Showing posts with label Riots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Riots. Show all posts

Saturday, August 1, 2015

The Culture War Returns

Well, it's not just now returning, although no doubt he's onto something.

From Jacob Heilbrunn, at the National Interest":
1968 IS BACK. A growing chorus of voices on the right is arguing that the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson are ushering in a new round of the culture wars. On the website Breitbart, for example, Robert W. Patterson, a former George W. Bush administration official, wrote, “The Grand Old Party must decide: Go libertarian, and sympathize with the protesters and rioters? Or does it want to be conservative, and side with the police, the rule of law, and the forces of order? The lessons of the 1960s suggest the latter is the path to victory.” William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, observed during the recent riots in Ferguson, “It does feel like a Nixon ’68 moment. Who will speak for the Silent Majority?”

It was a revealing question. In 1968, Richard Nixon tapped into white working-class antipathy toward student and black radicalism to defeat Hubert Humphrey. The Southern Strategy was born. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had won election as governor of California by denouncing the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and promising to “throw the bums off welfare.” Reagan would go on to midwife what became a potent alliance between the emerging neoconservative movement and traditional conservatives. The neocons began to share the traditionalists’ belief that, as Burke put it, “Men of intemperate mind can never be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

The maiden neocons had themselves emerged from the intensely partisan milieu of the 1930s to become respected public intellectuals. They viewed the scaturient passions of the New Left that had suddenly emerged in the 1960s as a clear and present danger—what the literary critic Lionel Trilling deemed an “adversary culture.”

Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and a number of other neoconservatives were deeply influenced by Trilling’s criticism of liberalism from inside the movement. They were also influenced—Kristol and Himmelfarb in particular—by the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who had fled Nazi Germany. Strauss believed that the culprit for much of what had gone wrong in Western civilization could be traced back to Machiavelli, who had lowered man’s sights away from a transcendent good. The result was the rise of relativism, in which one view of how humans should behave is as good as another. Strauss, by contrast, promulgated a different message, one that resonated with the new generation of conservatives—a return, after centuries of neglect, to classical virtue.

Kristol assailed what he called a “new class” of managers, lawyers, bureaucrats and social workers who promoted new issues such as women’s rights, sexual liberation and minority rights. Himmelfarb’s numerous books lauded the idea of Victorian virtue, stressed self-help and charity, and argued that the public dole had profoundly corrosive moral effects, foremost among them creating a culture of dependency on government.

Though it has tended to be scanted in recent years, neoconservatives—“Liberals mugged by reality,” as Kristol once put it—were initially much less preoccupied with foreign than domestic issues. Domestic policy is where they made their bones. Kristol and Daniel Bell founded the Public Interest in 1965 (though Bell ended up resigning as coeditor in 1973). The National Interest didn’t appear until 1985, just as the Cold War was beginning to reach its terminal phase. Political scientist James Q. Wilson, a regular contributor to Commentary and the Public Interest, devised the “broken windows” theory, which holds that stopping petty crimes is a vital step toward preventing major ones from occurring. RIOTING IN the inner cities in 1968, the disintegration of New York City, the rise of black militants and the introduction of affirmative action hardened neocon attitudes. Nathan Glazer called affirmative action “affirmative discrimination.” In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued a report warning about the collapse of the black family. Two years later, he delivered a speech to the Americans for Democratic Action stating that “liberals must somehow overcome the curious condescension that takes the form of defending and explaining away everything, however outrageous, which Negroes, individually or collectively, might do.” Other neocons blamed a new antinomianism for America’s ills. The emphasis on individual needs and wants—feminism, multiculturalism and the like—meant that the idea of a common civic good was disappearing. In their view, it was being replaced by a society of disgruntled supplicants.

Neocon apprehensions about crime and the sexual revolution were also acutely reflected in literary form. In novels like Mr. Sammler’s Planet and The Dean’s December, Saul Bellow vividly evoked the racial tensions of the 1970s, prompting charges that he was himself a racist. The Dean’s December focuses on the murder of a white graduate student named Rick Lester by a black hoodlum and a female prostitute. The protagonist Alfred Corde, a dean at the University of Chicago, registers his sympathy with the underclass but suggests that the basic problem is insoluble:
We do not know how to approach this population. We haven’t even conceived that reaching it may be a problem. So there’s nothing but death before it. Maybe we’ve already made our decision. Those that can be advanced into the middle class, let them be advanced. The rest? Well, we do our best by them. We don’t have to do any more. They kill some of us. Mostly they kill themselves.
Sounds familiar.

