Sometimes black mob violence is too bloody, too blatant, too frequent to ignore. Even for reporters.
That was the case in June 2014 in Rochester, New York, where for years -- YEARS -- recent immigrants from Nepal and Burma have been subject to more than a thousand cases of racial violence. All from black people. All unreported in the local media until June -- when the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle broke the embargo.40
Kind of. In its own weaselly way.
Let’s pick up the story from Democrat & Chronicle reporter Jon Hand: He is talking about a young immigrant whose father -- and just about everyone else he knows -- have been the victims of constant beating, robbery, taunting, bullying. All from black people.
The local paper of record puts it in a curious perspective:
The violent and misplaced anger (the victim) feels toward African Americans has been building for years in this small community of perhaps a few thousand South Asian refugees living in small pockets of northwest Rochester near and in Jones Square.
The anger is fueled, he and more than a dozen other residents interviewed say, by hundreds of incidents of robbery and violent and verbal bullying in recent years.
And for Khadka and his brother, the sight of their injured father crystallizes that rage into a single clear, terrible and inappropriate thought — a thought that pays no mind to the many American complexities surrounding race and class:
They wanted to go to war with the black community.
News flash: The black people are already at war with the Asians. And have been from the day they landed in Rochester. It took the Asians a while to figure that out.
"African-Americans are targeting them, and there is just so much of this they are going to take," said Bill Wischmeyer, an advocate for the refugee community known as "Mr. Bill."
"They're angry. They are ready to explode and it's going to get worse until someone ends up dead."
The violent, racially charged tensions in what was once a mostly black neighborhood have caught the attention of authorities before.
But not the newspaper. Not ever.
Not sure why self defense or even anger is “inappropriate” or “misplaced.” Maybe someday I’ll ask Jennifer.
Or why the victims of this violence have to learn about what the paper calls the “complexities surrounding race and class” while they try to piece together how they should feel about this relentless racial violence.
The Democrat & Chronicle ran this story on regular and ruthless black-on-Asian attacks during a series called Unite Rochester. It was not even the first story. That honor went to an article about how Rochester does not have enough black judges.
Only then did the paper cover what it apologetically calls the “sensitive and potentially volatile situation.”41 Potentially?
To the Asian victims, this violence is as real as it gets, no matter how diligently city officials and the media ignore it. The Asians say they reported crimes to police, but police refused to take reports. The Rochester version of Jennifer explained it all: Police say the immigrants will “eventually acclimate” to the harsh environment in which they have been placed.
The immigrants say they don’t remember that part of the orientation. Just the opposite: America was a “second heaven.” A peaceful place. Now they say this is a lie and they want to know if it was ever true.
It still is, in some places. Not Rochester. That is the real fight waging all over the country: Is black mob violence normal? Lots of people say yes.
Wischmeyer re-posted a Facebook comment he received from one of the refugees:42
"I want to know why is it that Rochester police didn't do nothing against hate crime toward us immigration or refugee.... a lot of Nepalese people getting beat up lately and they still don't do nothing in the past 3 year...all they said is stay away from them..."
Wischmeyer tells the rest of the story: “What he told me was that a couple of African American youth approached his brother, pulled out a gun (pistol) and shot his brother in the stomach. THANK GOD it was a BB Gun. And all the police said was stay away from them? This was devastating to these refugee youths.”
The violent stories go and on and on. The reaction from black leaders in Rochester is curiously muted.
Sherry Walker-Cowart is the president and CEO at the Center for Dispute Resolution. She was not aware that black people were assaulting Asians by the hundreds, if not thousands. Even so, she offered a cause. And a solution:
"Some of it is naiveté,” she told the Democrat and Chronicle. “Some of it is prejudice, you know, and prejudice really comes from ignorance. It's just ignorance and people not knowing each other and seeing each other as human and making it a human issue."
In case you thought you misread this, you did not: She’s calling the Asians naive because they do not know enough to avoid the racial violence that plagues them night and day. In and out of their homes.
