Crime In Black and White—WaPo's Jonathan Capehart vs. NYT's Al Baker
11/22/2010
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Explaining that blacks and Hispanics are more prone to violent crime than whites is like explaining that the sun comes up in the East. Everyone knows it. The crime statistics prove it, as do the nightly news programs and daily newspapers—whatever the producers of Law and Order want you to believe.

Now a black editorial writer at the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart, has stumbled upon this truth. Capehart reports that he ran into New York City's police chief at breakfast one morning and asked about the city's rising crime rate. The conversation led Capehart to examine the New York City Police Department's crime data. The color of murder and gun violence in New York

Lo and behold, Capehart learned something he apparently hadn't known before: Blacks and Hispanics commit essentially all the violent crime in New York. They are also the most likely crime victims.

Capehart quoted the report for 2010 directly:

"Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter victims are most frequently Black (67.0%) or Hispanic (28.1%). White victims account for (3.2%) of all Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter victims while Asian /Pacific Islanders account for (1.8%) of all Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter victims. The race/ethnicity of known Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter suspects mirrors the victim population with Black (65.3%) and Hispanic (30.6%) suspects accounting for the majority of suspects. White suspects account for (1.8%) of all Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter suspects while Asian/Pacific Islanders accounted for (2.4%) of the known Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter suspects.

"The Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter arrest population is similarly distributed. Black arrestees (53.8%) and Hispanic arrestees (36.4%) account for the majority of Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter arrestees while White arrestees (7.1%) and Asian/Pacific Islander (2.2%) arrestees account for the remaining portions of the Murder and Non-Negligent Manslaughter arrest population."[PDF]

Seeing the news so starkly distressed Capehart. He writes:

"In short, 95.1 percent of all murder victims and 95.9 percent of all shooting victims in New York City are black or Hispanic. And 90.2 percent of those arrested for murder and 96.7 percent of those arrested for shooting someone are black and Hispanic. I don't even know where to begin to describe the horror I still feel looking at those numbers. But the word 'hunted' comes to mind."

Capehart feels the same horror Jesse Jackson feels. "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life," Jackson once admitted, "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery — then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved."

Jackson is relieved when he sees whites footstepping behind him, as are all liberals, black or white, because even a staunch ideologue knows the truth: Blacks and Hispanics commit almost all of the violent crime in this country.

Capehart has finally seen the true color of crime. But six months ago, The New York Times' Al Baker [Email him]unbosomed himself of  a jeremiad that suggested the NYPD was "profiling" because a study of "stop-and-frisk" data showed that most of those stopped and frisked were, well, black and Hispanic. [New York Minorities More Likely to Be Frisked, May 12, 2010]

Reported Baker: "[b]lacks and Latinos were nine times as likely as whites to be stopped by the police in New York City in 2009, but, once stopped, were no more likely to be arrested."

Blacks are 23 percent of the Big Apple's population, but constituted 55 percent of the stops. Hispanics are 32 percent of the population, but were 28 percent of stops. Whites, at 35 percent of the population, accounted for 10 percent of stops.

These data, compiled by the leftist Center for Constitutional Rights, allegedly prove the police are profiling,—although blacks were not arrested more than whites after a stop. And more importantly, although the readily available crime data — that used by Capehart — demonstrates that profiling isn't the problem.

After the Times took its shot at the thin blue line, the City Journal's sensible Heather Mac Donald discharged a blunderbuss loaded with data to blow a hole in the profiling charge. She published a piece in her magazine and (to the Times' credit) she was allowed to publish a similar piece on the op-ed page of the Times. [Fighting Crime Where the Criminals Are, June 25, 2010]

Wrote Mac Donald, "[y]ou cannot properly analyze police behavior without analyzing crime". Mac Donald eviscerated the Times by quoting from the 2009 edition [PDF]of the same report that Capehart used.