But keep reading.

C-Span of the Streets

At the New York Times, FWIW, "Glare of Video Is Shifting Public’s View of Police."

This is a terrible report, mainly because it (deliberately) fails to put the police videos into context, even including the Mike Brown case, which was completely debunked by the federal grand jury.

Yes, more videos provide greater accountability, and they may help rein-in police misconduct. But the left doesn't want accountability, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement is essentially a revolutionary communist program to take down the "racist" "imperialist" police system altogether.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

WATCH: New Video Shows Baltimore Riots Erupt While Police Told to 'Hold the Line' and 'Do Not Chase' — #FreddyGray

Yeah, the video comes out months later. Like it was some secret.

Remember, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake wanted to create "safe space" zones for black thugs to destroy the city.

Via CNN:



FLASHBACK: "Baltimore in Flames."

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Violent Anti-Uber Protests in France: Leftist Courtney Love Whines, 'Where Are the Police?'

It's in Paris, Lyon, Toulouse --- all over, heh.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Anti-Uber protests turn violent in France."

Also at London's Daily Mail, "French Uber protesters smash up Courtney Love's cab 'and take driver hostage'."

Yeah, Courtney Love's a freakin' far-left prog. And she's whining about "where are the police?"

Turns out she's always had a special fondness for the police, especially when they help her skate on potential murder charges. See WND, "COURTNEY LOVE AND THE SEATTLE COPS: Was Cobain murder investigation compromised by relationships?"


Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Monday, June 15, 2015

Leftists Explain Away 'Ferguson Effect' Crime Wave

This is one of those "just wow" pieces that makes you shake your head. Man, I still get flabbergasted as the left's shameless depravity.

From Heather Mac Donald, at the Wall Street Journal, "Explaining Away the New Crime Wave."

Hat Tip: Elizabeth Price Foley, at Instapundit, "NOTHING TO SEE HERE, KEEP MOVING: Explaining away the Ferguson Effect. Heather MacDonald explains the price of anti-police agitation by the political left."

Also at Memeorandum.

Ferguson Businesses Struggle to Rebound After Radical Left-Wing Riots and Destruction

One more of the "Ferguson effects" now savaging communities across the United States. Of course, in this case, it is Ferguson, struggling to overcome the left's revolutionary anarchy and violence.

At the Wall Street Journal, "In Ferguson, Mo., a Long Road Getting Back to Business":

Ferguson Riots photo tumblr_nflrjd6Kmr1s4t1cno1_1280_zps6537dd3d.jpg
FERGUSON, Mo.—Idowu Ajibola, 57, opened a pharmacy in this area eight years ago, tapping savings, family money and funds from his retirement plan. He added a beauty-supply business to the premises in 2008.

Mr. Ajibola’s fortunes changed last year after the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white police officer. During a period of widespread unrest, looters cleaned him out of high-price items, such as packages of hair extensions that sold for around $200 each. Mr. Ajibola estimates the rioting cost him $50,000 in stolen or destroyed merchandise; another $50,000 in fixtures were ruined.

“I lost quite a few customers,” said Mr. Ajibola. “People wouldn’t come in. It was a bad situation.”

Ten months after Mr. Brown’s death, businesses are still struggling to rebound in this suburb of St. Louis whose population of 21,000 is two-thirds African-American and has a median household income of less than $40,000.

With sales and traffic down on West Florissant Avenue, the Ferguson area that bore the brunt of looting and vandalism, Mr. Ajibola, who emigrated from Western Nigeria more than 30 years ago, decided to convert his wrecked beauty-supply shop into a dollar store. The new place sells items such as coffee mugs and kitchen supplies—goods less likely to attract shoplifters or looters.

Nearly half of the roughly 500 businesses operating in Ferguson and adjacent communities, such as Dellwood and Jennings, suffered property damage or lost revenue as a result of the unrest, according to the regional development association, North County Inc. Sixteen businesses closed. Seven of those have yet to reopen, while four have relocated, according to a city tally.

In April, the nation was again reminded of the emotional and physical scars that can result from civil unrest. The death of a 25-year-old Baltimore black man, Freddie Gray, who died after being arrested, set off another wave of protests, riots and looting. Close to 400 businesses, most of them small, suffered some kind of property damage or inventory loss, according to the Baltimore Development Corp.

