The Killers in Washington D.C.

President Trump's decision to take over the policing of our Nations's Capitol, and deploy a National Guard contingent to patrol its streets in response to rampant criminal activity by young black men, often teenagers, has attracted national attention. Opponents call it racist although others argue that  Washington D.C.'s black residents will benefit the most if the streets are secure. Some cite declining crime statistics, but I believe that most residents of the Capitol know that parts of the city are not safe, especially at night.

The President's action reminded me of a post I had written two years ago on the "root causes" of urban crime. See below.

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An article in the Wall Street Journal this week about young black men caught my eye. Barry Latzer, an emeritus Professor of criminal justice at New York’s John Jay college, traced the alarming increase in murder rates in the United States to a combination of “big cities, guns, and young black men.” 

Latzer noted new statistics that showed that while violent crimes like rape, robbery, and assault declined somewhat during the pandemic, the murder rate skyrocketed especially among young black men. Black males were victims of homicide at a rate five times that of white or Hispanic men, and the great majority of these murders were committed by other young black men. Often, the killings seemed to be over trivial matters, or affronts to “honor.”

 

Latzer attributed this type of killing to a holdover from Southern culture of 150 years ago, that blacks have carried into Northern cities. I trained as a historian many years ago, and one of the things I learned was to look for proximate causes of events, that is, causes closest in time to the event. I don’t think there is a need to go back a hundred years or more to find an explanation of why young black men are killing each other at alarming rates today. I think we have only to look at the education these young men received in their own brief lifetimes.

 

I am not referring to the formal education they have received in school. In my opinion, the low scores and poor results black young men achieve in school are not due to a lack of brain power but to a lack of motivation. Outside of school they have been educated to distrust and despise school. Their real education takes place on the street or on their phones. What do they learn there?

 

In a recent news story in my local newspaper, a Bridgeport gang member pleaded guilty to racketeering charges. He was a member of a notorious gang that “robbed drug dealers, customers and others, sold narcotics, and stole cars from inside and outside Connecticut, often using the cars to commit crimes.” In addition, they “frequently used social media to promote and coordinate their criminal activities.” Social media posts and text messages revealed that he “possessed firearms, including firearms with extended magazines, and that he sold a variety of drugs. … he also participated in the theft and possession of stolen vehicles, some of which were used to commit shootings.”

 

Over his 20 years this young man had obviously acquired the considerable education and skills necessary to compete in his chosen profession. He was part of a skilled band with their own code of ethics. His formal education in school must have seemed like mere child’s play, totally irrelevant to life in the real world. In other words, he and others like him are uncivilized. They are ruthless barbarians. 

 

 I do not say this is so because they are black. I think the color of their skin, or their race has little to do with it. After all, there is only one race, the human race, and we all have the same human nature. We can find examples of uncivilized young men all over the world today. Just look at images of members of Mexican drug cartels wielding AK-47s while ferrying migrants over our southern border. Remember the young men of ISIS cutting off the heads of captive victims. Are the Taliban in Afghanistan any different? Looking back on our own history, every wave of immigrants brought with it young, uncivilized young men who formed gangs and thought nothing of killing to avenge the slightest insult.

 

For thousands of years it has been parents, family, religion, customs and traditions that have civilized young men. The breakdown of these institutions in the past 50 years has been catastrophic in America. Coincidentally, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of hip hop music. In the same week that Professor Latzer bemoaned the high murder rate among young black men, Jason Riley, a black man who is a regular columnist for the Wall Street Journal, bemoaned the effects of the musical genre that has been the most powerful educational tool among young black men.

 

“A-list hip-hop artists… became fabulously wealthy trafficking in racist gutter lyrics and ugly stereotypes about black people. For decades, black parents have devoted an inordinate amount of time—with mixed success—to shielding their children from the materialism, drugs, promiscuous sex and thuggery behavior that pervades the songs of some of hip-hops most popular artists. ... decades of glorifying the gangsta-rap lifestyle and, worse, presenting it as the only authentic black experience, have come at a cost.”

 

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Crime Wave 2021

 

In the June/July issue of the St. Croix Review, a Midwestern journal of opinion, editor Barry Mac Donald led off with a startling analysis of a crime wave that has swept over some of America’s cities in the past three  years.

 

His editorial, entitled, “The Plight of Black America,” referred to an essay by Heather MacDonald, a renowned Manhattan Institute scholar, that noted that police shootings accounted for only 3% of black homicides. He wrote,

 

“In 2019, according to Statista, there were 7,484 black homicides in America. Who is killing the other 97 percent of black Americans? Are white civilians intruding into black neighborhoods and killing such a huge percentage of blacks?”

