We've all heard the repeated refrain, from supposedly "smart" people, that the real problem in inner-city communities with trigger-happy police forces is they simply have too much black-on-black crime.
We've heard it from former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani:
After noting how he diversified the New York City police force, Giuliani said it was very disappointing that “we are not discussing the fact that 93 percent of blacks are killed by other blacks.” The implication was that the so-called black-on-black crime was far more common than white-on-black crime, so the attention should be paid on the former.It quickly became personal. Giuliani and Dyson talked over each other for most of the 2-minute banter. Eventually, Giuliani uttered the line that went viral almost immediately (“White police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other.”) and Dyson fired back at the “defensive mechanism of white supremacy at work in your mind, sir.” (That comment also was picked up widely by Dyson’s critics.)
First of all, the stats that people like Giuliani, and
Joe Klein, and
Joe Scarborough tend to use are
all completely bogus. But the even greater tragedy is that while people like Giuliani misconstrue the actual stats to justify police violence against black people, they also use them to ignore
all violence against black people, and then blame them for it.
There's more below.
In point of fact, when you look at the closed cases for murders involving both single and multiple offenders and victims supplied by the Supplemental Homicide Report, it shows that 92 percent of white victims are murdered by white people, and 83 percent of black victims are murdered by black people, rather than the reverse as Giuliani claims.
But beyond that statistical switcheroo, there are deeper problems. It's not just that the killers of black murder victims are far less likely to be sent to death row. It's actually far less likely that any perpetrator in the murder of a black person will be arrested and tried at all, as Los Angeles Times reporter Jill Leovy has outlined in her new book Ghettoside.
Leovy understands that the second terrible burden is that we — and especially the police —have grievously failed to make the community safe. We are not protecting the young men and their families. The violence has raged for generations, and we have not stopped it. The cases get short shrift — in L.A., homicide detectives couldn’t get notebooks or computers at the same time that administrative staffers at headquarters got take-home cars. Black victims too often are diminished or worse; Leovy reports something I first saw nearly 30 years ago — LAPD officers writing “NHI” on homicide incident reports: No Humans Involved. Terrified witnesses stop cooperating, and investigators, carrying huge caseloads, give up. Prosecutors eyeing their conviction rates turn away from cases in which all of those testifying have records and credibility problems.
Leovy writes eloquently of how policing in black neighborhoods today takes place in the shadow of our shameful racist history. A low-level misdemeanor arrest may be motivated by zero-tolerance ideas about crime control instead of the frank racism of the South after emancipation, when police and prosecutors deliberately criminalized whole communities to drive black men into the for-profit prison-labor system. But the result is too similar, profound and odious. The police and the law are not seen as there to help. Low-level offenses get a lot of attention; violence doesn’t. Angry communities withdraw, don’t report, don’t testify. Homicides don’t get solved; prosecutions for black-on-black killings in many such neighborhoods are in the low double digits. Police laugh when asked about clearance rates for nonfatal shootings. Victims, their families and their friends get guns and take care of things themselves.
So not only to do black lives
not matter during a confrontation with police, they don't much matter in a deadly confrontation with other people, either. Odd though it may seem, communities of color are being grossly over-policed on petty and minor issues. They are stopped-and-frisked repeatedly even when they have done nothing wrong at all in order to generate activity to make it look like police are "working hard." This keeps up municipal revenues, but when something truly horrific and serious happens—a rape, a murder, a violent robbery—police continually prove ineffective or uncaring.
Leovy's work confirms a mathematical anomaly discovered when I attempted to confirm or refute Giuliani's numbers on homicides. The result is when you look at the cases that are cleared (where an arrest is made) compared to those that remain open, there's a wide gap depending on whether the victims are white or black.
This is the report for white victims contrasted with the Race of oldest offender.
White offender(s) 62.2 percent, black offender(s) 12 percent, unknown offender(s) 24.8 percent
And here is the report for black victims.
White offender(s) 4.7 percent, black offender(s) 55.1 percent, unknown offender(s) 40 percent
Besides the fact that, yet again, the percentage of white-on-white murder is higher than black-on-black (62 percent to 55 percent), the percentage of cases that go unsolved is much worse for black people (40 percent) than for white (24.8 percent).
These numbers do seem to stay relatively consistent when comparing the national level to the local level in Los Angeles. Even though overall murders are down dramatically ...
That's a lot of murderers who got away clean. Over the same period, the national average was 37 percent.
Perhaps even more depressing, 51 percent of murders where the victim was black went unsolved. When the victim was white, only 30 percent went unsolved. Over half of all unsolved homicide victims were Latino.