And yet the cities’ challenges are different. Baltimore has a larger tax base spread out over a diverse, stable middle class. It also enjoys a strategic location near the nation’s capital. As for Ferguson, “it’s going to be harder” to recover, said Bruce Katz, founding director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. Mr. Katz notes that Ferguson has a relatively weak local economy. Local government in the region is split among dozens of municipalities with limited authority and funding, making it more difficult to spur growth.

Sales tax distributions to Ferguson fell 3.5% to $2.6 million in the period between August 2014 and May 2015 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the Missouri Department of Revenue. This figure likely understates the pain felt by local business owners, since it includes receipts from Wal-Mart, Home Depot and other big-box stores that contribute a substantial portion of the total.

In December, Moody’s Investors Service assigned a “negative outlook” to Ferguson, which could mean a downgrade to its credit rating later on. A lower rating could affect rates at which the city can borrow money in the future...
The damage in Ferguson is just a fraction of the devastation the left is inflicting on America.

The truth is coming out.

Keep reading.

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Anonymous Baltimore Cops to CNN: Public Asked for 'Softer' Police Force, They Got It (VIDEO)

At Gateway Pundit, "Baltimore Cops: “Public Asked for Softer, Less Aggressive Police Dept. & We’ve Given Them That” (VIDEO)."



BONUS: At Truth Revolt, "Prosecutor Had Asked Cops to Target Area Where Freddie Gray Was Arrested."

North Miami Senior High School Principal Fired for Comments Defending #McKinney Police Officer

Man, this is ominous.

At Gateway Pundit, "BREAKING: Principal LOSES JOB for Defending McKinney Police Officer Casebolt (VIDEO)."

And at the Miami Herald, "Miami-Dade schools remove principal after his post about police controversy":

The principal of North Miami Senior High School inadvertently injected himself into the racially charged national debate over police treatment of blacks with a social media comment — and it wound up costing him his position at the school.

The Miami-Dade County school district announced Wednesday that Alberto Iber had been removed as principal after going online to defend a white Texas police officer who waved a gun at black teens while responding to a call about an unruly pool party.

In a brief statement, the district said employees are required to conduct themselves, both personally and professionally, in a manner that represents the school district’s core values. The district said a replacement would be named shortly and that Iber would be reassigned to administrative duties.

“Judgment is the currency of honesty,” said Superintendent of Schools Alberto Carvalho. “Insensitivity — intentional or perceived — is both unacceptable and inconsistent with our policies, but more importantly with our expectation of common sense behavior that elevates the dignity and humanity of all, beginning with children.”

Cellphone footage from McKinney, Texas, caught white officer David Eric Casebolt throwing a black teenage girl to the ground, then briefly drawing his gun while responding to a call about an raucous pool party. The incident last week was just the latest in a string of encounters that have sparked charges of abusive police treatment of minorities.

Iber — in a brief public post on a story on the Miami Herald’s website — defended the officer’s response.

“He did nothing wrong,” Iber wrote in a comment that showed his Facebook picture, name, school and title. “He was afraid for his life. I commend him for his actions.”

Iber’s stance quickly prompted a passionate online response from Ambrose Sims, a black, retired Miami Beach Police veteran who joined the force at a time of racial strife in Miami in the 1980s. He also came out as gay and led a campaign for equal rights. Sims wrote, in part: “Such a comment reveals to me that you’re a serious part of the problem.”

Iber’s comment — which was removed after a few hours but not before being captured in screen grabs that were circulated in the community — also raised eyebrows in North Miami, a diverse city in northeast Miami-Dade where a majority of residents are black. The student body at his school also is 99 percent minority, according to state records.

Alix Desulme, a recently elected councilman who is Haitian-American and also a school teacher, said he was “appalled.”

“For him to make such a comment is insensitive to the community,” Desulme said.

Iber responded to a reporter’s questions on Tuesday by reading a prepared statement.

“I support law enforcement, and also the community and students that I serve as the proud principal of North Miami Senior High,’’ he said. “The comment I posted was simply made as the result of a short video that I watched and my personal opinion.”

Iber, who just finished his first year as the head of North Miami Senior, said he meant to write the comment anonymously.

“I regret that I posted the comment as it apparently became newsworthy and has apparently upset people,’’ he said. “That was not my intention in any way.”
Fired for stating his opinion. Fired. That's it.

That is a First Amendment violation, big time.

The collectivist-left. Destroying this once-great country one citizen at a time.

