Black & blue.

You don't need a university study to determine who are the most frequent victims of crime in the inner city and who are its perpetrators. It is African-American criminals, not racist police, who break into African-American homes to steal the little that we have. It is African-American criminals who kill their brothers over twenty dollars. It is African-American criminals who rape your daughter. Black-on-black crime is the culprit, and it scares the hell out of me every time I get out of my car at night.

Yes, I have been harassed by the police for doing little more than turning around in a stranger's driveway in an affluent part of town. And yes, I know that there has always been an adversarial relationship between a certain element in most metropolitan police units and inner-city residents. But if we blacks were honest, we would admit that despite the exploits of a few racist jerks on any police force, the police are not the most immediate threat to the health and well-being of African-Americans.

To be blunt, we have met the enemy and they are sometimes us. From Buffalo, New York, to Modesto, California, and from Atlanta to Chicago, and yes, even in South Bend, Indiana, where I live, the black criminal is the clear and present danger, and most black folks know this to be true. We have been encouraged by the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of this world to focus on the police as one of our main problems. But hell, the police have never stolen my license plates - and they have been stolen.

When the police officer came out to my home to investigate the robbery, I had a discussion with him. He has worked in my neighborhood for twenty years and has seen things go from bad to worse to completely awful. He expresses a deep concern about the majority of law-abiding inner-city residents who are being victimized, but feels his hands are tied by questionable charges of police brutality. In more than one incident over the past year, he says, officers have been taken to court because they used force to stop a pusher who was known to be selling drugs to junior-high-school students. The unspoken attitude developing in his precinct, he says, is not to intervene in situations that may call for the use of force when perpetrators are black.

I believe that the political, moral, and socio-economic attention that the charge of police brutality creates is especially intoxicating for too many African-American leaders on both the local and national levels. They use it as a springboard to enhance their status as spokespersons for the black community in an intractably racist society. But they are never really challenged to look at what black communities are doing to stop black-on-black crime. It is always easier to blame someone else or something else. That is human nature. As my favorite Eurocentric dead white male, William Shakespeare, says, "the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

Of course, it is obvious to any of us who live in inner-city neighborhoods that black-on-black crime, dope pushers in our schools, and disruptive teen-agers in the classrooms do the most cataclysmic harm to the civility of our community. Why do we keep vicious dogs in our yards? Not to stop the police but to protect us against criminals. Why do we buy security systems for our homes? Not to stop the police! When I arrive home late each night from work and I'm putting the car away in the back alley, I am not worried about the police jumping out, shooting me, and stealing my vehicle. I am looking over my shoulder for "criminal black folks." Until we stop this dangerous charade of demonizing the very people who are sworn to protect us, the problems within the inner city will continue to fester.

We in the African-American community have cried wolf so often that we have inadvertently made our own neighborhoods more unsafe. If the police hesitate to act against the violence and incivility in many inner-city communities, who can really blame them? Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) have been conspicuously present at events involving police brutality and police misconduct, but they don't have to personally subdue some low-life who sells drugs to our kids.

Let me be absolutely clear here. Yes, police brutality exists, the cases of Rodney King and Abner Louima testify to it, and it must be stopped. But to focus on a few incidents and refuse to support the vast majority of police officers who want to combat crime in black neighborhoods is not only misguided racial politics, it is downright deadly to those of us who live there.

Patrick Hall is the coordinator of research instruction at the University of Notre Dame.