As bad as black crime statistics are, the real numbers are higher. Much higher. And it comes at a time when black elected officials and black media are trying to tell us the opposite: Black people are victims of white violence. And white racism.
All the time. Everywhere.
And that is the only reason crime rates are higher and sentences are longer: Cops and judges and prosecutors and lawmakers pick on black people for No Reason What So Ever.
First, let’s start with a baseline from the National Crime Victimization Survey.
In 2010, 62,593 blacks were the victims of white violence.
320,082 whites were the victims of black violence.
Blacks commit five times more violence against whites than whites do against blacks.
Because there are five times more whites than blacks, this means that black people commit 25 times more assaults against whites than whites do against blacks.
Now listen to the most breathtaking sentence in the history of San Diego journalism.
It comes unchallenged from the lips of Lei-Chala Wilson, president of the San Diego chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Wilson was explaining to a reporter from the San Diego Union-Tribune why crime rates for black people are so astronomically out of proportion:
“The statistics have proven we don’t commit more crimes than anyone else, but we’re more likely to get stopped, detained and arrested,” Wilson said. “The word is getting out and people are more aware of it.”389
People actually believe this fairy tale.
The truth is different: Let’s call it Black Privilege and take a look at four reasons why the numbers on black crime are way too low.
When I was writing White Girl Bleed a Lot, the publisher asked me if we should put more crime statistics in the book. I pushed back a bit because I did not want to make it an academic tome.
“Why?,” quoth Mr. Know It All. (That’s me again.) “Black crime rates are 6, 8, 30, 50 times higher than white crime rates. And compared to Asians, black crime rates are 10 times higher than that. Everybody knows that already.”
Wrong. Not on the numbers. The ‘everybody knows that’ part.’
Let’s listen to two black members of Congress explain the enormous disparity between black and white crime. They are members of something called the Congressional Over Criminalization Task Force and they are talking in May of 2014: 390
Then let’s talk about the difference between what they said -- and what is really happening.
Black and White Crime the Same, they say.
“The so-called war on drugs has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color even though data shows that minorities are no more likely to use drugs or commit crimes,” thus sayeth Congressman Robert Scott from Virginia.
That does not sound so crazy when it comes from the richly paneled dais of a congressional committee hearing room.
Now cometh Congressman John Conyers of Detroit on the same day with more of the same: “The Over Criminalization Task Force finally focuses on today what has been the most critical failing of our nation’s criminal justice system: The continuing prevalence of racism,” he said.
“We like now to think our justice is color blind. That our system is race neutral. But whether overt or subconscious, the vestiges of racism are still reflected” in sentencing. One in 9 black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are incarcerated. One in three black men and one in 6 Latinos will spend some part of their lives in prison compared to one in 23 white men.”
Nothing wrong with those numbers. But hold on for the whopper:
“Blacks represent 12 percent of total drug users in the country, but account for 40 percent” of people doing time for drugs.”
FAIL.
“So before we identify solutions, we must recognize how we institutionalize and normalize racism today,” insisted Conyers.
“I want to focus on how racism, unconscious or not, has a disproportionate impact on criminal penalties in minority communities. Bias can begin on decisions about what offenses are investigated.”
OK: Most important sentence of the whole book. Ready?
“With enough time and officers in a certain location, it is only a matter of time before they find reasonable suspicion to stop, detain and arrest someone -- or many people.”
That is a favorite theme of the Attorney General, the MSNBC crowd, Conyers, Scott and tons of others. No difference in behavior. Just a difference from racist police departments. (Even those run by black police chiefs in black cities with black mayors and city councils.)
And they always use this one bogus piece of information as an example: Black people and white people smoke the same amount of marijuana, but black people are arrested four times more often.
Everybody knows that.
Too bad it’s not true.
The equal drug use hoax.
This Holy Grail of Critical Race Theory has been trotted out by the Washington Post (with nine charts!)391, the New York Times,392 the ACLU393 and tons of others as proof positive of Institutional Racism.