Tuesday, June 9, 2015

Separating Fact from Fiction in the McKinney, Texas Story — #McKinneyPoolParty

From Lee Stranahan, at Breitbart Texas.



Plus, don't miss Andrew Branca, at Legal Insurrection, "Video Analysis: McKinney Brawl Another Rush to Misjudgment?"

Monday, June 8, 2015

Witnesses Speak Out Against Violent Black Thugs at 'Innocent Pool Party' in McKinney, Texas (VIDEO)

At Ace of Spades HQ, "So, This 'Texas Pool Party' Story Seems to be Premised on, Get This, a Huge Lie":



Racism and police violence!

Yay! A new distraction to be outraged about!

Here's he real story -- narrated by a black resident of the neighborhood.
Benet Embry just wanted a respite from the heat when he went to his neighborhood pool Friday. Talking to CNN Monday about the national story that rolled out of that simple, mundane summer activity still has him pretty well dismayed.
The 43-year-old African-American has lived in Craig Ranch, a planned community, for eight years. It's a nice place. Racially diverse. People get along there.

Thinking back on the pool party, he might have known it would be crowded. The invite to the party had earlier caught fire on Twitter and social media. Craig Ranch's strict homeowners' association rules prohibit bringing more than two guests to the pool.

So when crowds of teenagers showed up, huddling by the gate and shouting to let them in, things got out of hand. Some kids jumped over the fence, Embry said. A security guard tried to get them to leave but was outnumbered, so the guard called police.

Police would arrive, and one officer seen on a video later posted to YouTube, would be placed on administrative leave. The officer cursed at several black teenagers, yanked a 14-year-old girl wearing only a bikini to the ground and knelt on her back. He also unholstered his firearm and chased teenage boys as they approached him while he was trying to control the girl.

Shortly after the approximately seven minute video hit YouTube, many on social media alleged that the white officer was racist. The Texas NAACP called meetings because members suspected as much, its president, Gary Bledsoe, said on CNN Monday.

Embry disagrees.

"Let me reiterate, the neighbors or the neighborhood did not call the police because this was an African-American party or whatever the situation is," he said. "This was not a racially motivated event -- at all. This whole thing is being blown completely out of proportion."
Embry was more emphatic in a FaceBook posting:
Look, I LIVE in this community and this ENTIRE incident is NOT racial at all. A few THUGS spoiled a COMMUNITY event by fighting, jumping over fences into a PRIVATE pool, harassing and damaging property. Not EVERYTHING is about RACE. WE have other issues that NEED our attention other flights of made up make believe causes.
So, this neighborhood has a pool that's open to residents only. Well, residents, and they can each bring two guests.

So guess what one teenaged resident did? She began advertising for a cookout/party, without clearing this with the other people -- you know, the other people who actually own the pool and have the right to use it on a hot weekend day -- and over a hundred teenagers -- strangers to the other residents -- showed up and took over the pool.

You know, the pool that the other people had paid for.

In fact, some residents say the teenagers began charging a fifteen dollar entry fee to the pool they owned (jointly) and had a right to use in quiet enjoyment.

That's the backstory here -- that 100+ teenagers with no right to be upon other people's property descended on the property, because one (1) resident broke the rules and began advertising widely for a pool party that she decided to hold, without clearing it with anyone.

And, maybe, decided to make some money on, charging $15 a head...
Keep reading.

Friday, June 5, 2015

Mayor Bill de Blasio Is Unpopular With White Voters

Heh.

The Democrat-left, still dividing the country along racial lines and pissing off voters. Good job progs!

At WSH, "New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio Is Unpopular With White Voters: Stark racial divide keeps widening over policing and income inequality; administration is ‘mindful’ of gap":
They are worried about crime. They don’t want to pay any more taxes. And they really, really miss Michael Bloomberg.
But to understand why many white voters are so down on New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, consider that some of them said they believed the feeling was mutual.

“He’s so down on me,” said Gene Reilly, a 71-year-old Democrat from Manhattan’s Cooper Square neighborhood who is white. “He’s looking out for the poor.”

Mr. de Blasio, also a Democrat, rode into office on a landslide in 2013, taking 73% of the vote. But the racial divide was there from the beginning. While winning 85% of Hispanic voters and 96% of black voters, he captured just 54% of the white vote.

A year and a half later, the mayor’s approval rating among whites is at 32%, according to a Wall Street Journal-NBC 4-Marist Poll in May. That compares with a 49% approval rating among Hispanics and 59% among blacks.

