Our young black men are dying in America in an epidemic of interpersonal violence which has gripped our nation since the 1980s. The tide has risen and fallen and now is once again on the rise. On August 9 the Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report detailing the toll. Five days ealier, on August 4th, we were reminded of the risk of being a young black man in America when Terrence Aeriel, Dashon Harvey and Ofemi Hightower were executed in a Newark Schoolyard and Natasha Aeriel survived with a gunshot to her head.
According to the report,
Black Americans accounted for 13 percent of the U.S. population in 2005 but were the victims of about 15 percent of all of the nonfatal violent crime and about 49 percent of all homicides.
About half of homicides against blacks occurred in cities with a population of at least 250,000 people. Among single victim-single offender homicides, about 93 percent of black victims were murdered by black offenders. About 77 percent of black homicide victims were killed with a firearm.
However these three young people, bound for college in Delaware in a few weeks, were shot execution style during a robbery orchestrated by a gang of illegal immigrants. An illegal immigrant from Peru, Jose Lachira Carranza, 28 and another illegal immigrant from Nicaragua, Rodolfo Godinez, 24 recruited and controlled a group of four boys in their teens.
Michelle Malkin and Bill O’Reilly are up in arms over these murders. Not because of the violence in our cities, the lack of police funding, the ineffectiveness of gun control. Malkin and O’Reilly are concerned because illegal aliens are involved. This enables them to conflate these murders with the terrorism of 9/11. Malkin and O’Reilly are referring to urban areas as "sanctuary cities" and accuse the police and justice system of ignoring immigration status of those they arrest.
It is so obvious even Geraldo Rivera has noticed the hypocrisy.
Geraldo criticized Bill O’Reilly on O'Reilly's show last night:
On Sunday night, it was 24 hours after the horrible incident had happened. And what was shocking to me then is, 24 hours after the triple murder of three young people who had everything to live for, college kids who were good kids, no criminal records, who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, no national TV news organization was doing this story.
So I asked why. Why weren't people doing this story? We had three great kids killed. Was it because there was just another homicide in Newark where there had already been 60 homicides this year? Another black on black violent crime. Why weren't we doing this story?
It was to me very depressing and outrageous that the story wasn't getting any coverage. Then what happens? A couple of days later, it is revealed that one of the alleged perpetrators, maybe the alleged ringleader, is an illegal alien. Suddenly cable news can’t get enough of the story. Why is that?
Geraldo knows one of the problems is that the alleged ringleader was released on $15,000 bail after being accused of repeatedly raping a 5 year old child, not that he wasn’t reported to immigration authorities.
Ryan Haygood at blog.nj.com wrote today that he expected when he first heard of this murder, that the perpetrators were black (as he is himself). He writes:
Others have sought, with some increasing frequency, to make an issue of the perpetratrors' immigration status (and the immigration issue more broadly), arguing that we should "send illegals back" to their home countries.
The statistic above (he quotes from the DOJ report) clearly demonstrates that mass deportation of illegal imigrants would have no impact on the rate at which blacks are murdered in communities like Newark,
More fundamentally, the plight of immigrants mirrors the struggles faced by blacks not that long ago.
Consider this scenario:
In the years between 1915 and 1970, 7 million migrants crossed Southern borders bound for economic opportunities in Northern cities like Newark, Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago and New York. A great number of them had little, if any, formal education. They were unskilled by willing to work.
Enticed by industries that promised gainful employment, those migrants worked for less money than the existing labor force, building resentment amid claims that these migrants were stealing jobs and driving down wages.
This is the story, not of the illegal immigrants who are at the center of the current debate, but that of the millions of blacks who left the American South following the abolition of slavery.
Mr. Haywood knows that these conservative columnists aren't concerned with the violence of inner cities unless it serves their ends. In fact, his column is entitled, " How Newark can mend: First, forget about immigration status"
In fact, many illegal immigrants have a much lower crime rate than citizens. They fear deportations, and often don’t even report crimes that happen to themselves.
