The Nation’s Two Measures of Homicide
From the Washington Examiner:
Two major real estate search engines nix crime data in racial equity push
DECEMBER 14, 2021 01:27 PM
BY ZACHARY HALASCHAKRealtor.com has removed crime data from its website, and Redfin has decided not to add it out of concerns that it could perpetuate racial inequity.
David Doctorow, the CEO of Realtor.com, said … the removal was part of a company effort to “level the playing field” and scrutinize what safety means to buyers and renters so that it can “reimagine how we integrate safety data” on the platform.
When firms use the word “reimagine” they’re usually up to no good.
… On the same day that Realtor.com announced that it was removing its crime data, Redfin came out with a full-throated denunciation of crime data being included on real estate websites. Redfin’s chief growth officer Christian Taubman announced that, after consideration, the company would not be adding crime data to its own platform.
Taubman said that Redfin had been weighing whether to add information about crime because one of the metrics that consumers consider when looking for a home to purchase is how safe the area around that home is. The company concluded that available crime data doesn’t accurately answer that question, and “given the long history of redlining and racist housing covenants in the United States there’s too great a risk of this inaccuracy reinforcing racial bias.”
For reasons.
Redfin highlighted the difference between crime and safety and said that through its research, which included surveys, people defined safety in a variety of ways. Taubman said that the available data, namely the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI, pertains to reported crimes and excludes information about crimes that go unreported and crimes that go unsolved.
As we all know from all the dead bodies in shallow graves that suburban gardeners are constantly digging up in Calabasas, Lake Forest, and San Mateo, there’s...
The federal Bureau of Justice Statistics (which sounds like where Batman’s nerdy cousin works) has published 86 reports so far this year on a broad array of topics concerning crime and law enforcement. For instance, here’s an interesting recent tweet from them promoting their November report “Suicide in Local Jails and State and Federal Prisons:”
The average suicide rate for white inmates in local jails was 93 per 100,000 during the 5-year period of 2015-19, which is 5 times the rate for black inmates (18 per 100,000) and more than 3 times the rate for Hispanic inmates (26 per 100,000). https://t.co/VldWtixTQi #BJSstats
— Bureau of Justice Statistics (@BJSgov) November 5, 2021
For example, BJS has published five reports so far in 2021 with the word “hate” in the title.
But two words no longer ever appear in the titles on BJS reports: “murder” (not since 2001) and “homicide” (not since July 2014). Here are all the BJS reports of this century with “homicide” in the title.
The Nation’s Two Measures of Homicide
July 2014Homicide in the U.S. Known to Law Enforcement, 2011
December 2013
Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008
November 2011Homicide Trends in the United States
July 2007Homicide Trends in the United States: 2002 Update
November 2004
Homicide Trends in the United States: 2000 Update
January 2003Homicide Victimization and Offending Rates
February 2001
There used to be a standard report updated intermittently called “Homicide Trends in the United States.”
It included useful graphs such as in...
From Stat News:
By Usha Lee McFarling
Dec. 13, 2021
… While medicine as a whole, and even other elite specialties like dermatology, thoracic surgery, and otolaryngology, has begun to increase the number of people of color in its ranks, orthopedics’ numbers have barely budged. Less than 2% of those practicing in the field are Black, just 2.2% are Hispanic, and 0.4% are Native American. Even Asian American physicians, a group considered overrepresented in medicine, are much scarcer in orthopedics, making up just 6.7% of these specialists.
At \$511,000 in 2020, orthopedic specialists rank at the top of the medical pay charts, along with plastic surgeons, according to Dark Daily for pathologists. They averaged the highest bonus at \$116,000.
Orthopedics is also the most male of specialties:
Medscape found that women MDs chose certain medical specialties more often than others, including pathology, which ranked eighth. The top eight specialties employing female physicians are:
Pediatrics: 61%
Obstetrics/gynecology: 59%
Diabetes/endocrinology: 50%
Family medicine: 47%
Dermatology: 46%
Infectious diseases: 46%
Internal medicine: 44%
Pathology: 43%Specialties with the fewest female physicians are:
Plastic and general surgery: 20%
Cardiology: 14%
Urology: 11%
Orthopedics/orthopedics surgery: 9%
Orthopedic surgeons are kind of the carpenters of surgery, working on the musculoskeletal system. At the top of the game are the famous sports surgeons who have their famous athlete patients fly into Aspen or Vail to be operated upon.