“When it comes to illegal drugs, white America does the crime, black America does the time,” says Huffington Post.394
The message is clear, says one commentator at the Washington Post web site: “When you see the crime report next time, you know WHY the stats are black. Crime occurs at the same or higher rates in other communities, but the policing and prosecution is higher in the black communities.”
As I write this, a white Critical Race Theory professor from LaSalle University is saying the same thing on the black Philadelphia radio station, WURD. The host, Nick Taliafero, is rolling in it like catnip and congratulating the professor for his superior insight into white racism.
Down in Atlanta, Cynthia Tucker from the Atlanta Journal Constitution talks about how “Countless studies have shown that black Americans’ drug use is in line with our share of the U.S. population (about 12-13 percent of black Americans use illegal drugs), but our drug arrests far outpace that.”
Really now?
No.
But before we open the prison doors, let’s ask two questions:
One, how do the professors and big city newspaper guys and big time TV folks know that blacks and whites smoke the same amount of pot?
The Census Bureau told them.
How do they know?
They ask.
Full Stop.
What?
This info is part of the census -- on steroids: Not the ‘ask a question in an envelope’ part. The part where they visit thousands of homes and ask more detailed questions in person. Such as: ‘Do you use drugs? Or smoke pot?’
They do not ask you to piss in a bottle or test you in any way.
They just take your word for it.
Then they assemble their answers in a report called the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse and Health. And that is how the big ‘everyone smokes the same amount of pot’ hoax was born.
The buzzword for this kind of research is “self-reporting.” As you might guess, this research is itself the subject of a lot of research. And a lot of scientists have found that self-reporting on drug use is not reliable.
Especially for one particular group: African Americans.
Even the most ardent Critical Race Theorists have trouble denying the enormous disparity of crime rates among races. But if they don’t, their entire theory collapses. So they say it anyway – there is no difference between black and white crime -- knowing for sure that most reporters are too wracked with white guilt or shame to challenge anyone who does say it.
Some doctors down at Johns Hopkins University actually found out what happens when you test the reliability of self-reporting of marijuana and other drug use among black people. 396
A study of 290 African American men in Baltimore, Maryland undergoing treatment for hypertension showed that self-reporting of illicit drug use is unreliable. Only 48 of the participants reported drug use but urine drug tests revealed that 131 had used drugs.
With self-reporting, drug use among black people was 16 percent.
With testing, 45 percent.
Ooops.
There’s more. Different study. Different journal.
According to the medical journal Addictive Behaviors, “underreporting of cocaine was documented with urine testing validation as well where African Americans in comparison to Caucasians who were urine positive were about 6 times less likely to report cocaine use when other factors are controlled for.” 397
Translation: When you ask, white people and black people report using cocaine in about the same amount. But when you test, black people are six times more likely to use cocaine. And lie about it.
More from the same journal for you science junkies:398
The present study also identified predictors of discrepancies between self-report and hair testing. Race was the most salient predictor of cocaine disagreement.
Even when other factors were controlled for, the self-report and hair test results for African Americans were more discrepant than for non-African Americans, a finding consistent with past studies (Fendrich, et al., 1999; Feucht, Stephens, & Walker, 1994).
In a large study of youth (9−20), underreporting of cocaine was documented with urine testing validation as well (Fendrich & Yanchun, 1994) where African Americans in comparison to Caucasians who were urine positive were about 6 times less likely to report cocaine use when other factors are controlled for.
Our study extends this finding to a middle-aged sample of male African American Vietnam veterans and non-veteran community controls.
Race was the most salient factor? Conyers is not going to like that.
Anyone who has ever done one nanosecond of public opinion research of any kind knows this: You don’t ask. You check.
If you want to know if you are talking to a Democrat, don’t ask. Look at the registration. If you want to know if they voted in 4 of the last 5 elections, don’t ask. Look.