 

He then provided a five-page listing of actual homicides derived from the essay by Heather MacDonald, “A Grim—and Ignored—Body Count, the Problem in the American Inner City Is Not Racism but Drive-by Shootings of Blacks by other Blacks,” that appeared in the City Journal on November 2, 2020.

 

Here is a sample of the listings.

 

“On October 13, a 35-year-old probation officer who was eight months pregnant was fatally shot in the back outside of her home on the far South side of Chicago.”

 

“On October 10, a 16-year-old boy turned Lake Shore Drive in Chicago into a ‘shooting gallery,’ according to the police, shooting out the eye of a 19-year-old girl in a nearby car.”

 

“On October 8, a 51-year-old bus driver in Baltimore reprimanded a couple for getting on his bus without paying. The female grabbed the driver’s backpack and ran off. The bus driver gave chase; the male opened fire and continued pumping bullets into the driver as he lay on the ground, killing him.”

 

“In Sacramento, a 9-year-old girl was killed on October 3 during a family gathering in a park. Her six-year-old cousin and aunt were also shot. Two hours later, a 17-year-old crashed into a pole after being fatally shot. Shortly thereafter, a 17-year-old girl was shot.”

 

As I said above there are five full pages listing these horrific killings that occurred in just a few months. So far this year the killings in black neighborhoods have increased to record new levels. Just as alarming is the fact that the great majority of the killers are still on the streets. Very few have been arrested, convicted, or sent to jail.

 

What is the cause of these killings? It can’t be racism, systemic or otherwise, since the killers are black men, who by definition cannot be accused of racism. It might be better to ask, “who are these killers?”

 

Although the great majority of blacks, like everyone else in this country, are decent law-abiding citizens, there is a criminal underclass, made up primarily of young black gang members, who have been terrorizing black neighborhoods for decades. 

 

Young male sociopaths are not unique to the black community. When the Irish and the Italians first came to this country, they also had their gangs that terrorized the members of their own communities and tarnished the image of decent immigrants. More recent immigrant groups have their own gangs that murderously compete for control of the drug trade.

 

Over a hundred years ago, a perceptive novelist described these criminals and their world.

 

You got a sinister impression of a world, sordid, tumultuous, in which these gangsters, dope traffickers, bookies and race-course touts lived their dark and hazardous lives. Dregs of the population of a great city, living on their wits, suspicious of one another, ready to betray their best friends if it could be of advantage to themselves, open-handed, sociable, gaily cynical, even good-humoured, they seemed to enjoy that existence, with all its dangers and vicissitudes, which kept you up to the mark and made you feel that you really were living. Each man’s hand was against his neighbours, but the alertness which this forced upon you was exhilarating. It was a world in which a man would shoot another for a trifle, but was just as ready to take flowers and fruit, bought at no small sacrifice, to a third who was sick in hospital.* 

 

He was writing about the underworld in all-white Paris in the 1930s. It is not the color of one’s skin that makes one a criminal but rather the development of a criminal mentality that starts at a very young age. Teachers in inner city schools notice it in the earliest grades. Even before they get to high school, these children have gone far beyond disrupting classrooms and petty theft. At high school age they join gangs and become heartless murderers.

 

Last year, they were among the vandals, looters, burners, and shooters who took over and trashed neighborhoods without any fear of the official justice system. They suffered no consequences. Some politicians and commentators even praised them. 

Because the victims of these shootings were not killed by a white policeman, their lives really don’t seem to matter to the protestors marching to reform, de-fund, or even eliminate the official criminal justice system. In a June 23 column in the Wall Street Journal, Jason L. Reilly argued that the protestors and their agenda are at variance with the needs and wishes of the black community.

"Current efforts to reduce resources for law enforcement in the name of "social justice" for blacks ignore that blacks have long complained about underpolicing of their communities. In a 1993 Gallup poll, 75% of black respondents said they wanted more cops on the streets, and 82% said that the court system goes too easy on offenders. Blacks today continue to express overwhelming support  for the presence of more police in their neighborhoods, which suggests that, unlike the progressive politicians and activists who claim to speak on their behalf, most blacks are more interested in safe communities than they are in the racial composition of the inmate population."

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*Somerset Maugham: Christmas Holiday. pp. 201-2.