Walker-Cowart was singing a different tune after George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing St. Trayvon. Not of naïveté. Not of mutual misunderstanding. But of a black community “fractured” by the injustice of finding George Zimmerman going free.43
Need some more explanations? Let’s ask former Rochester police chief James Sheppard. He had plenty of them for the Democrat & Chronicle: “The perpetrators are more often young black men who don't feel good about themselves and who prey on the vulnerable for economic reasons.” 44
"Any time you have an immigrant group come in they stand out, particularly in your depressed neighborhoods," Sheppard said. "They may dress different, they may talk different, they tend not to fight back and so that just made them easy victims, easy to identify. And the fact that they didn't call police? That just made it happen more often."
Careful readers of White Girl Bleed a Lot will recognize a similar ‘blame the victim’ reaction from the black chief of police in Buffalo after black mobs assaulted dozens of white students at local college campuses: “The City of Buffalo is an urban environment, and if you come from a rural section of the state, this is a different setting.”45
Or the black police chief of Columbus, South Carolina. When merchants and students were upset at the dozens of cases of black mob violence near the campus of the University of South Carolina, the chief blamed it on the white students who drank too much. 46
Or the (now-former) superintendent of schools in Philadelphia who had a similar reaction to a similar case of long term black on Asian violence at South Philadelphia High School. 47 She gave the Asian students a flyer instructing them how to avoid antagonizing the black students who were beating them. 48
She whispered to reporters the Asian students -- at this school with 85 percent black students -- were the ones to blame because they did not know how to behave around black people.
Shortly after, also in Philadelphia, a middle aged white man out for an evening stroll found himself on the ground with dozens of black people beating and kicking and taunting him.
“Why are you doing this?” he shrieked.49
“It’s not our fault you can’t fight,” said one of the assailants, before they moved on to their next victim. Soon after, Mayor Nutter told the New York Times that widespread reports of racial violence in Philadelphia were “not much.”
The Times ate it up. Shades of Walter Duranty. Look him up.
Back to Rochester and its sociologist-in-chief who used to be the chief of police: The violence the Asians experienced at the hands of black people is “similar to that which other groups have experienced,” he said to the Democrat & Chronicle.
There’s that bogus moral equivalence again.
"There was a time when a lot of Southern blacks were moving from Florida and South Carolina into the Rochester area looking for jobs and they went through the same cycles of discrimination and having to fight back and get a foothold. Then, when they established a foothold, other groups came in whether it was Puerto Ricans or other nationalities and they had to go through the same rites of passage."
This was a different song than the one Sheppard was singing just a few months before when he and Trayvon’s mother were the star attractions at a Rochester forum called: “America's Most Wanted: Hip Hop, the Media, and the Prison Industrial Complex.”
Sheppard said police needed to do a better job of communicating with black people.50
I include the remarks from Sheppard and Walker-Cowart not because they are true, but because Marlin Newburn is calling bull on every single word of it. Newburn has been on the front lines of racial violence for 30 years, most recently as a prison psychologist.
“The comments by these people in authority are blatantly ignorant and predator-enabling,” Newburn said. “Black predators know they will never be held accountable for any outrageous or violent action, and they are completely conditioned to understand that someone will stand in front of a reporter or TV camera and make excuses for them. They know they're protected, nationwide. Even the laziest observer should consider how they have no qualms about assaulting completely innocent people.
“Black street predators are raised to hate any non-black, and this instruction comes from elders in the ghetto and the race-hustlers who constantly preach the continuing lie of black victimhood. These predators are completely sadistic, without a trace of empathy, and they gain greater status in their group if their assaults are particularly vicious.”
Ready for Newburn’s money quote? So what happens after reporters and police chiefs spend a lifetime excusing black pathology? More Newburn:
“Black street predators are a completely infantilized population living their preferred lifestyle. A person becomes infantilized, an adult-child, if consequences for their aberrant behavior are excused, ignored, rationalized, dismissed, or defended. They know they will never be held accountable for their savagery, and thus they will never change - or grow up. They also believe that life is a party where promiscuity, drug and alcohol use, theft, and any other destructive impulsive behavior they choose to engage in is a legitimate lifestyle. These community authority figures are insuring it will continue, and reporters’ wildly convoluted reasoning is just icing on the insanity cake.”