A recent study found people even lie about how often they go to church. They actually followed them and found that people said they went to church twice as often as they really did.
The ministers knew their churches would be full if everyone were as devout as they said. But their churches were empty.
I heard that on NPR and read it in Slate so I know it’s true.399
Cops know about drug abuse the same way. Find one and ask about different rates of drug use among different racial groups. Like the ministers, they know the difference between what people say at home and what they see in the pews on Sunday.
And now the Washington Post, New York Times, John Conyers, the Attorney General and every other Rachel Maddow-wannabee want us to accept self-reported drug use as gospel?
You have to wonder what they have been smoking.
Racial Jury Nullification
We are just getting started on Black Privilege: Scott, Conyers, the AG and others forgot to mention about how the biggest racial disparities in court rooms often redound to the benefit of black people. At least the ones who are accused of a crime.
Call it racial jury nullification. Even David Simon, the Hollywood uber-liberal and creator of NPR’s favorite cop show of all time, The Wire, talked about it in his 2013 book.
You remember Simon: He’s the guy who was angry when the jury refused to convict George Zimmerman for the slaying of Trayvon Martin. “The season on African-Americans now runs year round,” he declared in his blog. “If I were a person of color in Florida, I would pick up a brick and start walking toward that courthouse in Sanford.”400
(Does that include Asian people? What’s up with them anyway? Why don’t they commit some crimes, especially the new immigrants, so we can reinforce this “discrimination and deprivation made me do it” theory? I know why: They are too busy working.)
Back to Simon.
Before he was a big time Hollywood guy, Simon covered crime for 13 years for the Baltimore Sun. Here’s what he saw. If you ignore the excuses, the rest is interesting:
As with every other part of the criminal justice machine, racial issues permeate the jury system in Baltimore. Given that the vast majority of urban violence is black-on-black crime, and given that the pool of possible jurors is 60 to 70 percent black, Baltimore prosecutors take almost every case into court with the knowledge that the crime will be seen through the lens of the black community’s historical suspicion of a white-controlled police department and court system.
The effect of race on the judicial system is freely acknowledged by prosecutors and defense attorneys-black and white alike-although the issue is rarely raised directly in court.
Race is instead a tacit presence that accompanies almost every panel of twelve into a Baltimore jury room. Once, in a rare display, a black defense attorney actually pointed to her own forearm while giving closing arguments to an all-black panel: “Brothers and sisters,” she said, as two white detectives went out of their minds in the back row of the gallery, “I think we all know what this case is about.”
Here is what he is talking about: In Baltimore, the Abell Foundation found that black juries were reluctant to convict black people of crimes, compared to other counties in Maryland.401
The study found “the probability of convicting an offender of the most serious offense in Baltimore City is .02, in the comparison jurisdictions it is .63.”
In layman’s language, that is a 2 percent conviction rate versus a 63 percent conviction rate. And it is not just Baltimore. In New York, the racial jury nullification is so common it even has a name: Bronx jury.
In Brooklyn, defense attorneys and black defendants are gnashing their teeth because too many white people are moving in: They are polluting the jury pool and actually looking at evidence and actually convicting people.
They call it the Williamsburg effect: “When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose,” said the New York Post in June 2014.402
“The grand jury used to have an anti-police sentiment. When I was a prosecutor 22 years ago, a jury would be 80 percent people of color,” said high-profile lawyer Arthur Aidala. (Now a regular on Fox News.) “Now, the grand juries have more law-and-order types in there.”
Says one Brooklyn resident:
“I had to laugh at the ‘Bronx Jury’ line,” he said. “That's where I live and I've been summoned to Jury Duty eight times. I've never been on a case, never gotten past the Voir Dire selection process. The Lawyers know whom they want on the Jury.