The heart of the mayor’s political support, in his campaign and in his administration, has been New Yorkers of color and liberals. They responded to his calls to address income inequality and de-emphasize long-standing policies that had a disproportionate impact on the poor and minorities, including the street-policing tactic known as stop-and-frisk.

Yet in interviews, many white voters said they were increasingly concerned about crime, and they faulted the mayor for how he had handled policing issues.

And many said the mayor’s loyalty to his base and his liberal agenda had left them uneasy.

Some cited his decision to continue a losing battle last year to raise taxes on the wealthy to pay for his prekindergarten program even after New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had made state funding available.

“He thinks it’s all the fault of the rich,” said Aida Gurwicz, a 69-year-old retiree on the Upper East Side.

Some said they felt overlooked or even abandoned by the mayor.

“I think he has good intentions…yes, I’m glad you’re giving something to the lower class. But what about the middle class? He has to deliver something for us,” said Ellen Warmstein, 62, of Rockaway Beach.

And many white voters said they struggled to identify with Mr. de Blasio, who followed two mayors with deep reserves of white support— Rudolph Giuliani among the working class and Mr. Bloomberg among the well-to-do business set.

“He’s almost a social-communist,” Rochelle Weinberg, a Democrat from the Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills, said of the mayor. “He’s out of town all the time. He’s disrespectful and shows up late. I can’t stand him. Everything he does makes me angry.”
"Almost" a social-communist? Actually, De Blasio is a social-communist.

But keep reading.

Monday, June 1, 2015

The New Nationwide Crime Wave

From Heather Mac Donald, at WSJ, "The consequences of the ‘Ferguson effect’ are already appearing. The main victims of growing violence will be the inner-city poor":


The nation’s two-decades-long crime decline may be over. Gun violence in particular is spiraling upward in cities across America. In Baltimore, the most pressing question every morning is how many people were shot the previous night. Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.

By contrast, the first six months of 2014 continued a 20-year pattern of growing public safety. Violent crime in the first half of last year dropped 4.6% nationally and property crime was down 7.5%. Though comparable national figures for the first half of 2015 won’t be available for another year, the January through June 2014 crime decline is unlikely to be repeated.

The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months.

Since last summer, the airwaves have been dominated by suggestions that the police are the biggest threat facing young black males today. A handful of highly publicized deaths of unarmed black men, often following a resisted arrest—including Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., in July 2014, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore last month—have led to riots, violent protests and attacks on the police. Murders of officers jumped 89% in 2014, to 51 from 27.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, before he stepped down last month, embraced the conceit that law enforcement in black communities is infected by bias. The news media pump out a seemingly constant stream of stories about alleged police mistreatment of blacks, with the reports often buttressed by cellphone videos that rarely capture the behavior that caused an officer to use force.

Almost any police shooting of a black person, no matter how threatening the behavior that provoked the shooting, now provokes angry protests, like those that followed the death of Vonderrit Myers in St. Louis last October. The 18-year-old Myers, awaiting trial on gun and resisting-arrest charges, had fired three shots at an officer at close range. Arrests in black communities are even more fraught than usual, with hostile, jeering crowds pressing in on officers and spreading lies about the encounter.

Acquittals of police officers for the use of deadly force against black suspects are now automatically presented as a miscarriage of justice. Proposals aimed at producing more cop convictions abound, but New York state seems especially enthusiastic about the idea.

The state’s attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, wants to create a special state prosecutor dedicated solely to prosecuting cops who use lethal force. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo would appoint an independent monitor whenever a grand jury fails to indict an officer for homicide and there are “doubts” about the fairness of the proceeding (read: in every instance of a non-indictment); the governor could then turn over the case to a special prosecutor for a second grand jury proceeding.

This incessant drumbeat against the police has resulted in what St. Louis police chief Sam Dotson last November called the “Ferguson effect.” Cops are disengaging from discretionary enforcement activity and the “criminal element is feeling empowered,” Mr. Dotson reported. Arrests in St. Louis city and county by that point had dropped a third since the shooting of Michael Brown in August. Not surprisingly, homicides in the city surged 47% by early November and robberies in the county were up 82%.

Similar “Ferguson effects” are happening across the country as officers scale back on proactive policing under the onslaught of anti-cop rhetoric. Arrests in Baltimore were down 56% in May compared with 2014...
Keep reading.

And at Twitchy, "‘The New National Crime Wave’ explores the consequences of the ‘Ferguson effect’."

