One thing that hit me in your comments above, Ham, is a solution that is almost guaranteed to raise the roof here.

Why not police the holy bejeezus out of the inner city?

There is an absolute toxic mix of strains of items that have devastated the black community, and this path down really kinds of starts in the late 60's early 70's -- the black community even in the inner cities was making inroads into normalization, and the black middle class could actually be started to be denoted as 'flourishing'.

Since then an absolute unholy combination of items has cratered the black community --- some can have societal root causes (disparity in public education, for one), but some not.

One major devastatingly apparent and very explicit pair of stats relate to single mother households, and to black incarceration rates. On top of that the black mortality rate for young men is absolutely through the roof, most likely directly tied to the former two, and in turn serving as a positive feedback.

If we police the holy bejeezus out of the inner city, why cant this actually serve as a curb on these factors? Almost think of it as a corollary to the model in occupying Japan post world war two. Provide an environment that fosters a middle class, that fosters growth in land value, that fosters a very tangible and serious counterweight to the culture of crime that is there?

I really hate to tell our resident progressives this, but an overcommitment to law and order works wonders for targeted communities. From the late 1960s to the early 1980's, the mob pretty much literally governed New York City. The FBI deliberately overpoliced that aspect -- leading to a massive sweep of the mob from the tentacles of power.

Giuliani then followed that act with the introduction of 'broken windows' policing starting early in '94 -- the change in NYC between that time and 2000 in terms of violent crime rates was nothing less short of astounding.

Given those macro track records, what is so fundamentally wrong with the 'police the bejeezus' out of the inner cities? I will absolutely state that the educational system has to be reformed at the same time to maximize the results. But, what is wrong with that proposal?