There was one occasion during the selection process where the judge
announced that anyone that had either been the victim of a crime or
had a close friend or relative that had been the victim of a crime
was to line up in the center aisle for questioning about the
circumstances. The entire jury pool lined up. That judge must have
been new, or from out of town.”
For the benefit of people who have trouble with numbers, here is a reminder: That is Reason Number Two why black crime is underreported.
It’s magic: No report: No crime.
More and more often, the crimes are not getting into court. They are not being reported. In White Girl Bleed a Lot, I documented and linked to stories in New York403, Baltimore, Seattle404, Atlanta405, Milwaukee406, Chicago and other places about how the cops are cooking the books.
Not just in the streets, but in the schools too.
Lots happened since White Girl Bleed a Lot hit the shelves.
Another report came out about how a major city cooks the books on crime. This time Los Angeles: “LAPD MISCLASSIFIED NEARLY 1,200 VIOLENT CRIMES AS MINOR OFFENSES,” says the headline. All during a one year period ending September 2013. “Including hundreds of stabbings, beatings and robberies, a Times investigation found.”
“The incidents were recorded as minor offenses and as a result did not appear in the LAPD's published statistics on serious crime that officials and the public use to judge the department's performance.”407
Black people make up 9.6 percent of the city’s population, but 30 percent of the general jail population.408
Hispanics make up 45 percent of the city.
The Times does not get into whether black people benefit from this under reporting.
People at cop web sites chimed in this happens a lot: “Cleveland does the same thing, to cover up their short comings, because they wanted to snare the Republican Convention, they did, Watch Out Republicans, there is a lot of crime downtown by the casino.”409
In the summer of 2013, black mob violence swept through the downtown Inner Harbor area of Baltimore -- where the tourists go. And they were seeing it and talking about it.
Black mob violence is kind of bad, depending on whom you ask. But when tourists start talking about it? That is an absolute nightmare.
Finally, Governor O’Malley stepped in and suggested to black Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake that she put a few more cops on the street. How about it Steph?
Not on my watch, she said:410 "Returning to the days of mass arrests for any and every minor offense might be a good talking point but it has been proven to be a far less effective strategy for actually reducing crime," Rawlings-Blake told the Baltimore Sun.
This is for all you statistics junkies out there: If you don’t arrest someone, it is not a crime.
This is the same Sun newspaper that actually figured out the cops were cooking the books after the famous 2012 St. Patrick’s day beat down that went viral. 411
Sometimes you wonder if reporters are reading their own papers.
City officials even argue about which city is doing the best job in arresting fewer black people. When Bill de Blasio was inaugurated as Mayor of New York in 2014, his big buddy Harry Belafonte blasted former Mayor Bloomberg for creating the “nation’s highest lock-up rate of minorities,” reported the New York Post. 412
And remember, this is even with the Bronx juries.
That was more than Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson could stand: Darn it, they were not arresting lots of black people there either, no matter what Mr. Banana Boat Song said.
“We reduced incarceration by about a third,” Wolfson pointed out. “We did substantially better than the rest of the nation. We didn’t lock more people up. We substantially locked up fewer people.”
The mantra around the country is the same: Break the cradle to prison pipeline that is putting one in three black people in prison.
Criminals are victims of something that puts them in a pipeline. Not the other way around. Got it?
Got it.
Following the assassination of two police officers in New York, city cops started responding to fewer crimes. Result: arrests down 67 percent. That means crime is down 67 percent. So the city is more dangerous and the people who run it are entitled to say it is safer.
No place is more determined to drop the crime statistics than Chicago. In White Girl Bleed a Lot, a Chicago cop talked about how they did it, especially around President Obama’s Hyde Park home.
“If something happens near Obama’s home, we rarely report,” said a member of the Chicago Police Department who patrols in that area. “We usually just call it vandalism. That is the way they want it.”
By 2014, the crime reporting became so in-credible that DNA Info in Chicago reported that a police captain opened up a community meeting by admitting just that:
You won't hear Lakeview's top cop talk statistics at community meetings anymore — even if numbers suggest that crime is down from the year before in the neighborhood.
