in the oh-that's-so-politically-incorrect sense. It's that he's wrong because the assumptions he makes about race and crime are not based on facts. 
 
 Cohen appears to believe all black men are the same, and that they are violent. Cohen says he's "tired" of politicians and activists "who essentially suggest that, for recognizing the reality of urban crime in the United States, I am a racist." He justifies Zimmerman's assumption that Martin was a criminal by citing statistics about crime in New York. "In New York City, blacks make up a quarter of the population, yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects—almost all of them young men," Cohen writes. "We know them from the nightly news." While New York's stop-and-frisk program has been criticized for disproportionately targeting minorities, Cohen says, "if young black males are your shooters, then it ought to be young black males whom the police stop and frisk." If police "ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work." 
 
 "Urban crime" is shorthand for young black people committing crimes in big cities on the verge of collapse. But Martin wasn't killed in Cabrini-Green. He was killed in Sanford, Florida (population 53,570), inside a gated community called the Retreat at Twin Lakes, which has about 260 townhouses. The alleged crime was a suburban crime. And, just for the record, it was not the black kid who was just acquitted of it. 
 
 Cohen is trying to conjure images of urban blight in the 1980s—back when, as Matt Yglesias points out, Cohen argued that it was okay for jewelry store owners to refuse to let black people in because they were afraid of crime. Today, Cohen writes that even the black male president should be scared of black males: 
 
 In his acclaimed Philadelphia speech on race, [President Obama] cited his grandmother as “a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street.” How about the former Barry Obama? When he was a Columbia University student living on the lip of then-dangerous Harlem, did he never have the same fear? 
 
 The thing is, a lot has changed since the 1980s. Reading Cohen's column, you'd get the impression that there was an epidemic of crime committed by black people. Too bad he didn't read Jamelle Bouie's article in The Daily Beast a day earlier, about "the Myth of Black-on-Black Crime." Crime rates have been dropping for 20 years. (Just for the record, New York's murder rate in 2012 was the lowest since the 1960s.) If black people were predisposed to committing crimes, Bouie points out, "you would still see high rates of crime among blacks, even as the nation sees a historic decline in criminal offenses. Instead, crime rates among African-Americans, and black youth in particular, have taken a sharp drop." Fewer than 10 percent of black kids in Washington, D.C., the home of Cohen's employer, "are in a gang, have sold drugs, have carried a gun, or have stolen more than $100 in goods." 
 
 Cohen is upset that no one is talking about the epidemic of black violence that isn't real. "Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males?" he asks. "Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment... It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but unmistakable part of life." 
 
 It is unacceptable to complain that "nobody is talking about X" when you have an Internet connection. You can find people talking about anything. Email me, and I can point you to the top 10 '90s nostalgia GIF tumblrs. But you wouldn't need to dig for people saying we should be afraid of black violence—warning, say, that black people would riot if Zimmerman were acquitted. You could just flip on Rush Limbaugh. 
 
 Studies have shown poverty has more to do with crime than race does. More unexpectedly, research published in the American Journal of Sociology in 2001 found that people are more likely to think their neighborhood has a higher crime rate if more young black men live there. The Retreat at Twin Lakes is a multi-ethnic neighborhood—about half white, 20 percent Hispanic, and 20 percent black, The Daily Beast's Amy Green reports. George Zimmerman had called police 46 times. He organized the neighborhood watch. Cohen writes, "There’s no doubt in my mind that Zimmerman profiled Martin and, braced by a gun, set off in quest of heroism. The result was a quintessentially American tragedy—the death of a young man understandably suspected because he was black and tragically dead for the same reason." With his column, Cohen is perpetuating the attitude that made that tragedy possible. 
 
 Update: Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt tells the Huffington Post, "If I had not published the column, just as many people would be asking why the Post can’t tolerate diverse points of view." He added, "I think if people want a 'conversation about race,' as is frequently suggested, they should be open to a range of views and perspectives." There are a range of issues where on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand makes sense, because there are compelling arguments and data on both sides: campaign finance, defense spending, charter schools. But it's a little tone deaf on this issue: some people think black teenagers are dangerous monsters, some people think holding that opinion is an unconscionable danger to black teenagers. 
 
 Want to add to this story? Let us know in comments or send an email to the author at ereeve at theatlantic dot com. You can share ideas for stories on the Open Wire. 
 
