by Jack
A little black girl named Heaven will be buried today at St. Mark International Church on Chicago’s West Side. She was the latest casualty in warring gangs.
Some reports show that there are up to are up to 600 gangs or cliques in the Chicago metropolitan area, with a membership of up to 150,000. This has resulted in a surge in violence that has shocked and stunned Chicago’s law enforcement.
The uptick in violent crime began on Memorial Day weekend, when about 40 people were shot, almost all blacks, including 10 who were fatally wounded. So far there have been more than 250 homicides (mostly blacks) this year, up 38 percent over the same period last year, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Heaven was killed when she was hit by a stray bullet while helping her Mom sell candy in front of her home. The murder occurred when rival gang members sprayed bullets into a crowd. This innocent child is sadly symbolic of a greater tragedy that we dare not talk openly about, for fear of being called a racist, but we should. It’s the only way this problem is going to get the attention it needs to be fixed.
Some of the following facts are politically incorrect, but they are still facts and they will hopefully make some of you aware of a very serious trend. Awareness is the first step towards solving a problem at the ballot box.
Fact: The number inmates in state and federal prisons has increased nearly seven-fold from less than 200,000 in 1970 to 1,518,535 by midyear 2007. An additional 780,581 are held in local jails, for a total of 2.3 million. At the core of this problem is the black community and the focus should be right there, because something has to change in this segment of our population because they’re not making it and they’re pulling us all down. Nobody wants to hear this because it sounds ugly, it sounds racists and unfair. But, like it or not, it’s the truth.
The inner city problem is a moral outrage and it should be seen as intolerable, because this trend will soon reach a flash point. It’s already spread like a cancer to small communities that have never had a gang problem before, like Chico, Willows, Redding, Orland, Hamilton City and Oroville. These outlaw gangs have popped because too many minorities think it’s cool to mimic the badasses in big city gangs and prison culture. This role play has effected how kids think and it’s caused mini-crime waves in the suburbs, mostly it’s auto-theft, but sometimes it turns to homicide.
Look at these truths and then tell me its not every bit as dangerous as I’ve just told you!
1. Between 2000 and 2006, the state prison population increased by an average annual rate of 1.7%, the federal population by 5.3%, and jail population by 3.6%.
2. As of 2007, 1 out of every 131 Americans was incarcerated in prison or jail.
3. 40% of persons in prison or jail in 2006 were black. 20% were Hispanic.
4. One in ten (10.4%) black males aged 25-29 was in prison or jail in 2007. 1 in 28 (3.6%) Hispanic males and 1 in 59 (1.7%) white males in the same age group were also in jail or prison.
5. Black males have a 32% chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives; Hispanic males have a 17% chance; white males have only a 6% chance.
6. One in four inmates were convicted of a drug offense.
7. African Americans account for 12.84% of the population, however the are responsible for 38.1% of all violent crime.
Blacks rank especially high with 55% of all robberies and 48.7 of all murders. Not letting Hispanics off the hook here either, because their stats are nothing to be proud of, nor are whites who trail in 3rd place for per capita crime. Our overall crime rate says we live in a violent society. But, when you consider most of those major crime stats are concentrated in dense ethnic areas it reads like a cultural indictment. The “hoods” look like something you would expect only in the 3rd world.
Jeffry Gamble, who is black was a victim of a car wreck that left him paralyzed, but he says that probably saved his life in the long run. Otherwise, he says, he would be dead or doing life in prison just like all of his brothers. Gamble thinks he knows the answer why so many black males are in prison and why the prison population is growing like wildfire.
“It’s not just that we didn’t fear jail,” says Jeffrey, who now uses his experience to warn youngsters away from gangs and prison. “It was like a rite of passage. You needed to go to jail so you could have that badge of honor.” Three generations of African-American men enmeshed in the criminal justice system. A legacy of incarceration passed from father to son. A cycle that just won’t break.”
The quick money to be found selling and our huge appetite for consuming illegal drugs is another major contribution to the high numbers of incarcerations, 1 in 4 black inmates are being held for drug crimes. Those drug arrests nearly parallel the growth in the total prison population as drugs become more widely used in the USA. There’s another cycle that won’t break. However, our justice system and in particular, law enforcement, doggedly keeps doing the same old things over and over hoping for different results. The war on drugs is not a war and never has been, except in the speeches given by politicians.
Maybe you have your own ideas how we could turn this situation around before gang violence prison overcrowding becomes acute and virtually out of control?
How come you never tear your hair out over the carnage in Oakland? Could it be because … someone … never “community organized” in Oakland. And why does that, also, seem to stick in you craw. What on earth is wrong with community organizing?
The gangs are fighting over . . . ?
The land of the free has the highest incarceration rate of any civilized nation of this earth. If we graph the prison population, it started going hockey stick when Nixon started the “War on Drugs.”
Legalize drugs.
Problem solved.
Libby, Oakland is a terrible place and it has been since WWII. It would be great if people started stepping up to fix it, but the crime problem is so big it scares them away before they can start.
Next…Nothing wrong with community organizing. I’ve been involved in doing that for years in whatever ways I could. I think more people should get involved. Have you done any community organizing for anything? Just curious.
Places like Oakland, Newark, Trenton, New Orleans, Chicago, Washington DC, East LA, Stockton, to name but a few, all have the same problems, too many violent black criminals with no fear of the law. They are quick to anger, harbor a lot hatred and seem to have no reservation about killing people. The cycle of criminal behavior is passed from generation to generation. Gangs have replaced parents, they have filled that big empty gap caused by too many black fathers who have run out on their responsibilities.
This would be a great study for the psychiatric community. Maybe they could discover why there is a propensity for violence and anger with no regard for the safety of other people among too many black criminals. There’s something not right here and it can only get worse until people start taking on personal responsibility and accountability.
