Misplaced priorities

I promise to move on to a completely different topic tomorrow, but I want to finish off this series topics that kind of go together.  On January 1, 2009, Johannes Mehserle, a San Francisco/Oakland Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer shot and killed an unarmed black man named Oscar Grant in front of dozens of witnesses.  No one this side of Mr. Grant’s mother thinks Mehserle did it on purpose.  For a year and a half, the media couldn’t get enough of the story.  After a trial and a quick verdict that essentially said that Mehserle was an idiot but not a murderer young hoods rioted in the streets.  Strangely, mostly shoe stores were hit:  “The jury was unfair to our old buddy Oscar; let’s go get us some new shoes!”  And, oh yes, a Subway, looting is hungry work.

As we discussed yesterday, every year over 100 people are murdered in Oakland — real murders, not just tragic accidents.  Each of these real murders merits a 30 second story on the morning news and is never heard about again.  I don’t have any stats, but I’ll bet the vast majority go unsolved. 

Even given the man-bites-dog quality of a cop killing a kid, this seems disproportionate.  In response to my first in this series one commenter wrote SO WHAT?  Is that really how we feel about these kids killing each other and innocents who happen to be in their line of fire?  Are we really so unconcerned?  Conversely, are the folks in the inner cities so untrusting of the police that, with media complicity, they blow a tragic accident up into an indictment of all police everywhere? 

As I guess is my theme in this series, it seems to me there is something desperately wrong here and I don’t have any idea what can be done about it.  Am I just bleeding heart over nothing or are there real problems here that we should be working to resolve?  And, as a practical matter, can helping to resolve them help America and help defend America from the leftist assault on her?