In a comprehensive study of crime in Chicago headed by Robert J. Sampson of Harvard University, immigrant youth were shown to have much lower crime rates than other Americans. This multi-year study focused on youth and their neighborhoods and covered a wide variety of different neighborhoods with different income levels and different ethnic composition across the city. A story on the longitudinal study reports:
The risk of committing violence is comparatively lower for recent immigrant youth. Chicago and its suburbs are magnets for immigrants: According to Census 2000, the area has more than 1.4 million foreign-born residents (including more than 580,000 Mexican immigrants and more than 130,000 Polish immigrants). For those Chicagoans surveyed for this study, the odds of first-generation immigrants engaging in violence were almost one-half those of third-generation immigrants—implying that one reason whites and Latinos have lower levels of violence than blacks is that the first two groups are more likely to be recent immigrants. "Our data do not support the common link of immigration and violence," says Sampson.
Others have reflected on the troubling Department of Justice statistics on murder rates for Black Americans.
National Urban League President Marc Morial, a former mayor of the city of New Orleans, in the southern U.S. state of Louisiana, said the data reflect a trend that cannot be reversed by law enforcement alone. It will require changes in public education and a revival of federal summer jobs programs for economically disadvantaged young people, he said.
``The mixture of illegal drugs, easy access to handguns, and young men who feel locked out of economic opportunity is what these statistics reflect,'' Morial said.
The study by Sampson argues that lower socioeconomic status is not directly associated with violence. Instead, segregation in cities disproportionately exposes different racial or ethnic groups to factors that induce or discourage violence.
"Our theoretical perspective argues that segregation concentrates in a neighborhood all the things that are correlated with race in society," Sampson says. "Anything correlated with 'black' is concentrated in these African American neighborhoods because of the segregation dynamics in the city. Even at the same exact income level or same individual IQ score or same marital status—in all cases, black youth are living in a much more compromised environment because of residential segregation."
But the good news from the study, according to Sampson, is that initiatives on a community level—such as vouchers to help poor families move into middle-class neighborhoods, or programs to stabilize the professional component of African American neighborhoods—could go a long way toward closing the gap in violence rates. He argues particularly for targeting neighborhoods that are "spatially vulnerable"—that is, surrounded by higher-risk neighborhoods.
What factors make a positive difference in reducing violence? Married families, a higher level of professionals in a neighborhood and a lower number of people with "cynical attitudes about the law and morality." In fact, Sampson argues that all things being equal, a neighborhood with a higher number of recent immigrants will have less violence, arguing for a "protective effect" of recent immigrants.
Sampson’s study is very controversial, and doesn’t directly deal with illegal vs. legal immigrants. However his approach is excellent. We need to address the death rate from interpersonal violence like the public health problem it is. We need to get beyond the emotional issues and theories and start collecting data and developing scientific models to address the problem.
On Sunday August 5, the day after the murders in Newark, Dr. John P. Pryor wrote a moving guest column on "The War in West Philadelphia" in the Washington Post. Below is an excerpt:
The wounds and nationalities of the patients are different, but the feelings of helplessness, despair and loss are the same. In Iraq, soldiers die for freedom, for honor, for their country and for their buddies. Here in Philadelphia, they die without honor, without purpose, for no country, for no one.
More young men are killed each day on the streets of America than on the worst days of carnage and loss in Iraq. There is a war at home raging every day, filling our trauma centers with so many wounded children that it sometimes makes Baghdad seem like a quiet city in Iowa.
Unlike the Iraq conflict, this war is not on the front pages of The Post or on CNN. You have heard of the Washington area sniper shootings and the massacre at Virginia Tech. I am sure you have not heard about the "Lex Street massacre," in which 10 people ages 15 to 56 were lined up and shot, execution-style, in the winter of 2000. Seven were killed, three critically injured.