 Elspeth Reeve ||||| Last week, National Review Editor Rich Lowry wrote a column arguing that the Trayvon Martin case is a distraction, because the real problem facing black Americans is black on black crime. And on Monday, he complained that some people had called him a bigot for writing the column. (Note: I have contributed periodically to National Review and National Review Online.) 
 
 I disagree with Lowry’s piece, but I certainly don’t think it’s bigoted. Here, I originally had a few hundred words about why, but that’s not really the core point of this post; I’ve appended my discussion of the Lowry column at the bottom if you’re interested. It suffices to say that Lowry ought to be able to make these points without being called a bigot, even though I think he’s wrong. 
 
 But Lowry is running into the problem I discussed last week: he’s probably getting called a bigot because of the company he keeps. Providing a great example, this week National Review writer John Derbyshire published a kind of unbelievably racist piece for Taki’s Magazine, describing “the talk” he gives to his children. 
 
 In the wake of the Trayvon Martin’s shooting, many black parents have discussed the advice they give to their male children about not getting themselves shot in a misunderstanding with a white authority figure. Derbyshire’s talk, on the other hand, is about how to avoid being harmed by a black person. He gives such advice as “If planning a trip to a beach or amusement park at some date, find out whether it is likely to be swamped with blacks on that date,” and “If you are at some public event at which the number of blacks suddenly swells, leave as quickly as possible.” 
 
 Derbyshire also recommends befriending some “intelligent and well-socialized blacks” (IWSBs, for short) so that you can deflect charges of racism by noting that some of your best friends are black. Alas, he adds “the demand is greater than the supply, so IWSBs are something of a luxury good, like antique furniture or corporate jets: boasted of by upper-class whites and wealthy organizations, coveted by the less prosperous.” 
 
 So, while Lowry is advising blacks not to worry so much about the systematic profiling of blacks as criminals due to their race, his colleague Derbyshire is writing a piece specifically urging white people to engage in such profiling, among various other racist nonsense. 
 
 And this is the problem for Lowry and other conservatives who want to be taken seriously by broad audiences when they write about racial issues. Lowry wrote a column containing advice for black Americans. Why should black Americans take him seriously while he’s employing Derbyshire? If Lowry wants NR to be credible on race, he should start by firing John Derbyshire. 
 
 As for my substantive take on Lowry’s column? It isn’t bigoted, though it does set up a false dichotomy. Why shouldn’t black Americans concern themselves with black-on-black crime and also with the mistreatment of innocent black men by authorities? Indeed, I think if you look closely at the politics of heavily black jurisdictions in America today, voters do care about both of those things. 
 
 Lowry’s first example in his column is a young black man shot for no reason in his Detroit home in February. He complains that there is no national outrage over this, but he doesn’t note that the Detroit Police Department under Mayor Dave Bing’s administration has brought in outside experts to import policing best practices from places like New York in an effort to reduce violent crime. 
 
 Reducing violent crime is absolutely high on the political agenda in Detroit. It’s just that different problems have different solutions. The problem in Sanford was that the police department wasn’t properly handling the investigation of Martin’s death, and public pressure was a useful tool to bring about intervention from the state and federal governments to improve the case’s handling. Fixing Detroit’s crime problems will require a more bottom-up solution, and the fact that there isn’t a national outcry doesn’t mean that the problem isn’t being taken seriously. 
 
 Indeed, while the sharp drop in violent crime over the last two decades has had many causes, it partly reflects the fact that voters and politicians have placed greater emphasis on fighting crime than they used to. In large American cities, that very often means black elected officials and black voters. 
 
 Lowry also ends the piece with this: 
 
 [George] Zimmerman could be arrested, convicted, and hanged tomorrow, and it will have no effect on the lives of young black people in communities beset by social disorder. Whatever happens to Zimmerman, the drip-drip of spilled blood will continue, all but ignored except in the police blotter. In America, the lives of young black people are cheap, unless they happen to fit the right agenda. 
 
 This is missing the point. The broader complaint in the Martin case is that young black men are suspected of crimes for no reason other than their race, leading to unwarranted seizures and arrests and, in some rare cases like this one, tragic deaths. And a further problem is that the non-investigation of Zimmerman (whose clothes were not even retained as evidence by the Sanford Police) sends the message that there is no consequence for killing a young black man due to a misunderstanding. It’s a perfectly valid complaint about the rule of law, and doesn’t negate Lowry’s point that black-on-black violence is an important problem. ||||| ST. PETERSBURG — As Americans honored the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, a Republican candidate for Florida House District 68 said President Barack Obama should be hanged for war crimes. 
 