Perhaps the orthopedic surgeon best known to the general public was Dr. Frank Jobe (1925-2014), who invented the Tommy John operation for baseball players in 1974. Not too surprisingly, I see that he had landed behind enemy lines in a glider on D-Day, then was captured at the Battle of the Bulge, and then escaped.
So I’m guessing...
From the Washington Post news section:
‘I know my parents love me, but they don’t love my people’
Adoptees of color with White parents struggle to talk with their families about race
Story by Rachel Hatzipanagos
Dec. 13, 2021
Growing up, Angela Tucker felt like a racial impostor. She may have looked Black, but she didn’t feel that way.
Tucker, 36, is an adoptee raised by White parents in a city that was 88 percent White when she was growing up. It left her disconnected from music such as jazz and blues music, Black art forms she didn’t discover her passion for until adulthood.
Whereas all other black children born in the 1980s grew up to love jazz and blues.
Okay, this is a long article, so I’ll just focus on one topic in it, but it’s the Big One:
She covered her natural hair with wigs and weaves, uncomfortable with how her curly strands appeared in predominantly White environments.
… Classmates’ racist comments about their hair and eyes were dismissed as harmless curiosity. America’s racial dynamics were explained in the language of “colorblind” idealism.
… But she was also disheartened by her impulse to casually dismiss racism when it came her way, like when students in her mostly White school put pencils in her hair and marveled at the way the texture made them stay in place, she said. …
Wik, 27, remembers a first-grade classmate asking her, “What’s wrong with your eyes?” as he pulled his eyelids back. Others would ask her whether her hair was her “real hair.”
… Growing up, Black transracial adoptee Rebeccah Carlson hated the color of her skin. She hated her hair and her lips.
This reminds me of Darwin’s big follow-up to the Origin of Species, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex in which he attributed some of the distinctiveness of races to sexual selection for traits that are appealing to the opposite sex rather than directly functional in the struggle for life (the peacock’s...
On the tenth anniversary of Christopher Hitchens’ death, here’s my obituary in Taki’s Magazine:
Nature’s Tory
Steve SailerDecember 21, 2011
There wouldn’t seem to be much left to say about the late Christopher Hitchens after the countless tributes paid by other journalists about the night (or afternoon or morning) they got drunk with Hitch. Still, I want to call admiring attention to his taste in English literature.
Unable to boast of having downed a few with Hitchens myself, I tended to find much of his voluminous output over the last decade reminiscent of the legendary Private Eye reporter Phil Space. Yet in at least one venue, Hitchens demonstrated distinction. Just before 9/11, Benjamin Schwarz hired Hitchens to write a long monthly literary column for The Atlantic that showcased Hitchens’s combination of panache, pedantry, and lifelong conservatism.
The first four authors Hitchens profiled for The Atlantic were Anthony Powell, Winston Churchill, Kingsley Amis, and Rudyard Kipling: all of them English, right-of-center, and connected. …
While Hitchens’s notions on many subjects appeared to have been made up off the top of his head (Trotskyism! Islamofascism! Invade Iraq!), his favorite writers were sound as a pound. Hitchens affected being a man of the left, but he was one of nature’s Tories. His mother saw to the nurture. When his father fretted about public-school tuition, she declared, “If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it.”
Hitchens went on to write for The Atlantic about W. Somerset Maugham, John Buchan, Ian Fleming, Philip Larkin, and Evelyn Waugh. In other words, Hitchens lauded the kind of writers who don’t intimidate journalists, which explains a bit about the disproportionate adulation he’s received in the press over the last week.
Hitchens didn’t show much interest in avant-garde or academic books. Instead, he succored the media’s resentment of...