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Black-on-Black Violence Surges Over Memorial Day Weekend

At CBS News Baltimore, "29 Shootings, 9 Fatal, Over Memorial Day Weekend In Baltimore."

Also at Bloviating Zeppelin, "Baltimore black-on-black murders since Gray: where are the riots?"

And see USA Today, "Baltimore, other cities see violent holiday weekend":
Violence surged in major U.S. cities over Memorial Day weekend, bringing new highs for homicides in Chicago and Baltimore after years of declining crime.

Nine murders and nearly 30 shootings over the weekend brought Baltimore's monthly homicide toll to its highest point in more than 15 years, taxing a city and police department already pushed to its limits after rioting last month.

Baltimore logged a record 35 homicides as of Tuesday, the most in a single month since 1999. This year, the city has had 108 homicides.

"I've never seen anything like it," City Councilman William "Pete" Welch told The (Baltimore) Sun. "The shootings and killings are all over the city."

The Memorial Day weekend was also a bloody one in Chicago, where at least 12 people were killed and 44 were wounded in gun violence from Friday night to Tuesday morning. The rash of violence continues a trend of killings and shootings that began this year after the city recorded the fewest homicides in decades last year.

The weekend's wounded include Jacele Johnson, 4, shot in the head Friday evening as she sat in a car on the South Side with a 17-year-old cousin, who was shot in the chest. On the city's West Side, a 17-year-old boy was shot in the back and the leg.

About two hours earlier, a 19-year-old man was gunned down two blocks from Chicago Police Headquarters, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

Even before this weekend's incidents, murders were up 17% and non-fatal shootings had jumped 24% from the same time last year, according to Chicago Police Department statistics. The city has recorded 133 homicides this year as of May 17 compared with 114 at the same time last year. There have been 693 shootings this year compared with 560 at the same time last year.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who won re-election in April, touted the strides Chicago has made under his watch in reducing the number of homicides. The nation's third-largest city had 407 murders last year, the city's fewest in five decades.

After seeing crime drop sharply in the first half of 2014, St. Louis saw a steep rise in violence in several neighborhoods as protests grew, following the shooting death of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson by police officer Darren Wilson. By year's end, St. Louis logged 157 homicides, the city's highest yearly toll since 2008.

The problem has persisted this year as well: Homicides went up 6% for the first quarter of 2015 compared with the same period last year.

Police Chief Sam Dotson said he noted a decrease in police-initiated interactions with residents in the midst of the worst protests in the St. Louis area in the weeks after Brown's killing in August. Police also were less active in November after the St. Louis County prosecutor announced Wilson wouldn't face criminal charges.

In Baltimore, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts wrote a letter to community leaders Monday, acknowledging the disintegrating relationship between police and the community. He said the police would move "aggressively" to address the violence.

Baltimore, he wrote, is "in the midst of a challenging time. Following a period of civil unrest, we have been experiencing an increase of the pace of violent crime, most notably homicides and shootings."
Plus, more at Fox News, with Megyn Kelly and Dana Loesch, "White House Suggests More Gun Control Is the Answer to Spike In Violence - The Kelly File."

Sunday, May 3, 2015

Downplaying the Radical Left's Black Revolutionary Violence

Actually, I disagree with Bryan Burrough's argument that #BlackLivesMatter activists aren't endorsing armed resistance against America's law enforcement. Maybe the dude's not on Twitter. I've repeatedly posted on the Ferguson activists, in Missouri and New York, advocating cop killing and the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary overthrow of capital. The deaths of New York City police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were the direct result of leftist anti-cop agitation, including New York protesters chanting "What do we want? Dead cops! When do we want it? Now!"

The fact is leftist cop-killing agitation is all over the place. It's not isolated to a few so-called "fringe" elements. As urban riots continue around the country, expect to see leftists target more police officers for murder.

Here's Burrough, at LAT, "Today, a softer response to police violence than in 1960s and '70s":

Radical Leftists Kill Cops photo 1419331513573.cached_zpsgvavmrtm.jpg

Among the first black leaders [in the 1960s] who called for retaliation was Robert Williams, an NAACP man in North Carolina who, after confrontations with the Ku Klux Klan, urged blacks to arm themselves in a 1962 book called “Negroes With Guns.” After fleeing to Cuba, Williams called for black servicemen to kill their white superiors during the Cuban missile crisis.