 "I'm past impeachment," Joshua Black wrote on Twitter. "It's time to arrest and hang him high." 
 
 The tweet caught the attention of Chris Latvala, a Republican candidate for House District 67. 
 
 "You aren't seriously calling for the killing of Obama are you?" Latvala replied. "I know you are crazy but good heavens. U R an embarrassment." 
 
 Latvala added: "I make it my business when so called GOP candidates become an embarrassment to my beloved party." 
 
 Black, 31, of Pinellas Park moved to Florida in 2007 after practicing street evangelism in St. Louis and works as a taxi driver. According to his campaign website, Black entered politics in 2012 when he tried influencing the presidential primary. 
 
 The website says: "Republicans have a serious communication problem. Everything we say sounds like spears." 
 
 Hours after the tweet, Black defended his comment. Obama should be held responsible for ordering a drone strike that killed a U.S. citizen overseas, he said. 
 
 "He should be executed for treason," Black said. "I think the appropriate punishment is death. They killed Benedict Arnold. (Obama) shouldn't be allowed to kill Americans without a trial." 
 
 The political newcomer said he doesn't fear U.S. Secret Service agents showing up on his doorstep. Many voters might agree with his position, he said, adding: "I guess they're going to call me a racist now." 
 
 After talking to a reporter, Black posted a lengthy message to supporters on Facebook. 
 
 "I make no apologies for saying that the President is not above the People. If ordinary Americans should be executed for treason, so should he." 
 
 Pinellas GOP Chairman Michael Guju said Black doesn't know the secret details of the drone strike. "It is impossible to accept this statement," Guju said. "This is wholly unacceptable and unduly provocative." 
 
 Black's opponent in the House race, Democratic state Rep. Dwight Dudley, said Black has the right to disagree with Obama's decisions. But he shouldn't call for Obama's hanging. "It's dangerous and unbecoming for someone who wants to lead to call for such violence and extremist action," he said. "Wow. I'm stunned." 
 
 Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report. ||||| ‘Enough is enough,’ says May … but Corbyn and Farron query police cuts and ask why government has not published report into funding of jihadi groups 
 
 What’s happening? 
 
 It was supposed to be the Brexit election. Instead it is the issue of security that dominates today after another terror attack struck a British city and election campaigning was suspended for the second time. 
 
 London attack: Isis claims responsibility, as first victim is named – live updates Read more 
 
 Sunday’s suspension was more brief than that agreed after the Manchester Arena bombing, and different in tone – perhaps inevitable after the second terrorist strike in a fortnight, and with just days to go before voters head to the polls. 
 
 Theresa May emerged from a meeting of the government’s emergency Cobra committee to announce: “Enough is enough.” 
 
 While we have made significant progress in recent years, there is – to be frank – far too much tolerance of extremism in our country. 
 
 
 
 On what she thought still needed to be done, May said there could be increased prison terms for even minor terrorism offences, and targeted internet companies: 
 
 We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed – yet that is precisely what the internet, and the big companies that provide internet-based services provide. 
 
 We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements to regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremism and terrorism planning. 
 
 Returning to the stump on Sunday evening, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn took a different view on how extremism could be tackled: 
 
 You cannot protect the public on the cheap. The police and security services must get the resources they need, not 20,000 police cuts. Theresa May was warned by the Police Federation but she accused them of ‘crying wolf’ . 
 
 
 
 That is a reference to a speech made by May as home secretary two years ago, in which she accused Police Federation delegates of scaremongering and “crying wolf” over cuts in police funding. 
 
 Corbyn also sought to distance himself from some of his own past comments, notably a 2015 BBC interview in which he said he was “not happy with the shoot-to-kill policy in general” on Britain’s streets (an interview the BBC Trust later ruled was presented out of context). Speaking on Sunday, the Labour leader said he backed the actions of armed police who shot dead the three suspects just eight minutes after the first emergency call: 
 
 I will take whatever action is necessary and effective to protect the security of our people and our country. That includes full authority for the police to use whatever force is necessary to protect and save life as they did last night. 
 
 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Counter-terrorism officers near the scene of the London Bridge terrorist attack. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images 
 
 Corbyn finds backing this morning for his argument that “difficult conversations” need to be had with countries including Saudi Arabia over the funding of extremism. Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron echoed Corbyn’s call for a report commissioned by David Cameron into funding of jihadi groups to be published. 
 