J.K. Rowling is a nice, sensible lady who worked very hard to write something that would make children happy. Now, though, these children have grown up and turned on her for not falling prey to the peculiar madness of our times, as seen in the 17,000 replies:
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
The Penised Individual Who Raped You Is a Woman.https://t.co/SyxFnnboM1— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) December 12, 2021
From my movie review in Taki’s Magazine comparing Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story to the 1961 film:
When You’re a Remake
Steve SailerDecember 15, 2021
… Mostly, Spielberg’s West Side Story is similar to the one released when he was 14. But in the interest of tracking the unfolding zeitgeist, here are changes he oversaw:
Spielberg’s big brainstorm for luring in the heavily Hispanic young audience is to keep Bernstein’s magnificent music and even double down on the 1957 setting with added dialogue about Manhattan real estate, but to replace the gay stage violence with straight movie violence. Hence, Justin Peck’s choreography is highly Robbins-like, but butches it up with less toe-pointing.
Also, Spielberg and his screenwriter Tony Kushner (Angels in America and Spielberg’s Lincoln) resolved to reduce the problematic elements by eliminating the original film’s outdatedly evenhanded treatment of the two gangs of juvenile delinquents, the white Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. Just as Shakespeare didn’t take sides between the Montagues and Capulets, the 1961 film portrays the two groups as rumbling over turf because that’s what young males like to do.
Today, though, objectivity like that is felt to be immoral. You can now tell who deserves to win and who deserves to lose from the color of their skin. So, Spielberg and Kushner make clear that the Sharks and Jets fight because the browns are the good guys and the whites are the bad guys.
The Sharks are no longer even juvenile delinquents, but instead are grown men with jobs and families defending their graffiti-free vibrant community from the nihilistic Trumpist Jets.
But this means the Sharks don’t seem very cool anymore. …
Read the whole thing there.
And here’s Norm Macdonald attempting to lead a dancing street gang:
From Fox6 (in Milwaukee, for some reason):
By Chelsea Edwards, Carolina Sanchez and Natalie Hee
Published December 12, 2021 9:17PMU
BAYTOWN, Texas – One person died, and 13 others were injured when a gunman opened fire at an outdoor vigil in Baytown on Sunday evening, the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said.
The vigil was held in the parking lot by Yvonne’s Famous Kitchen food truck in the 1400 block of North Market Loop near Thompson Rd.
Authorities say the shooting happened around 6:40 p.m. as the crowd was gathered for a balloon release in honor of recent murder victim Jamal Narcisse.
Witnesses say the owner of the food truck, Yvonne, is also the mother of Narcisse, 29, who was killed December 3 in Baytown. Friends of Yvonne say she was one of the people shot and hospitalized Sunday night.
“It was just a bunch of gunshots and everybody tried to get out of the way,” said Dezmahn Cormier.
Cormier was one of roughly 50 people gathered at Jamal’s vigil.
“We was together every day, every day. And when it happened, I was with him. I ended up getting shot too when he got shot,” Cormier said.
During the December 3 shooting, Cormier was shot in the leg and left with a limp.
Less than 10 days later, the violence followed him to Jamal’s vigil.
“Right as they were releasing the balloons up in the air was when the vehicle came. And almost at that exact time is when they opened fire into a crowd,” Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said. …
Following the shooting, a “disturbance” occurred at the Houston Methodist Baytown Hospital’s Emergency Room, where some shooting victims were being treated.
According to Baytown PD, a large group gathered there around 7 p.m. after victims were transported to the hospital.
“Baytown Police Officers and Detectives, Deputies from Harris County PCT 3 and Harris County PCT 8 along with Troopers from Texas DPS assisted the Sheriff’s Deputies with ensuring that...
Here’s another Open Thread for the Karlin commenting community since the previous one has gotten very long and sluggish to load, jump starting it by moving a couple of the previous comments.
— Ron Unz
The previous Open Thread had passed 1,000 comments and was getting very sluggish to load. Since Anatoly is apparently very busy working on crypto-currency projects, I’ve gone ahead and opened this new one for his commenter-community, moving a few of the last comments over to it.