Town Hall Police Cmdr. Elias Voulgaris said the biggest way to tell if things were going well was listening to feedback from residents. Besides, many in the community didn't believe police numbers anyway, he said.
"You'll notice I didn't bring up stats," he said at a recent community policing meeting. "No one believes the stats. The biggest barometer is feedback."
It was a rough summer for Voulgaris. At a heated August policing meeting, residents both decried the statistics showing crime was too high — a beat in Lakeview led the city in robberies— and questioned whether the official data could be believed.
Crimes are only documented when the victim files a report, and some neighbors and a well-read neighborhood crime blog, Crime in Wrigleyville and Boystown, frequently point out that not all robberies are documented.
Chicago Magazine did not one, but a two-parter on it: The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates: 413 “The city’s drop in crime has been nothing short of miraculous. Here’s what’s behind the unbelievable numbers.”
Spoiler alert: Bogus numbers.
Thanks to articles like the one from Chicago Magazine, the word is spreading. There is an even a website for it: Crime in Wrigleyville and Boystown, The facts about increasing violent crime in Chicago's popular sports and LGBT entertainment areas.414
Fresh questions about the Chicago Police Department's classification of violent crimes are rising to the surface today as prosecutors announce robbery charges against a 17-year-old in connection with cell phone "thefts" at the Wilson Red Line Station.
The Chicago Police Department issued an alert in the case on Friday and the boy, who lives just a couple of blocks from the station, was arrested over the weekend.
But here’s the riddle: If prosecutors have charged the teen with two felony counts of robbery, why are at least two of the cases classified as theft by the police department? (Classification information for the third case is not yet available to the public.)
Thefts, by law, are non-violent crimes like taking someone’s phone off of a restaurant table. But, robbery is a violent crime—taking something by using physical force or threatening the use of force against a victim.
The Chicago Police Department, under pressure to improve upon impossible-to-believe double-digit crime “reductions,” is keenly interested in having as many robberies reduced to “thefts” as possible.
Chicago magazine’s 2014 report on the department’s crime-fudging methods is a must read for the unfamiliar.
How about Denver: From 2009 to 2012, a computer glitch stopped 12,000 crimes from being posted on the city’s web site where they are used to create a “crime mapper.” You know, the map parents and teachers and real estate agents and everyone else use to see what is safe. And what is not.415
Oops, sorry about that chief.
Second City Cop reminds us that someone even wrote a book about it: The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation: “Two college professors, one of whom is a retired NYPD captain, pretty much destroy any crime-reduction properties of the CompStat model of policing and pin it solely on statistical manipulation and misreporting.”416
If Second City Cop likes it, that is good enough for me.
How about Louisville: The downtown Waterfront Park is supposed to be a gleaming example of the revitalization of the riverfront. But as you remember from the first chapter of this book, there was lots of crime going on, but city officials were saying: Just look at the map: nothing there.
Turns out, crime in the park was being posted to an address outside of the park.
Hate it when that happens. 417
Detroit? More than 11,000 rape kits sat in a warehouse for years. No one touched them until the summer of 2013. 418
They also don’t do murder that well: “The Detroit Police Department is systematically undercounting homicides, leading to a falsely low murder rate in a city that regularly ranks among the nation's deadliest,” a Detroit News review of police and medical examiner records shows.419
The police department incorrectly reclassified 22 of its 368 slayings last year as "justifiable" and did not report them as homicides to the FBI as required by federal guidelines.
So however dangerous you thought Detroit was, it is 11,000 rapes and 22 murders worse.
Insert your favorite expletive of disbelief here.
Down in New Orleans, crime stats were so ridiculously low that the state and a city inspector came in and did an audit. Here’s the money quote from the WWL TV news: 420
For the second time in three days, a watchdog agency is questioning the New Orleans Police Department's crime statistics.
