"Racial Equality Among Muggers?"—DEATH WISH, The Stakeout Squad, And Disparate Impact
05/26/2017
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Kathy Shaidle links to Paul Kersey's piece on DEATH WISH, and adds this video clip of a 1974 cocktail party, where they're talking about the unknown "vigilante" (Charles Bronson) who's been turning the tables on muggers:

White Male party guest 1: "I tell you one thing, the guy's a racist. You notice he kills more blacks than whites."

White female party guest:"Oh, for Pete's sake, Harry, more blacks are muggers than whites. What do you want us to do, up the proportion of white muggers to have racial equality?"

White Male party guest 2:"What? Racial equality among muggers? I love it."

Paved With Good Intentions</a> The Failure of Race Relations in Contemporary AmericaThat reminded me of this story from Peter Brimelow's 1993 review of Jared Taylor's Paved With Good Intentions. (Because 1993 was not The Current Year, this was published by Carroll & Graf, and reviewed in National Review and the Wall Street Journal.)

Invisible Men, National Review, January 18, 1993

“WAS THE MUGGER black?” asked my wife sympathetically. As a Canadian newly arrived in Manhattan, she honestly didn't know that you must Never Ask. Her hostess, caught off balance in mid-crime story, admitted that he was. Then she hurriedly covered herself: of course, she said, this meant nothing.

Besides being a Canadian, however, my wife was and still is in some respects invincibly innocent. And now she was really puzzled. “But aren't most muggers in New York black?” she inquired. Her hostess was outraged. “I don't believe that,” she snapped.

The single greatest strength of Jared Taylor's Paved with Good Intentions is its massive and merciless crushing of this type of hysterical denial, which currently paralyzes all discussion of race relations in America.[More]

Said hysterical denial still paralyzes all discussion of race relations in America—Matt Yglesias, who makes his living by discussing race relations, was knocked down in the street with one punch by a black "polar bear hunter", and it took him two years to admit publicly that the attacker was black.

Anyhow, as the female party guest said in Death Wish, more muggers are black. So were armed robbers. In Jim Cirillo's Tales Of The Stakeout Squad, the late Jim Cirillo reported a similar question of disparate impact.

The NYPD's Stakeout Squad did officially what Bronson was doing unofficially—staking out high-crime businesses, many of which had been robbed repeatedly,   and waiting for the robbers to come:

STAKING OUT THE STAKEOUT SQUAD

Cirillo: At the time, we had a black boss in charge of SOD—Special Operations Division. He put two black cops into the Stakeout Squad to keep an eye on us. They loved us, we became their heroes. And they told us that when they were being interviewed to come into the Stakeout Squad, the deputy chief had said to them, “You know these guys only shot black people?”

And they said, “We didn’t know that, boss.”

He says, “I want you to keep your eyes open and your ears open, and next time you see me, give me a report and let me know what you think. The only thing white these guys ever shot was a Volkswagen.”[This was an accidental discharge.]

One of these guys tells me he saw the chief later on and he says, “Hey chief, remember you told me to check in with you? Well, I looked at the MO, and the MO shows that all the holdups was always two black guys or three black guys. Maybe that’s why they’re only shooting black guys?”

As if this boss doesn’t hear the radio.

During that time all you heard on the radio was “On the lookout, two black males, with guns. . . three black males. . . Mutt and Jeff team, two black males.” For chrissakes that was all that was pulling the robberies at that time! What the hell did he expect? We were dying for some Irish-Italian kid to come in, we’d have blown him right out of his socks to show we were equal opportunity shooters!

The stakeout squad was closed down by the higher-ups after the publication by then-Deputy Commissioner Robert Daley of

"a laudatory article entitled “The Deadly Score Of The Stakeout Squad,,” which was the cover story in the April 24, 1972 issue of New York magazine. After flying beneath the radar for nearly five years, with most of its activities receiving little or no coverage, this suddenly put a spotlight on the unit."

And of course, that meant it had to stop, because there were no "Irish-Italian" kids robbing stores at gunpoint and getting shot.

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