— Ron Unz
There’s apparently popular demand for a new Open Thread so here you go! Though I probably won’t be checking up on the comments here much.
I needed to recharge the past month. But I’ll start writing much more frequently on the Substack from next Friday on.
This is presumably my last Open Thread on Russian Reaction (posted on on A123’s request).
As I said in the previous thread, after 7 years of blogging, I will be leaving The Unz Review. Though my original intention was to focus on other, non-blogging related projects, there was such a large outpouring of demand for me to continue producing content from my loyal readership that I became increasingly uncomfortable with disappointing you and letting the diverse, vibrant, and multicultural community that has coalesced here over the years just wither away. So I decided to make an earnest effort at keeping it alive.
You’ll be able to continue reading me at Substack.
Weekly Open Threads + longreads, as often as I can manage. I won’t spam your inbox with short/Tweet like posts. For that, there’s… Twitter?
Some of you such as Dmitry and A123 have asked how we can keep the “broad” discussions we see in these Open Threads going. Substack’s main problem is that its commenting system leaves much to be desired, so I’m now sure if equivalent Open Takes there can replicate the effect. As such, it might eventually be best to find an alternative for such “free-wheeling” discussions. I notice that Scott Alexander has a forum, a Discord, and a subreddit. I am too lazy and pressed for time to run a forum, and I don’t want to mix too much with plebbitors, but perhaps Discord could be an option. Discord is often used for gaming and crypto discussions, so there’s some good intersections there, but it’s also a rather SJW platform, so not the most stable foundation to built on. More speculatively, I hear that urbit should be ready for mass adoption by early 2022. (Joining now requires jumping through hoops that will be unrealistic for most people). Let me know your thoughts in the comments. If I do decide that Substack comment-threads are insufficient, I will eventually announce it at the Substack. But this...
It was never my mission to pursue “activist” goals so much as to try to accurately understand and explain how the world works, and at best, play some modest role in informing the debate in those areas that I hoped could make use of some of my insights.
From that perspective, my record of my “Russian reactions” in my past almost seven years at The Unz Review has been a mixed one:
* In his latest newsletter, Adam Tooze points out that the Chinese government is asserting greater state control over the economy, including the power of Chinese business magnates to “cash out” of their holdings.
In retrospect, this is perhaps the most logical explanation for the crypto crackdown.
* Diana Fleischman has a good article in Quillette on how the Leftist moral panic against eugenics has given ammunition anti-abortion activists, with apparently six states now banning women against abortion on the basis of congenital disability. Interesting example of how an SJW – rightoid horseshoe, even in matters so small, helps usher us along towards Idiot’s Limbo with some combination of more disabled people, more restrictions on prenatal testing and genetic screening, a reduction in reproductive rights. Noah Carl notes most of the pointing and sputtering it generated came from left-wing progressives.
* Mark Galeotti – Kremlin Looks to Establish a ‘Techno-Authoritarian’ Power Vertical 2.0. Seems like a move in the Chinese direction of digitalized, indices-based control over regional governance (along the lines of Mishustin’s reforms of the tax sector).
* Steve Sailer on new FBI stats showing a 29% rise in murders in 2020. Incidentally, the gap between the US and Russia is now possibly larger than at any time since the Revolution.
* The Guardian lumps Steve in with Jeffrey Epstein. #AJAB
* Paul Robinson covers a report which calculates that the incidence of Russian military interventions abroad under Putin has actually declined relative to the Yeltsin era.
* Silventoinen, K. et al.(2020). Genetic and environmental variation in educational attainment: an individual-based analysis of 28 twin cohorts. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 12681. (h/t Steve Sailer). Contra Herrnstein/Murray, the heritability of educational attainment may have actually declined during the second half of 20C. Was the idyllic (to some?) picture of old time America...
Russia should belong to Russians, and all others dwelling on this land must respect and appreciate this people. – Alexander III.