A report released Wednesday by the city's inspector general shows that some crimes aren't being classified as crimes at all.
The state legislative auditor on Monday questioned why some crime complaints to the NOPD didn't result in investigations. Wednesday, the city's inspector general takes issue with crimes that were investigated but never classified as crimes.
"We found in this case, 177 times in six months, which is a lot, that there was in fact crime that was not reported as such,” said Howard Schwartz, first assistant inspector general. “And they're not doing anything about it.
Same thing in some schools. In Philadelphia, teachers were instructed to stop calling police for what they called minor crimes. No blood, no foul.
The head of the teacher’s union says his members are being pressured to -- stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “hold down the reported numbers. At the same time Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman has been trumpeting a decrease in school violence.”
"My officers are very frustrated out there because they're being told not to report things and that everything must go through the principal," said Michael Lodise, president of the school police union. "If they don't want to report it, it doesn't get reported." 421
Lots of crimes in black neighborhoods don’t get reported. Like gun fire. The ShotSpotter, an anti-crime technology that features an array of wireless microphones that can pinpoint a gun shot to within forty feet, is the ultimate crime detector.
The system is 96 percent accurate.
Using ShotSpotter, The New York Times reported that neighbors called police only 10 percent of the time that guns were fired in a high-crime area of San Francisco. In Oakland, 22 percent of gunshots prompted 911 calls.422
“Chief Chris Magnus of Richmond, Calif., a community of 120,000 north of Berkeley that routinely ranks among the country’s most violent cities, recalled listening to a ShotSpotter recording of a gun battle in 2010 that involved more than 100 rounds fired from four guns. “It was just mind-boggling,” he said. “This is like 11 at night on a summer night, and nobody even called it in.”423
In Orlando in 2012, “With the sheriff's election less than two weeks away, challenger John Tegg is ramping up his accusations against Sheriff Jerry Demings, alleging he falsified crime statistics by reporting more serious burglaries as lesser crimes, particularly in areas with large tourist populations,” sayeth the local paper, the Sentinel.
The Sheriff confessed: 84 burglaries were classified as lesser crimes. He fixed it. Said he was sorry.424
In Washington, D.C., local police reported, sheepishly, that hate crimes based on race were up -- and most of the victims were white. Hate crime numbers are the most bogus of all. Even so, let’s go to the Washington Times to find out why more white people are victims.
“The low level of reported race-based hate crimes, including the small number in which minorities were victims, could be a sign that minority victims are reluctant to report crimes, said David C. Friedman, director of the D.C. regional office of the Anti-Defamation League.
“In many African-American communities and other parts of the country, no matter what the demographics of the police department are, there are levels of concern” with coming forward, Mr. Friedman said.425
White on black crime is underreported in our nation’s capital? Do tell.
That was Reason Number Three black crime is under reported. Why as bad as it is, it is way, way worse.
Still not satisfied? Didn’t think so.
Don’t Forget Witness Intimidation.
Let’s finish up the chapter on artificially low black crime rates with witness intimidation: Stitches for snitches. Every high-crime police department in America says this is the top reason why they can’t catch more criminals in black neighborhoods: No one will drop a dime.
Melissa Harris-Perry of MSNBC had it figured out. She and a Harvard Professor were batting this back and forth on her Saturday TV show: If someone sees a black person committing a crime, should they report it if it makes black people look bad?
A seemingly simple question, but difficult for MSNBC’s new golden girl, the host of the Melissa Harris-Perry Show.
At least it was when Mona Eltahawy appeared to talk about her cover story in Foreign Policy magazine on violence against women in the Arab and Muslim world. Eltahawy had her arms broken in a demonstration and was tortured and raped in an Egyptian jail cell. So she seemed a bit surprised when Harris and the Harvard professor questioned her right to draw attention to these atrocities.
