All that kneeling ignores the real cause of soaring black homicides

All but one of the murder victims in St. Louis last year were Black, and everybody accused of those murders were also Black. Those were the statistics that prompted one of the city’s top law enforcement officials to make a personal plea to his fellow African-Americans: Stop it now.

“One hundred percent of the people that were caught and accused of those crimes were African-Americans. We have to address that,” St. Louis Public Safety Director Jimmie Edwards said specifically to “Black folk” during an event marking the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. national holiday on Monday. “We cannot go forward and continue King’s dream unless we look in the mirror and address that problem. That’s a problem that’s on us.