That Connecticut Hit And Run

Derb gets to the bottom of it:

When I first saw the clips, my suspicious and mean-spirited nature kicked in. I went to my computer and looked up the demography of that Hartford neighborhood. Uh-huh. (That’s just the broad zip code, which likely includes some gentrified zones. Here are student stats for the nearest public high school. Here are the same for the nearest public elementary school.) Yet in all the TV news and talking-head coverage of the incident, nobody bothered to tell us about neighborhood demographics. Not only did they not bother to tell us, they pointedly refrained from telling us. The talking heads were all: “What’s the matter with us?” and “How did we get this way?” and other verbal hand-wringings, while vast numbers of white TV viewers who’d already guessed the thing I’d looked up, were thinking to themselves: “Whaddya mean, us? This isn’t us, it’s them. Nothing to do with us.”

Just a reminder of what sometimes lies beneath the prose at NRO.