The reporters thought they were the good guys: Chattanooga is one of the most dangerous cities in America, and their series for The Times Free Press was creating pressure for local officials to do something about it.842
They even offered a solution that was getting some results: Focus on the high value targets: The criminals doing the most damage. And that is what the city did.
So by December of 2013, the paper was bragging about the initial results of its Speak No Evil series: Police arrested “32 of the worst of the worst” in this city of 176,000 and the newspaper obliged by putting their pictures on the front page.843
Sniff, sniff: The smell of Pulitzer was in the air.
Except for one thing: Everyone arrested, everyone in the pictures, was black.
Dang.
The pictures and story of the worst of the worst marked the end of the first phase of the paper’s anti-crime push: Recognize that “most violent crime comes from a very small pocket” of people. Then tell them to stop. Or move. Or get arrested.
Two weeks later, the paper was ready for the next step: Organize a meeting to convince residents in high-crime neighborhoods (now they have me speaking in euphemisms) to give up the code of silence and start calling police when they see a crime.
But the largely black crowd of 200 wanted something altogether different: To its credit, the Times Free Press reported that too: The forum, on video, 844
quickly turned into a diatribe about prejudice and racism in Chattanooga. A number of comments revealed a strong belief that the black community has been treated unfairly by whites. Several speakers referred specifically to the November arrest of 32 black men that police called the "worst of the worst" criminals in Chattanooga.
"Don't just single out our kids," one black man said, speaking into the microphone. "Are they the only ones that commit crime?" he asked to cheers and hollers.
The focus of the forum was the so-called High Point initiative, named after a North Carolina town where the approach reduced crime.
That did not matter to Concerned Citizens for Justice. Members of the group believe that white racism is behind the poverty and injustice that creates so much violent crime. And that white people often commit similar crimes, but the police ignore them.
Just like our buddy John Conyers said a few pages into this book.
Members of the group packed the meeting and they were in no mood to listen to the newspaper’s facts: “Of the 122 shooting victims in Chattanooga from Jan. 1 through Nov. 21 of that year, 114 were black, six were white and two were Hispanic, according to figures provided by police. Of the 63 known suspects, only one was white.”
The paper patiently reported that “Kevin Muhammad, a Nation of Islam youth worker, said the white community also has a code of silence. He also compared the High Point Initiative to the days when police would round up slaves. When he did, much of the crowd cheered.”
The Concerned Citizens for Justice posted comments live from the forum at its FaceBook page: “CCJ member, Janelle Jackson, bringing up the history of "no snitch culture" and that race is a part of this conversation because we know that regardless of what has been told to us, the "worst of the worst" in this city are NOT 32 black men.”
The CCJ rejected the idea that the Code of Silence had anything to do with crime. Or that the disproportionate amount of black people involved in violent crime has anything to with it either: Other than the fact that black people are victims of relentless white racism.845
We find it very troubling that the “War on Drugs,” racial sentencing and arrest disparities, police brutality, income and access inequality—racism and poverty— were scarcely addressed while the bulk of investigation and blame fall on the community’s “code of silence.”
The NAACP joined in with a lukewarm statement, agreeing that crime is a problem, but so is racism, poverty and racial disparities on arrests and crime and imprisonment.
The paper recognized that fighting crime might not be as easy as finding criminals and locking them up: “The hurt and anger that echoed through the auditorium suggested that Mayor Andy Berke's new violence reduction initiative faces an uphill battle among the very people it's intended to help.”
I keep hearing about this tsunami of unreported white crime. I keep soliciting videos. I keep not getting them.
“It must be ninjas,” said one wag. “Because no one ever sees them.”
That’s a good one.