A far more prominent advocate was Malcolm X, who made police a focus of his demands for a bloody black revolution in American streets. After his assassination in 1965, Malcolm's baton was picked up and carried forward by angry militants such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who popularized the term “Black Power.”

But it was the Black Panther Party, formed in 1967 by a pair of Oakland college students, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, who led a broad segment of black America into something approaching open conflict with urban police. The Panthers were initially a kind of neighborhood watch for Bay Area blacks; when they saw a white cop stop a black motorist, they would approach with guns drawn, demanding that the cop respect the black man's civil rights. Time and again they angrily confronted police — first in Oakland, later around the country — in incidents that, when broadcast, introduced an entirely new paradigm to the strained relations between black Americans and police officers.

Panther rhetoric was stunningly inflammatory. It was the Panther newspaper that spread the term, “Off the Pig.” “The only good pig,” one New York Panther told startled white newspapermen, “is a dead pig.” At one point the Panther chief of staff, David Hilliard, announced that killing policemen wasn't enough: “We will kill Richard Nixon,” he announced at a rally.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, attacks on urban policemen paralleled the rise in violent rhetoric. From 1964 to 1969, assaults on Los Angeles patrolmen quintupled. In Detroit they rose 70% in 1969 alone. Emboldened, a group of white militants calling themselves Weathermen went underground in 1970 and began plotting attacks on policemen in solidarity with the Panthers. Only after an accidental bomb explosion killed three of its members that spring did the group disavow murderous violence.

A Panther offshoot, the Black Liberation Army, or BLA, emerged in 1971, launching a series of attacks on police in New York, Atlanta and San Francisco; four were killed. The BLA remained a threat through 1972, when three of its members carried out perhaps the most gruesome assassination of police officers in New York history, shooting to pieces two officers, one of them black, on an East Village sidewalk. The group was finally eliminated after a series of attacks and shootouts in 1973, one of which resulted in the capture of its last leader, Joanne Chesimard, now known as Assata Shakur. After another group of militants freed her from a New Jersey prison in 1979, Shakur escaped to Cuba, where today she remains the highest-profile U.S. fugitive still under the protection of the Castro government.

Compared with what we experienced during the 1970s, even the Baltimore riots are tame. Kids are throwing rocks and looting, while most adults are telling them to go home...
Right. Tame.

Last week's riots were Baltimore's worst since 1968.

Frankly, thank god no one was killed.

Saturday, May 2, 2015

After Urban Riots, a Long Road to Revival

From Christopher Caldwell, at the Wall Street Journal, "In troubled American cities, such as Baltimore, neighborhoods devastated by unrest seldom come back":
The Woodberry Kitchen, near Druid Hill Park in northwestern Baltimore, is among the best restaurants in the mid-Atlantic. It shares a renovated cotton mill with an art gallery and a glassblowing studio. Washingtonians flock there. The restaurant website recommends taking the highway, but there is a shortcut for those willing to creep northward along Fulton Avenue in West Baltimore.

I suspect few patrons take that shortcut twice. The jazz bandleader Cab Calloway and the Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall grew up in the neighborhood, but it has, to put it mildly, gone downhill since then. This is Sandtown, where dozens were arrested this week in the rioting that followed the death in police custody of 25-year-old Freddie Gray (on Friday, charges were filed against the officers involved). Unless you have been to the worst parts of Detroit or Camden, N.J., you are unlikely to have seen anything like Sandtown.

More shocking, perhaps, is how little distance separates sophisticated, 21st-century Baltimore—where you can dine on wood-roasted Delaware River rockfish with pak choi and koshihikari rice—from the left-behind, boarded-up Baltimore that Americans have been watching on television with alarm.

The country can only hope that this week’s damage remains limited to one wild night. The fate of Baltimore and other troubled American cities often depends on how the violent parts get rebuilt after rioting. In most cases, riot-torn neighborhoods don’t get rebuilt at all.

Baltimore missed the boom of the 1990s. It has lost 120,000 residents in the last quarter-century. It has a murder rate (37 per 100,000) that only New Orleans, St. Louis and Detroit can match. A decade ago, under Democratic mayor (and now presidential candidate) Martin O’Malley, reforms drove the rate down, but they required policing so aggressive as to be unsustainable. In 2005, there were 108,000 arrests in a city of 622,000 residents. Less than half of Sandtown’s working-age residents work.