 Quote of the day:

 

Churchill: The truth is incontrovertible. Panic may resent it, ignorance may deny it, malice may distort it, but there it is. 

Systemic Racism or Black Culture?

Last week a couple of letters in the Wall Street Journal argued that high rates of incarceration of black men in American prisons, and low test scores of black children in American schools were evidence of "systemic racism" in American society. I will deal with the education issue in a subsequent post but for now would just like to address the prison issue by reproducing a post from 2017 that seems just as relevant today.

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Recently I was invited to speak on Renaissance art at the monthly meeting of a local MENSA chapter. The organization is made up of very smart people whose IQs place them in the top 2% when it comes to intelligence. The intelligence of the self-admitted “geeks” was certainly in evidence at the dinner that proceeded my talk. Discussion at the table was spirited and lively and ranged over a variety of subjects. 

These were interesting people and it was a pleasure to just sit back and listen. Politics was generally avoided but one man at the table brought up a book on racial injustice that sparked a little argument.  Although only halfway through the book, he was apparently already convinced of its validity. The book was “The New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander. Its subtitle, “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” is more indicative of its subject. 

Published in 2012 the book soon made the NY Times bestseller list and was even required reading for the incoming class at Ivy League Brown University. Indeed, the San Francisco Chronicle called the book the “bible of a social movement.” Apparently the book claims that the incarceration of millions of black men in America is proof that racism is alive and well despite any claims to the contrary.

Fortunately, one of the other members at the table turned out to be well-read on the subject and brought up some very good objections based on his own reading. Later, he sent me a link to a very critical review article, entitled, “Revisiting ‘The New Jim Crow,’ written by John P. Walters and David W. Murray.  Here is a link to the review article that appeared on the Hudson Institute website. The reviewers quoted from the book’s dust jacket:

By targeting black men through the War on Drugs, and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control—relegating millions to permanent second-class status.” 

Walters and Murray refute this thesis, and take issue with the statistics offered to support what amounts to a conspiracy theory. They dispute the author’s assertion that “arrests and convictions for drug offenses—not violent crime—have propelled mass incarceration” by first noting the data for state prisons.

In state prisons, holding the largest number of incarcerated inmates, only 16 percent are drug offenders—54 percent of those incarcerated are violent offenders. 

They also explain that racism is not the reason why drug offenders make up almost 50 percent of the federal prison population. They note that the substantially smaller federal system “focuses on major domestic and international traffickers—34 percent of the federal prison population is Hispanic and 23 percent are not U.S. citizens.”

In short the authors of the review show that “The New Jim Crow” misuses statistics and even leaves out important evidence that does not support its thesis. Instead they argue that conduct and culture have more to do with rates of incarceration than racism. They point to the case of a black man from Mississippi who the book claims “cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon, and is currently on parole.”

It is true that Mississippi does deny voting to those who have been convicted of serious crimes from murder and rape to forgery and embezzlement. The man in question was indicted for the shooting of a 17-year-old boy; escaped from prison while awaiting trial; and was subsequently arrested and labeled a fugitive wanted for a capital crime. He was extradited and then convicted of murder. Somehow, he was later released on parole but cannot vote “not because he is black, but because he killed someone…”

The reviewers cite New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton who pointed out that blacks and Hispanics “represent half of our city’s population, but 96.9 percent of those who are shot, and 97.6 percent of those who commit the shootings.” I suspect that the same figures hold in other major cities including my own neighboring city of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Recently I read an article in the Wall Street Journal by Jason Reilly, a black writer who is one of the Journal’s regular columnists. He also argued that conduct and culture have more to do with the problems of black Americans today than racism. In particular, he dismissed those who persistently bemoan the effects of slavery 150 years after its abolition. He pointed to the tremendous strides that blacks made in America in the 100 years after the Civil War. During those years statistics and experience show, for example, that black incomes rose at the same rates as whites and that black family formation was comparable to white. Despite persistent racist attitudes especially in Hollywood, blacks made substantial progress. Interestingly, two of last year’s top movies, “Hidden Figures” and “Fences”, illustrate that black families had made it into the middle class. 

If racism is to blame for a disproportion number of black inmates in American prisons, does it also explain the explain the racial imbalance in American sports today? Why is the preponderance of black athletes on professional basketball and football teams not racist? Isn’t it ironic that the black professional athletes who protest during the playing of the national anthem will all make millions during their playing careers? Despite their own success these athletes want to believe or need to believe in a very revealing myth of victimization.

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