 The Guardian reported last week that the findings – which are believed to focus on Saudi Arabia’s funding for Islamists – might never be published. The Home Office called its contents “very sensitive”. 
 
 Writing in the Guardian today, Farron says a thorough attempt at tackling extremism should mean publishing the report: 
 
 That should include exposing and rooting out the source funding of terror, even it means difficult and embarrassing conversations with those such as Saudi Arabia that the government claims are our allies. 
 
 At a glance: 
 
 Diary 
 
 We can expect a meeting of the government’s emergency Cobra meeting this morning, with a Theresa May statement to follow. The PM then resumes campaigning. 
 
 statement to follow. The PM then resumes campaigning. Jeremy Corbyn is visiting north-east England, culminating in a rally in Gateshead this evening. 
 
 is visiting north-east England, culminating in a rally in Gateshead this evening. Tim Farron and Nicola Sturgeon are in Edinburgh ahead of tonight’s delayed Question Time, hosted by Nick Robinson. That’s on BBC1 at 9pm. 
 
 Read these 
 
 Jane Merrick in the Independent says the PM’s response to the London attack had to be political: 
 
 The criticism fails to recognise the reality of the situation. What was she supposed to do? People waking up on Sunday morning to yet another attack, the third in as many months, needed reassurance that something was being done – beyond the usual appeals for unity and resilience. As she herself said, things cannot simply return to normal… 
 
 In Britain it is unprecedented in modern times for one terrorist attack to have been carried out during an election campaign, let alone two. Experiencing three in fairly quick succession has shaken the country. As we are in uncharted territory, there is no rulebook to follow. But it seems like May cannot win and would have faced criticism whatever she had said. 
 
 In the Guardian, Myriam François says the solutions proposed by May and others miss the mark: 
 
 Attacking European nations or the United States was never Isis’s raison d’être. But as coalition forces have gradually dismantled the strongholds that provided the group with a modicum of authority in the eyes of its supporters, strikes in western cities have consistently been claimed as a response to this. 
 
 This isn’t to suggest the territorial fightback against Isis should not be pursued – it is simply that we have to recognise that the fate of European capitals is tied up with a very real war taking place in the Middle East. British foreign policy, whether you agree or disagree with its direction, is reverberating on British soil. And here it mixes with the underbelly that exists in all societies: the marginalised, the angry, the alienated; those looking for a higher cause to bring meaning to an often dead-end existence. 
 
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– Ray Kelly isn't soft-pedaling the effects if the NYPD's "stop and frisk" policy ends: "No question about it, violent crime will go up," he said today when asked if more people would die without it, Politico reports. "The stark reality is that violence is happening disproportionately in minority communities," he said, adding that "officers have to have the right of inquiry if they see some suspicious behavior." Benjamin Crump, the lawyer for Trayvon Martin's family, called the policy "a slippery slope. No matter what you want to call it, essentially it's racial profiling. And we know Trayvon Martin was profiled for something that night on February 26, 2012. And he had broken no laws." Kelly said Trayvon's case is "a little bit different. These are two civilians. It clearly was a tragedy, but it didn't involve sworn police officers." Elsewhere on your Sunday dial, as per Politico: John McCain on Egypt: The US has "no credibility" and the White House is "not sticking to our values. There is no policy. And there is no strategy. We are much more hated and much less respected than we were in 2009." McCain called for the US to cut off aid. Lyndsey Graham on Egypt: "We're gonna have a failed state in Egypt, and we're gonna have to suspend our aid because we can't support the reaction of the military. Even though the Brotherhood overplaying their hand started this, we can't support what the military is doing in response." Reince Priebus rebuts criticism from Eric Fehrnstrom over debate brouhaha: "I don't know if his Etch-a-Sketch is on tilt. I'm not really taking advice from Eric Fehrnstrom right now. I'm trying to build a party that's year-round. I'm trying to fix a dated digital operation, I'm trying to get a hold of a primary process and a debate debacle" Rand Paul on his fight with Chris Christie: "The party's big enough for both of us. This all started with him saying, 'We don't have enough room for libertarian Republicans.' The thing is, that's how we grow our party. There's room for people who believe in bigger government in our party. Some of the things that he seems to have promoted makes us believe that, well, he seems to think there's a lot more spending that could be going on."