The city, which is two-thirds black, has a black political establishment that has been entrenched for a generation. Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake and her police commissioner, Anthony Batts, called last fall for a federal civil-rights probe of their own city. The notion, heard on some talk shows, that the city’s leaders want to keep black residents down can be dismissed.

In the wake of urban unrest, well-positioned neighborhoods eventually attract private and public capital for rebuilding. Both Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles have suffered riots that were orders of magnitude greater than this week’s in Baltimore. Washington’s U Street corridor, nearly destroyed by the revolt that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, is again a lively business hub.

But it took a very long time. U Street didn’t see the first stirrings of revival until the 1990s. And businesses were replaced, not restored. U Street was once the premier black downtown in the U.S.; now it is a place for hipsters to drink microbrews and smoke hookahs. That’s better than nothing, but U Street isn’t the hub it was. It is a new hot spot on the site of the riots rather than any sort of resolution of the problems that the riots revealed.

The legacy of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, which followed the acquittal of four policemen videotaped beating the black motorist Rodney King, is similarly mixed. A 2009 poll found that 68% of the city’s African-Americans and 76% of its Latinos had a favorable view of the city’s police department, formerly denounced for its paramilitary tactics.

But here, too, the process took time, with the lost economic activity amounting to as much as $3.8 billion. A 20-year retrospective in the Los Angeles Times showed that the unemployment rate in the neighborhood is now higher and median income lower than at the time of the riots.

Less prominent cities tend to languish after riots...
More.

Friday, May 1, 2015

Web of Problems Led to Baltimore Rioting

At WSJ, "Longstanding troubles include a steep drop in manufacturing jobs, drug use, abandoned houses and crime":
BALTIMORE—To 18-year-old high school senior Diondre Jackson, the causes of Monday’s rioting here go much deeper than boiling anger over the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray from spine injuries he suffered while in police custody.

The spasms of looting and destruction in predominantly African-American parts of the city sprang from long-festering distrust of police among young blacks, he said, along with what he called weakened family structures and inadequate leadership in the community.

“There’s nobody to tell them right from wrong,” he said of young rioters. “A lot of them don’t have parents. When there’s no leadership to raise a child, how can you expect the child to act civilized and adultlike?”

Cleaning up the damage will be far easier than addressing the complex web of problems that has weighed on inner-city Baltimore for decades, including a steep drop in well-paying manufacturing jobs, the scourge of drugs, high crime rates and what some call a prison pipeline that leaves many young black men with records that lock them out of jobs.

At Mr. Gray’s funeral Monday, several speakers highlighted these problems. The Rev. Jamal Bryant spoke of self-empowerment but also about the forces that he said have made some African-Americans feel “boxed in”: housing discrimination, high incarceration rates, poor schools.

Former Mayor Kurt Schmoke said that when he graduated from high school in 1967, the region’s largest private employer was Bethlehem Steel Corp. By the time he became mayor 20 years later, Johns Hopkins University and its health system had risen to No. 1, a perch they maintain.

Just since 1990, the number of manufacturing jobs in the Baltimore metro region has fallen to 55,000 from 131,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. During the same span, employment in education and health services has jumped to 258,000 from 146,000.

“There are jobs going begging,” said Mr. Schmoke, a Democrat who is now president of the University of Baltimore. But he said they are out of reach for many city residents.

“They are jobs that require a level of literacy that is higher than the parents or grandparents of these people needed to obtain,” he said, adding that improving public schools is critically important.

Another challenge many residents face in finding employment is a criminal record, often for low-level drug offenses, Mr. Schmoke said. He noted that a task force led by Lt. Gov. Boyd Rutherford, a Republican, is looking into making expungement easier.

“An arrest for marijuana possession when you’re 18 should not be a cross you bear for the rest of your life,” Mr. Schmoke said.

Drugs have long plagued the city. During the 1990s homicides topped 300 a year, fueled by a crack cocaine trade concentrated in black neighborhoods. Heroin addiction is also a long-standing problem.

Online court records show Mr. Gray had a number of arrests, mostly for drug-related offenses, some of which resulted in conviction.

He was arrested on April 12 after running from a police officer when the two made eye contact in an area known for drug-dealing, officials have said. When they caught him, officers allegedly found a switchblade in his pants pocket and loaded him into a transport van.

A family lawyer has said that while Mr. Gray was in police custody, his spine was nearly severed at his neck and three vertebrae were broken. Mr. Gray died of his injuries on April 19. Six police officers have been suspended with pay, and five have given statements to police. None has commented publicly on the case...
More.