For the first time in more than a century, the Russians have a state that they can call their own, a state run by and for the Russian people – the hallowed “Russian National State” (RNS) that has been the holy grail of Russian nationalism in the post-Soviet era. At first glance, this seems like a questionable, if not extraordinary, assertion. As I have myself pointed out in the past, Hillary Clinton’s claim in 2016 that Putin is the “godfather of extreme nationalism” is something that is only taken seriously by the political horseshoe that is neoliberalism.txt and the American Alt Right, the sole difference between them being that the former think it bad and the latter think it good, whereas in reality both of them are merely projecting their own parochial fears and fantasies onto Russia. More importantly, this would also seem strange to significant numbers of Russian nationalists, who would immediately bring up Putin’s claim that the slogan “Russia for Russians” – a sentiment that is consistently supported by half of Russians in opinion polls – is the preserve of “fools and provocateurs.”
However, it is actions, not words, that count, though I would note that even so far as words go, Putin now saves his invective for proponents of “Russia only for Russians”; although this is a strawman so far as Russian nationalism is concerned, the quietly inserted qualifier is nonetheless acknowledged and appreciated. As regards actions, the Putin administration in the first half of its third term has adopted the core Russian nationalist program nearly wholesale and embarked on its practical implementation. So broad and all-encompassing is the shift that, just as academics came to classify what happened between Putin’s rejection of Western moral...
I have been a long-term China bull since I began blogging. Proof (2008). A lot of what the Western media was writing about China were based on Sinophobic fantasies that had no correlation with reality. Just to be clear, I am still a China bull, at least in the sense that I’m sure its GDP per capita will converge to the levels predicted by its human capital, i.e. Japan/South Korea, giving it by far the world’s largest economy by mid-century. But I am increasingly skeptical about its ability to produce anything that is… really interesting/world-transformational.
It continues making top-down decisions that, as in centuries past, may curtail the ultimate scope of its civilizational achievements.
Several months ago, it made it illegal to create gene-edited babies. If enforced, this effectively takes China out of the biosingularity race. Conversely, the first gene-selected baby in the world was born a few weeks ago in the US (the father’s political views raised a minor journalistic furor).
Now China bans crypto. While “China bans crypto” stories have become something of a meme in the crypto community over the years, this latest one seems qualitatively different. They’re no longer just banning financial institutions from provisioning crypto services, trading them on leverage, or mining Bitcoin on account of its carbon costs and strain on the electricity grid. Those measures were defensible from a social and environmental point of view. This latest ban appears to criminalize the purchase of cryptocurrencies from overseas or even involvement in marketing or technical support related to crypto business.
There is a good chance that crypto and Web 3.0 will transform global finance, governance, and the Internet over the next generation in fundamental ways. Many of these transformations will be in ways that challenge or at least question the traditional prerogatives of the state as regards censorship, monetary emissions, and even legal...
Did you know ‘racial oppression’ from whites to blacks is the reason black people decide to pull the trigger of a gun and target other black people disproportionately?
No?
Well, this nugget of wisdom was just discovered unvarnished in Champaign, Illinois, where yet another excuse for high rates of black gun violence has been passed on to white people and racial oppression. [‘Racial oppression is the root cause of gun violence’: A deeper dive into a city’s multi-million dollar plan for peace, WCLA.com, December 15, 2021]:
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (WCIA)– Following a 4-hour Champaign City Council meeting and emotional pleas from dozens, the real work is set to begin.
Council advanced the city’s “Community Gun Violence Reduction Blueprint” in that meeting Tuesday night. It’s the most expensive, most comprehensive gun violence plan the council has ever come together on.
Countless stories of hurt at the hands of gun violence filled the room, a sign of the sheer number of people who have personal experience with it.
“Saying, hey look, this is what I’m living. This is my reality,” shared Marlon Mitchell, the founder of non-profit FirstFollowers.
Mitchell was not at all surprised by the far-reaching impact of continued violence in the city.
One public speaker shared an audio recording of gunshots that went on for more than a minute. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time when he says 64 rounds rang out.
“We agree that the root problem is manifested in income inequality, poverty, underfunded public housing, under-resourced public services, achievement gaps in schools, lack of opportunity and perceptions of hopelessness, and easy access to firearms by high-risk people,” another speaker laid out.