Maybe her confusion sprang from the fact that she thought she was in a news studio. Harris-Perry cleared that up right away:426
I start with a little bit of trepidation in this conversation, in part because I know some of the critiques of this,” said Harris-Perry. “The very idea that Western press, those that are not from these nations, who are not Muslim ourselves, who are not part of these traditions.”
It is worth interrupting here to note that the “traditions” that Harris-Perry was referring to were involuntary female circumcision, wife beating, and childhood sexual abuse. At least those are the only three Eltahawy had time to mention before Melissa set her straight. Back to Harris-Perry:
[people] can look at your article and say “Ahhh, look at how horrible those men, or those societies, or that religion is.”
“And that is part of the reason why, for example, we have an under-reporting of rape and domestic violence in African American communities. Because we know the violence enacted on black men by police, so we often don’t call. Right?”427
If you say so, Melissa.
There is no doubt that lots of thugs just won’t go to the cops. Even when they are victims. It just came out in 2014 what happened when a police officer found Tupac Shakur dying from gunshots in Las Vegas.
He asked the famous rapper what happened. Who shot him.
“Fuck you,” said Tupac. Then he died. (And in case you missed it, the Tupac musical closed after six weeks on Broadway. The guy who played Tupac knew exactly the reason why: “Racism.”)428
More often the silence is not quite as glorious, or voluntary. Instead it is called witness intimidation or tampering. This is really a separate reason, but let’s go with it here anyway.
In Wilmington, Delaware, again, in 2013 a group of black people robbed a woman and her child. She went to the police. A member of the crew -- who was not present at the home invasion -- told the woman not to testify if she knew what was good for her.
The woman said she was not afraid and she was damn sure going to testify.
He killed her. He’s in prison.
The people who did the crime, they are roaming the streets. Free. Drinking one for their homie. The Center for Problem Oriented Policing breaks it down:429
Studies and surveys of police and prosecutors suggest that witness intimidation is pervasive and increasing. For example, a study of witnesses appearing in criminal courts in Bronx County, New York revealed that 36 percent of witnesses had been directly threatened; among those who had not been threatened directly, 57 percent feared reprisals. Anecdotes and surveys of police and prosecutors suggest that witness intimidation is even more widespread.
Prosecutors estimate that witness intimidation plays a role in 75 to 100 percent of violent crime committed in gang-dominated neighborhoods, although it may play less of a role in communities not dominated by gangs and drugs.
Even in the Bronx, where chances are a black jury is going to take it easy on a black defendant anyway?
Dang.
How about this case from a small town near Cincinnati: Here’s the headline: “Juvenile retaliation may be cause of house fire.” A white woman with two children called the police because local black people were doing all sorts of bad things to her after430 she caught them burglarizing her house. She did not like that.
So she called the police and at least one of the burglars was arrested. He and his friends did not like that. For six months they harassed, vandalized, threatened, taunted, trespassed and shot guns at her house. Then it started getting really bad:
“They swarmed my house and was shooting my house with pellet guns, and they were throwing lit flares at my house, telling me they were going to burn my house, kill me and my kids; that we’re all dying, and we’re cop callers,” Jennifer Chitwood said.
“I was terrified. I thought the house was going to catch on fire when we were there,” she said. “I had my two babies and sister and another little boy in the house. It was horrible.”
Finally in March 2014, they burned down the house. A tape of the 911 call shows the dispatcher as indifferent to the large scale black mob violence as police, prosecutors and city officials had been to this woman’s plight for the last six months.431
Sometimes witness intimidation happens in the streets. Sometimes in the courtroom. In 2013, several people threatened a witness to a murder.432
That was Philadelphia, where from 2011 to the end of 2013, 2600 people were charged with witness intimidation. In 2013, the District Attorney in Philadelphia said witness intimidation had reached “epidemic levels.” 433
But not to worry, says the Mayor. Crime is going down. That is Reason Number Four. And later, I’ll throw in a bonus, another Reason.