It seems like you're saying that there's so little crime in his area because minorities are being specifically targeted.
Doesn't that imply that minorities are criminals that make areas unsafe?
I think this is what Specter is getting at.
This is a good example of what is wrong with the political right.
Crime statistics and reporting is very complex, and it's difficult to tell to what extent crime statistics are influenced by overpolicing and overeporting, but it's fairly undeniable that some minorities do commit crimes at a higher rate than others. The question is why.
Most people, for example, even if they don't sympathise with criminals, understand that crime is often created or influenced by conditions of material deprivation, such as, for example, the systemic intergenerational poverty and low achievement deliberately imposed upon black communities through redlining and other forms of prejudice. If a community is more likely to end up in desperate poverty, or more likely to end up with limited educational prospects or more likely to struggle finding a job, then that community will probably suffer from crime. Most of that crime will likely result directly from people seeking to profit from that poverty and desperation.
Most people are able to understand, on some level, that harsh policing doesn't really lower crime. In fact, it raises crime statistics (because it turns out when you police a community more harshly you will discover more "crime"). Granted, a lot of people don't care because they see the justice system as punitive rather than transformative, and see the goal of policing as that of punishing or suppressing people who are bad, but the basic facts are fairly obvious. The real way to lower crime statistics is to ameliorate the causal factors of most crime, which is poverty, desperation and a lack of social bonds. Even most conservatives, on some level, understand in their own communitarian, "family values" fashion that crime is a product of these circumstances. They just think it needs to be fixed with Christianity and getting rid of that scary rap music rather than, you know, welfare.
But a lot of conservatives are also extremely authoritarian, and are extremely invested in the idea that the hierarchical society in which the live is just, meritocratic and the only possible social arrangement, and for those conservatives, the reason certain minorities commit crime more is because they're bad. They have the bad genes and it makes them do crime. Nothing to do with poverty, or desperation, or a lack of social integration, or low expectations, or untreated mental health and addiction crises in these populations. They had the same opportunities as everyone else, but they did crime because they are bad and its in their nature.
Obviously, I don't have to point out the implications of what this actually means when we're talking about ethnic minorities. You figure that one out yourself.
There's a pretty famous Nazi propaganda film called
The Eternal Jew. Surprisingly, it includes a lot of footage shot in the ghettos of occupied Poland and showing the horrible conditions therein, which you'd think would be very counter-productive towards preparing the German public for genocide. However, the film presents these horrible conditions as the natural condition in which Jews lived. The fact that people are starving and desperate is not presented as the fault of the regime which put them in ghettos, but as proof of the fact that Jews could not form a functioning society, that they were naturally dirty and squalid people. In short, the Nazi regime created conditions of horrible deprivation, then claimed that those conditions were evidence of inherent racial differences which ultimately justified genocide.
Pointing out that a community has problems is not racist (I guess it could be, but not usually). Blaming some inherent racial quality for creating those problems is very, very racist.