In the last five years, the number of shootings involving a victim has more than doubled from 26 in 2016 to 67 in 2021 to date. Homicides have tripled from three, five years ago, to a record-breaking 16 this year.
The city spelled out where it’s...
A wise man once wrote ‘egalitarianism is a revolt against nature.’
Democrats now wish to push anti-white equity audits upon tech companies, because they dare employ too few non-whites (non-Asians) amidst those on payroll. You’d think this would be a statement about who is creating technological innovation amongst software companies, when a dearth of blacks and Hispanic employees are responsible for anything resembling pushing mankind into the future, but the opposite is in play.
Somehow, white people and merit in tech companies is now a crime, punishable by “racial equity audits.”[Democrats Push ‘Racial Equity Audits’ To Cement Control of Tech Companies: Audits call for abolition of standards of ‘merit‘, Washington Free Beacon, December 13, 2021]:
Democrats want to subject tech companies to mandatory “racial equity audits” conducted by their political allies, a move which could cement the party’s control of Silicon Valley.
A small group of organizations with close ties to Democratic politicians and progressive donors conducts the majority of these audits, which advocates say are needed to promote racial justice. But in practice, equity auditors often push companies to hire more left-wing activists and former Democratic party officials, often from the auditing organizations themselves. The audits also call for the abolition of standards of “merit” and the ability for a special executive to veto any company project.
Racial equity audits are the chief service offered by “diversity, equity, and inclusion” consultants, a cottage industry connected by a revolving door of Democratic staffers and funded by liberal donors. Equity auditors have made a killing from school districts that pay handsomely for consultants to revamp curricula, the Washington Free Beacon has reported. Now, racial equity auditors are setting their sights on corporate America.
Democratic officials have called for...
A real estate website has decided not to add crime data to their database, all in an effort not to “reinforce racial bias.” [Neighborhood Crime Data Doesn’t Belong on Real Estate Sites, Redfin.com, December 13, 2021]:
We recently decided not to add neighborhood crime data to Redfin.com. We were considering this because we’re very much focused on answering all the questions people have when they’re considering a home purchase, and we know that one of these questions is whether they’ll feel safe in a given home or neighborhood. But the data available don’t allow us to speak accurately to that question, and given the long history of redlining and racist housing covenants in the United States there’s too great a risk of this inaccuracy reinforcing racial bias. We believe that Redfin–and all real estate sites–should not show neighborhood crime data.
People Are Interested in Safety, Not Crime
One big thing we learned through our research is that there’s real variety in how people define and evaluate safety, and that it doesn’t line up very well with purely crime-based data. When we survey people about what they want to know about a neighborhood, they define safety in a number of different ways: people variously say they care whether there’s trash on the street, care solely about violent crime, or care whether they are going to frequently see people who are homeless.
Reported Crimes May Not Accurately Reflect Actual Crimes
Even if you narrow down to crime as an indicator of safety, there are reasons to doubt the usefulness of the data available. The most straightforward source of crime data is the Uniform Crime Report from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which collects reported crimes from police departments across the country. Most crimes in the U.S. go unreported, however, and most reported crimes go unsolved. The fact that most crimes are missing creates a real possibility that the crimes that show up in the data set skew one way...
What happens when you spend the latter part of 2020 completely capitulating to the demands of Black Lives Matter, a terrorist organization that wanted to make it legal for black individuals to collectively commit the bulk of the crime across America?
A mere year later, these corporate CEOs who fell to their knees to fellate Black Lives Matter with the most gusto now rise up and demand police protect their property… [CEOs from Target, CVS and Walgreens ask Congress for help amid retail crime surge, MarketWatch.com, December 11, 2021]:
The CEOs from 20 major retail brands, including Target TGT, -1.68%, CVS CVS, +0.04% and Walgreens WBA, -0.73%, have jointly penned a letter to Congress over concerns of increasing crime in their stores.
“As millions of Americans have undoubtedly seen on the news in recent weeks and months, retail establishments of all kinds have seen a significant uptick in organized crime in communities across the nation,” the letter reads.