You haven't heard about this tragedy because it happened to inner-city poor people in a crack house in Philadelphia. Imagine, for a moment, if this had occurred in a suburban shopping mall or if a Marine unit in Iraq had been involved. There would be shock, outrage, 24-hour news coverage, Senate hearings and a new color of ribbon to wear. That double standard, that triage of compassion and empathy, is why the war on the streets continues unabated.
Dr. Pryor was recently interviewed on NPR by Michelle Martin of Tell Me More on NPR. This link will take you to the interview. It was so good I transcribed some of it, but listen to it all if you can take the time.
What we are trying to do at the University of Pennsylvania with the Firearm Injury Center here at Penn and others are to look at this interpersonal violence as a disease. And when you do that there are ways you can use public health techniques to address the problem.
Back in the 50s and 60s automobiles were death traps they were horrendously bad instruments and people were getting killed. And the government, along with researchers was able to address that as a health problem not as an economic problem not as a political problem but as a health problem and over the last twenty or thirty years have been able to do amazing things to stem the deaths from motor vehicle crashes. We need to do the same thing with Interpersonal violence. We need to adapt these techniques in learning research to interpersonal violence.
It means like a good example is here in Philadelphia, Philadelphia obviously recognized the problem and established back in 2005 what is called the PIRUS program which is the Pennsylvania Injury Reporting and intervention System. And what this is is basically taking every gun shooting that happens in the city and try to put it into a database, try to understand what happened with that shooting, not only the physical shooting but what happened with the victim and with the shooter and then try to have some type of intervention and try to make sure that type of interaction doesn’t happen again. And using data and using scientific methods could really look at the problem not as a political problem or a socioeconomic problem.
Michelle Martin asked "Dr. Pryor what can the rest of us do?"
This is his reply:
One is realizing that there is a problem and pushing our political leaders to make this a national agenda item. We are in the midst of a campaign and I have not heard interpersonal violence come up on the radar screens of our national leaders during the early debates. This is clearly a national problem in every major city in America.
We need to speak out against this violence. We need to study interpersonal violence and measure it and work to end it. We should not use it as a political football in the immigration debate. This is a public health emergency, costing our nation billions of dollars. We can cut the rate of murder and end the despair of living in segregated cities, surrounded by prejudice, cynicism and hopelessness.
Here’s what Bill O’Reilly says:
The mainstream elite media doesn't care about inner-city crime. You know it, I know it, we've covered it all our lives.
So Dr. Pryor, this diary is for you and the other 9 partners in your ER, on the front lines, trying to save lives in West Philadelphia and caring for those too injured to save. Thank you for your service and thank you for speaking out, asking our nation's leaders to work to reduce this violence. I am listening and joining you in speaking out.
Update:
Now Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani are entering the "sanctuary city" fray. Gail Collins has written an excellent
op-ed in the New York Times on this topic.
At issue is the fact that, like the city’s mayors before and after, Rudy Giuliani told New York police officers, hospital workers and school officials that it was not their job to check people’s immigration status. This is a perfectly rational position. If you’ve got hundreds of thousands of undocumented people living in your town, you want them to be willing to report crimes, to go to a doctor if they have a communicable disease, to keep their kids in school and off the street.
Then she adds this stinger....
Cheap-shot break: Mitt Romney’s well-manicured suburban lawn was kept that way by illegal immigrants. The workers were hired through a local landscaping company. The Boston Globe tracked some of them down back in their native Guatemala, and they said they worked for $9 to $10 an hour and that Romney had never inquired about their legal status, reserving his interaction to an occasional "buenos días."
I am only bringing this up because there seems to be a modern-day political rule under which people who hire illegal immigrants as nannies become ineligible for public service in any form, while those who hire illegal immigrants as lawn mowers and hedge trimmers get a free pass. I’m sure there is an excellent reason for this that has nothing to do with the fact that the nannies do work normally performed by women while mowing the lawn is a guy’s job.