Legalizing drugs would certainly solve a big part of the crime problem, but we still have a lot left to fix. However, I like the idea of taking money away from gangs and dealers.
Legalizing drugs and making it a medical problem shifts the case load, but it does not exempt society from paying a heavy price.
Thanks for your suggestion Q, I think this bears looking into very carefully.
Or you could just legalize murder. That would drop the crime rate way down for murder. It would also cut the incarceration rate. See, these solutions are simple when we start thinking like Quentin and Jack.
Van Jones was a community organizer in Oakland and San Francisco. Remember the video of Valerie Jarrett saying thats where she noticed him? Wonder if he was there the same time Jerry Brown was major.
Poor Oakland. Jerry Brown and Van Jones.
Jarret and Jones:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud_yNFnfrSI
Jones in Oakland:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Jones
From 1996-1997, Jones and PoliceWatch led a campaign which was successful in getting officer Marc Andaya fired from the San Francisco Police Department. Andaya was the lead officer accused of the in-custody death of Aaron Williams, an unarmed black man. In 1999 and 2000, Jones was a leader in the failed campaign to defeat Proposition 21, which sparked a student movement that made national headlines.[20][21] In 2001, Jones and the Ella Baker Center launched the Books Not Bars campaign. From 2001 to 2003, Jones and Books Not Bars led a campaign to block the construction of a proposed “Super-Jail for Youth” in Oakland’s Alameda County. Books Not Bars later went on to launch a statewide campaign to transform California’s juvenile justice system.[22]
Soaps, please do not connect me with Quentin, I’ m only agreeing with him to the extent that we should explore our options and legalizing drugs is certainly an option. I have reported on this idea extensively and I’ve always said that I felt it would yield carnage on a grand scale, but at least we would know and then returning to strict enforcement would come with the wisdom of knowing exactly what happens when drugs run rampant in society. I’ve said this for decades, so I am being very consistent.
PS I also thought of saying we could legalize murder, robbery, etc. and that would also lower the crime rate.
There is a pestilence of “community organizers” in both Chicago and Oakland. Such is the effect of “community organizers” in both cities and now in the nation.
It may be that the answer cherry picked his source.
The hockey stick spike did begin in the sixties when drug use went mainstream in a large percentage of the white youth population. But the country’s drug war began in 1935 with Franklin Roosevelt. (The New York Times headline: “ROOSEVELT ASKS NARCOTIC WAR AID”) And rather than Nixon it was Lyndon Johnson who first decided something needed to be done about drug use (see link below):
Here’s more on Nixon from the same Wikipedia page where I retrieved this information and where the “hockey stick” graph can be viewed:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs
If you want the answers ya gotta ask the right questions.
Libby community organizing can be a wonderful thing. In fact I think Michelle and Barack would be fantastic at it! In fact their talents are wasted in government!
In our early history American men and women excelled at community organizing, they just called it building a barn or community charity. They organized through the churches and sororities holding fund raisers to support their work. Given the power of high profile types like the Obama’s raising funds should never be a problem at all. There is no reason to involve federal, state, or local government.
It is imperative that this work be done at the local level with private funds.
And who said community organizing hasn’t gone on in Oakland? The original Black Panthers were very active community organizers in Oakland in the sixties and seventies. Unfortunately much of their side work was either racist or criminal in nature.
Thanks to the Marxist influence our culture has changed so that individual and group efforts at the local level are undermined (or poo pooed) by the “we need the government do it” and “dependency” mentalities.
The closer to problems we work the more likely we are to have success at meeting our goals…and preventing terrible waste of resources (people & money). Once again if government didn’t play do-gooder the people would be forced to step up and the solution would more likely fit the problem.
I stand corrected. let’s outlaw all substances which cause bad behavior.
Just because it didn’t work 90 years ago, it’s worth another try.
“The hockey stick spike did begin in the sixties.” Yes, that is what I said. Your attempt to distract reveals something important, though.
In the 1930s American enterpreneur, George Schlicten, invented the decorticator, a machine which would sped the production of fiber and paper products from hemp.
Well, DuPont did not believe in competition for their newly-invented fiber, nylon, so they did what corporations have always done. They got the government to impose a tax on the competition–just like they do now. The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 passed because yellow journalist, William Hearst (the Rupert Murdoch of his day), who owned millions of acres of forests (that suddenly became worthless with the invention of the decorticator), launched a racist campaign of fear–just like they do today! Hearst wrote the “Negroes–with big lips . . . are seducing White Women . . . with MARIHUANA!!!!!!!
Ya, the “American Way” of building a better product using entrepreneurial skills, and eschewing propaganda and government regulations.
The TEA Party methods of Hearst and the DuPont corporation may work for you, but I prefer the good, old fashioned methods–American enterprise and hard work!!!–which incidentally wouldn’t be filling up our jails.
A win-win for liberty!
Thanks for bringing up yet another example of how the corporations are running America for a profit!
Well why stop there? We should outlaw absolutely everything that poses an inherit health risk, liquor, smoking, drugs, cars, guns, knives, bicycles, swing sets, boats, swimming pools, dodge ball, tennis, football, skating, medical surgery, legal medications, airplanes, electrical devices, predator fish, cell phones, predator animals, dangerous livestock, poisonous snakes, spiders, liberals, etc. Then and only then shall we be safe in our beds, right?
So reiterating what you have said is considered an attempt at distraction? You sure are some goofy dude!
What great power did Dupont owners use to twist the arms of the government officials who colluded with them and used the power of office to cheat the little guy?
THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD HAVE SAID NO.
Tea Partiers are not what you think and you would be wise to figure out why…but…I waste my breath.