The article Continues:
"And actually, the real story might be even worse than the numbers suggest.The Daily News also found that the Los Angeles Police Department listed some homicides as "cleared" (i.e., solved) even though no one had been convicted:"
596 homicide cases from 2000 through 2010 that the LAPD has classified as “cleared other” — cop speak for solving a crime without arresting and filing charges against a suspect ...
"The LAPD cleared some of these cases because the district attorney declined to prosecute, but when asked for the reason each case was cleared, police officials did not respond.
In other words, the police think they know who the killer is, in many cases, but knowing is not the same as being able to convict before a jury."
Keep this in mind: "Cleared" is the police term for selecting a suspect and maybe arresting them. It's not proof of guilt before a court of law. All of the figures I've used so far in this article, and that anyone uses (including Giuliani) are "clearance" figures, not convictions.
It's much too easy to simply assume that the police themselves are racist, because in many cases that just isn't true. It becomes expected for black bodies to fall like flies, like an inevitable tide. Even officers who vow and swear to themselves that they will make a difference have a difficult task stemming that tide while working within a system that by its nature has grown comfortable with a high level of black death. In the broader sense many of us, including police, have developed an empathy-deficit disorder when it comes to black people who it seems, are always complaining about something or the other. They're always whining, always pointing fingers etc ...
Well, that's often because they actually do have much more complain about, much more to whine about, and much more that needs to be done. More then 50 percent of murder victims in the U.S. are black, regardless of who the perpetrators are. Whether it's racism, lack of empathy, lack of proper resources, lack of training and leadership, lack of trust, or bits and pieces of all the above, the end result is predictably the same in city after city. All the data shows black people have far more to fear than practically anyone else, including cops. Some have argued that they should just "fix it on their own," but what they're really suggesting there is that average common middle-age and middle-class black folk should just go out and get into violent gun battles with hardened gang-bangers, something the cops can't seem to get right even with body armor and MRAPs.
Or maybe just try to perform citizens' arrests on them.
Even when black people do step up, as witnesses or as informants, can the police be expected to step up just as much and protect them from retaliation? Can they promise them, or anyone, they can keep them safe when they do the right thing? And hence—racism or not—the clearance gap grows.
Consider the other side of the coin: When you know that the chances of being caught (much less convicted) of killing someone black are roughly 50/50—what's to stop you from taking the chance and rolling the dice? How are you supposed to be deterred exactly? We want to have the cops out there doing broken windows" policing, not letting people get away with little things lest they turn into something worse. But when they actually do turn into something worse, the cops and credible witnesses all seem to scatter like cockroaches when the lights turn on.
This gap has consequences, and it has causes.
Imagine, if you can, what you’d do if that big kid on the next block and his friends gang-raped your sister. And showed the cellphone videos to everybody at school. And when you tried to face him down, they put you in the hospital and did a drive-by on your house. While the cops just watched. Imagine what you'd do when your older brother got your dad’s deer rifle and said to you and your friends, we have to go take care of this. They killed our mom and they have to pay.
Imagine how the violence would spiral: There’d be bodies in the streets in no time. And then, if you can, imagine how you’d feel listening to the folks in the next town over watch the carnage and talk about how it’s all because you have a terrible family and weren’t raised right, and there’s dope so you’re all drug dealers and we all know drug dealers have to shoot each other, and shooting each other is just cultural for people like you, and you and all your friends are vicious, evil super-predators with no regard for human life.
And then imagine how you’d feel as the cops looked at you, and your family, and your friends, and your whole town, and said, we knew you were scum.
But those of us who've lived in an urban inner-city don't have to imagine any of this. We're living all this. Notice how strongly the above scenario matches the one often cluelessly proffered by the NRA
and Donald Trump for solving gun violence?
You can't rely on the police. You have to arm yourself, protect yourself, get justice—yourself. The honest and good people in the inner-city know this, and they've been living it for decades. For decades they've done what they could to fight back and protect themselves, sometimes using their own guns, but without the support of a trustworthy police force those efforts are largely for naught.
This isn't the way it should be, and it can't continue this way indefinitely. When people stand up and shout "black lives matter," it is not to sweep the high rate of black murders under the rug. Rather, it's the opposite. These cases need to be solved, they need to be addressed, and those who actually are guilty need to be found and prosecuted—whether they are black, or white, or cops, or not cops.
The point is, that isn't happening. And I don't think people will stop making noise about it until it finally does.
Sat Sep 26, 2015 at 2:51 PM PT: To those that argue that there are valid Conservative Ideas to address this issue, I really don't think so because they're only suggestion is more guns for cops and less public resources or the poor which is only going to continue the downward-spiral, what I say as an alternative is summarized here in one of my responses to Don Lemon's "just pull up your pants" rhetoric.
