Numbers, Witnesses and Misdemeanor Murder.

As I type this I’m looking back at a call from two days ago. I checked by with one of my units on a Shooting-Just Occurred call, a mid-20s black male was shot in the middle of a very busy intersection of Da Hood. Someone drove up, fired the round and drove off. In front of about 50 people just standing in the area, apparently with nothing to do and all with cell phones equipped with cameras. The young man was shot in the abdomen with one small round and walked into a small store, asking the clerk to call for an ambulance.

We all know he was a local and when we started to ask the “witnesses,” nobody knew him or anything about how he got shot. People who couldn’t wait to approach us with their cell phones, hoping for their 15 minutes of Twitter fame, were now quickly walking away.

We have a term for it. Misdemeanor Murder.

I have no idea if the man died or not (I would guess not from the extent of the injuries) but again, there is no question if this was a police involved shooting, every one of the dozens of people there would have a camera out and being speaking to the reporters who called. See Mike Brown.

One of the effects of the breakdown of minority families in the years since the Great Society, the civil society has disintegrated. People are taught as they get older (there are not raised) that law enforcement is the enemy and that the justice system is not a way for handling crimes. The unknown black male likely knew who fired the round and drove off. In a few months someone else will be shot by this young black man or his “family.” And nobody saw nothing!

Another case of Misdemeanor Murder.

Heather McDonald has written a book called The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. In it she documents the statistics of actual shooting. In spite of the propaganda of the current idiot residing in the White House, there is not a war on minorities by the police. Some of the highlights:

1. Cops killed nearly twice as many whites as blacks in 2015. According to data compiled by The Washington Post, 50 percent of the victims of fatal police shootings were white, while 26 percent were black. The majority of these victims had a gun or "were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force," according to MacDonald in a speech at Hillsdale College.

Some may argue that these statistics are evidence of racist treatment toward blacks, since whites consist of 62 percent of the population and blacks make up 13 percent of the population. But as MacDonald writes in The Wall Street Journal, 2009 statistics from the Bureau of Justice Statistics reveal that blacks were charged with 62 percent of robberies, 57 percent of murders and 45 percent of assaults in the 75 biggest counties in the country, despite only comprising roughly 15 percent of the population in these counties…

…MacDonald also pointed out in her Hillsdale speech that blacks "commit 75 percent of all shootings, 70 percent of all robberies, and 66 percent of all violent crime" in New York City, even though they consist of 23 percent of the city's population.

2. More whites and Hispanics die from police homicides than blacks. According to MacDonald, 12 percent of white and Hispanic homicide deaths were due to police officers, while only four percent of black homicide deaths were the result of police officers…

3. The Post's data does show that unarmed black men are more likely to die by the gun of a cop than an unarmed white man...but this does not tell the whole story. In August 2015, the ratio was seven-to-one of unarmed black men dying from police gunshots compared to unarmed white men; the ratio was six-to-one by the end of 2015. But MacDonald points out in The Marshall Project that looking at the details of the actual incidents that occurred paints a different picture:

The “unarmed” label is literally accurate, but it frequently fails to convey highly-charged policing situations. In a number of cases, if the victim ended up being unarmed, it was certainly not for lack of trying. At least five black victims had reportedly tried to grab the officer’s gun, or had been beating the cop with his own equipment. Some were shot from an accidental discharge triggered by their own assault on the officer. And two individuals included in the Post’s “unarmed black victims” category were struck by stray bullets aimed at someone else in justified cop shootings. If the victims were not the intended targets, then racism could have played no role in their deaths…

4. Black and Hispanic police officers are more likely to fire a gun at blacks than white officers. This is according to a Department of Justice report in 2015 about the Philadelphia Police Department, and is further confirmed that by a study conducted University of Pennsylvania criminologist Greg Ridgeway in 2015 that determined black cops were 3.3 times more likely to fire a gun than other cops at a crime scene.

5. Blacks are more likely to kill cops than be killed by cops. This is according to FBI data, which also found that 40 percent of cop killers are black. According to MacDonald, the police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black than a cop killing an unarmed black person…

I think I see another book on my Good Reads account coming up.

Gotta get ready for work. Thursday in Da Hood means the weekend is just starting, so we likely will see people getting drunk, stupid, perhaps a shooting or stabbing. In front of dozens. And nobody saw nothing.

Another case of Misdemeanor Murder.

Thanks Norm W. and Whitman L. for the link.