"Blacks committed 66 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009 (though they were only 55 percent of all stops and only 23 percent of the city's population). [Emphasis added]Blacks committed 80 percent of all shootings in the first half of 2009. Together, blacks and Hispanics committed 98 percent of all shootings. Blacks committed nearly 70 percent of all robberies. Whites, by contrast, committed 5 percent of all violent crimes in the first half of 2009, though they are 35 percent of the city's population (and were 10 percent of all stops). They committed 1.8 percent of all shootings and less than 5 percent of all robberies. The face of violent crime in New York, in other words, like in every other large American city, is almost exclusively black and brown. "[Distorting the Truth About Crime and Race, May 14, 2010 ]

Mac Donald observed that the police department's Compstat process crunches crime data that tell police where the crime is—and something else important: blacks and Hispanics are stopped and frisked less frequently that the propensity for violent crime would seem to demand.

Yet the New York Times, Mac Donald correctly concludes, "assumes that policing should mirror census data"—that is, if blacks constitute 23 percent of New York City's population, then blacks should account for 23 percent of all those stopped by police.

But the police can't operate that way. They have to patrol crime-besieged neighborhoods and arrest the people who commit the crimes. And most of those people are blacks and Hispanics.

Thus, cops spend most of their time making busts in minority neighborhoods like the South Bronx and Harlem, not on the Upper East Side.

Unlike the professional race hustlers, Jonathan Capehart seems to understand the obvious:

"People have railed against black-on-black crime for decades. And yet it persists. Yes, there are a host of factors that push someone to a life of crime, but not all of them have to do with the limitations or failures of society. Some folks are just plain evil, and no amount of social intervention will stop them from preying on people, especially people who look like them.

"People have also railed — and rightly so — against the disproportionate application of the law against people of color. Bob Herbert has used barrels of New York Times ink against the NYPD's stop-and-frisk policy. But when faced with such stark murder and shooting statistics, what's a police commissioner supposed to do to ensure the safety of the public?

"All of society has an obligation to ensure that its citizens can live their lives in peace and security. The police are doing their job."

So Capehart gets it. That's very good.

But Capehart, perhaps innocently, missed the black-on-white aspect of these crime reports—rape being just one example.

Consider these data, right below those Capehart cited:

"Rape victims are most frequently Black (46.0%) or Hispanic (34.2%). White victims account for (15.1%) of all Rape victims while Asian/Pacific Islanders account for (4.7%) of all Rape Victims.

"Rape suspects are most frequently Black (54.9%) or Hispanic (31.3%). White suspects account for (7.4%) of all Rape suspects while Asian/Pacific Islanders accounted for (6.3%) of the known Rape suspects.

"Rape arrestees are most frequently Black (48.9%) and Hispanic (38.2%). White arrestees (6.8%) and Asian/Pacific Islander arrestees (5.8%) account for the remaining portions of the Rape arrestee population."

So blacks and Hispanics account for about 87 percent of those arrested for rape; whites about 7 percent. These data mean that almost all inter-racial rape is black-on-white or Hispanic-on-white.

Had Capehart looked even further, he would have found data from the Justice Department, duly reported by Lawrence Auster at FrontPageMagazine.com that showed

"[i]n the United States in 2005, 37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man, while between zero and ten black females were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man. What this means is that every day in the United States, over one hundred white women are raped or sexually assaulted by a black man." [The Truth of Interracial Rape in the United States May 03, 2007]

In other words, white women are as entitled to feel "hunted" as Capehart.

Upshot is, if you're a law-abiding black man or white woman in New York City, life can be dangerous.

Blacks and Hispanics are waging a fratricidal war of murder, rape and robbery in New York City—and rampaging against whites at will.

Capehart, to his great credit, is aghast.

Not so the New York Times' Baker. Nothing to see here, folks, he assures bystanders. Move along. Move along.

A.W. Morgan [Email him] is fully recovered from prolonged contact with the Beltway Right. He now lives in America.

 

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