It seems as if everyone from the excreable Al Sharpton to the President is inexhaustibly beating the drum of racial unrest in the wake of the events in Ferguson, Missouri and on Staten Island, NY.  So the article written by Steven Malanga, titled as above, and published earlier this week in City Journal, is timely.  From the article, these interesting excerpts:

What’s striking in the progression of these later studies is a steady decrease in the number of people having interactions with the police—from about 45 million in 2002 to 40 million in 2011—or from about 21 percent of the 16-and-older population to about 17 percent.  One clear reason for the decline has been the corresponding drop in crime: the number of people reporting crimes or other problems to the police fell by about 3.6 million from a peak in 2002.  More important, perhaps, was that reports of use of force by police also fell, from 664,000 in 2002 to 574,000 in a 2010 report.  Those declines occurred across all races.  The number of African-Americans reporting that police used force against them fell from 173,000 to 130,000.  Among whites, the number has dropped from a peak of 374,000 to 347,000.

and

… in the most recent survey, in 2011, 88.2 percent of those stopped by the police said they thought officers acted properly.  There were few significant distinctions by race.  Nearly 83 percent of African-Americans judged police behavior to be proper, for instance.  The study also asked citizens whether they thought the police had stopped them for a “legitimate” reason—and here the data on race is particularly interesting.  Some 80 percent of all drivers viewed their stops as legitimate, compared with 68 percent of African-Americans.  But the study also asked drivers to report the race of the officers who stopped them, and African-Americans were just as likely to say that stops initiated by white officers were legitimate as those initiated by black officers.  Similarly, white drivers saw no difference in how they were treated by white officers or black officers on this question.

I continue to believe that we must be ever vigilant against the abuse of police power, but the full article, HERE, contains a wealth of information, is enlightening, and is well worth reading.  Since it contains statistics drawn from Justice Department studies, you will realize that Eric Holder has no excuse for pretending that the police have a built-in antipathy toward black Americans.