Whew: That’s a lot of truth telling in one place. We’ll see Newburn again.
The newspaper could not close the story without taking one more opportunity to apologize to those who might object to anyone noticing that blacks in Rochester have been terrorizing Asians for a very long time.
Not for food. Not for money. But for spite. And sport.
“The language is at times stark,” explained the editors. “But is meant to be an honest representation rather than an attempt to give offense — or give credence to inappropriate and incendiary statements.”
If they think that is incendiary, wait ‘till they get a load of what happens in the rest of Rochester.
In September of 2013 in the Rochester suburb of Irondequoit, police had to close down a movie theater after 400 to 500 black people started fighting inside and outside a showing of the movie Insidious, Chapter 2. 51
Most of the rioters were from Rochester.52 “I saw police officers chasing kids, as we were pulling out of the parking lot to leave we saw police officers knock kids to the ground and one police officer was batoning kids,” said Alton Johnson to Rochester YNN.
Lt. Jonna Izzo explained it all to News 8: “They have pent up energy from being scared in the movie theater and they come out and they don’t know what to do with that energy.” 53
The reporter bought it.
Some residents said it was strange that anyone could blame a large-scale act of violence and mayhem on a movie. Others said it had nothing to with the movie: That mall and others in Irondequoit have been plagued by black mob violence for years:
“So it’s not the first time and won’t be the last !!,” said David Sevor at the web site for WHAM TV news. “It’s sad these young teenagers don’t know how to behave out in public.”
Mike Alpaha was more explicit: “It’s been a problem that has been escalating for a long time. White people are the real problem! You’re all too scared to speak up and talk about the real problem!”54
“These young black kids are out of control and have no discipline in the home. They have no respect for anyone (especially white people). But everyone is scared of being called a racist for telling it how it is. I’m not a racist, but I can say that the inner city black youth are out of control and only getting worse!”
Four police departments from neighboring jurisdictions assisted. City officials called the bus company, which returned the rioters to Rochester. Yes: They gave the rioters a free ride home.
No: I do not know why. But I do know no one was arrested. So much for the crime stats.
Not all of the episodes of racial violence in Rochester involve large mobs. Smaller episodes of black mob violence on video are as prevalent in Rochester as anywhere. In this video, a white child is beaten and his bike is stolen by a group of black people. Then they came back and beat him some more.
So there were at least six black people there watching and recording and laughing. But time after time police reports say only one person is guilty of a crime.55 You tell me. How many are responsible?
The Rochester City Newspaper does not like the mobs. Not at all. Though it is still working up the gumption to report on the central organizing feature of the people responsible for violence and mayhem downtown at the Liberty Pole.56
The problem is bigger than a few rowdy youth congregating at the Liberty Pole. Ask members of the Red Shirts— retired police officers who patrol downtown — and they’ll tell you how they have to escort some downtown office workers outside because gangs of young people taunt and harass them as they leave their buildings.
Out-of-control young people also shut down a carnival in Greece, delayed the opening of Seabreeze Amusement Park, and made for a scary and chaotic situation at the Lilac Festival.
Part of me wonders if the Liberty Pole problem will improve once the new transit center, with its own security force, opens. But the area around the Liberty Pole resembles an armed encampment at different times during the day, and a new police substation just opened in the nearby Sibley building. None of that has stopped the Liberty Pole problems.
Some involve even smaller groups, like the small gang of black people on video who were laughing and dancing as they talked about how they were going wait for an “old white lady” to leave a convenience store, then smash her in the face with a snow ball. And a fist.57
Which they did. Police told the local paper it looks more like harassment than assault. Meanwhile, police are looking for the “old white lady.” Until they find her, she is just one more person who decided reporting violent crime is just more trouble than it is worth. Or more dangerous. Remember that the next time your local media reports crime is down in your town.
We’ll get to that: Why black crime is way, way worse than even really, really bad crime statistics say it is.