“While we constantly invest in people, policies, and innovative technology to deter theft, criminals are capitalizing on the anonymity of the Internet and the failure of certain marketplaces to verify their sellers,” it continues. “This trend has made retail businesses a target for increasing theft, hurt legitimate businesses who are forced to compete against unscrupulous sellers, and has greatly increased consumer exposure to unsafe and dangerous counterfeit products.”
The goal for the letter, which was addressed to the majority and minority leaders in both the House and the Senate, is to consider passing the Integrity, Notification and Fairness in Online Retail Marketplaces (INFORM) Consumers Act. The act aims to increase transparency for online retail marketplaces, slow the sale of counterfeit goods online, and increase verification protocols for buyers.
“Leading retailers are concerned about the growing impact organized retail crime is having on the communities we proudly serve, which...
Nationwide, the pendulum prepares to swing back toward law and order.
Black on black gun crime/homicides are ravaging cities across the nation, with those in power still asserting their war on white privilege/systemic inequalities/implicit bias a far greater objective than combatting the individuals who collectively make places like Oakland unfit for western civilization. [Oakland backtracks on cuts to police funding, votes to add officers as crimes surge, KTLA.com, December 8, 2021]:
The Oakland City Council, a longtime leader in the Black Lives Matter movement to cut police funding, reversed course Tuesday and voted to hire more officers as it grapples with a surge in homicides and gun violence.
The proposal by Mayor Libby Schaaf to add two new police academies and unfreeze positions within the department to add 60 new officers passed with six members voting yes, one voting no and one abstention.
Council members ended up not voting on a separate proposal to offer one-time bonuses of at least \$50,000 to recruit experienced officers from other cities and at least \$20,000 to Oakland residents who become police cadets. They will later consider hiring incentives for experienced officers.
Schaaf applauded the vote in a statement, saying that residents “spoke up for a comprehensive approach to public safety — one that includes prevention, intervention, and addressing crime’s root causes, as well as an adequately staffed police department.”
Oakland is among several politically liberal cities reversing course on police funding amid a spike in violence, to the dismay of police critics who have said officers are ineffective at preventing crime and end up traumatizing residents, especially Black people. They have said there is no staffing shortage within the police department, and that officers should focus on the most serious crimes.
“What’s terrifying about this is as Oakland goes, so goes the country,” said Cat Brooks, co-founder of Oakland’s Anti Police-Terror...
A black career criminal murderers a 14-year-old white boy.
His name is Ryan Rogers. He was last seen riding his bike, before allegedly being murdered by a black career criminal.
[Police chief: Homeless drifter from Miami with extensive record killed 14-year-old boy: Body of Palm Beach Gardens teen found alongside an Interstate 95 overpass, Local10.com, December 2, 2021]:
“He appears to be a homeless drifter spending most of his time on the streets of Miami” is how Clint Shannon, Chief of Police of Palm Beach Gardens’ Police Department, described 39-year-old Semmie Lee Williams Jr.
Williams was arrested Wednesday and was taken into custody in Miami on a first-degree murder charge for the killing of Ryan Rogers, 14.
Rogers, a freshman at William T. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens and an avid soccer player, was found dead on Nov. 16 alongside an Interstate 95 overpass just a few minutes away from his home.
On Nov. 15 at 6:40 p.m., investigators say Rogers left his home in Palm Beach Gardens on his bike. At 10:30 p.m., his mother, Cindy, reported him missing.
It was less than 24 hours that Rogers’ body was found 80-feet south of the Interstate 95 overpass on Central Boulevard, according to Williams’ arrest form.
The form also states that a set of headphones, which did not belong to Rogers, were found at the scene. A DNA match to Williams was determined by the Palm Beach County Forensic Biology Unit.
“The incident itself appears to be a completely random act. We do not have a motive in this case and I would best describe it as an innocent child victim having a chance encounter with a very violent criminal,” Shannon said at a Thursday press conference outside of the Palm Beach Gardens Police Department.
Shannon did say that Rogers was stabbed, but would not release further details, saying that the investigation is ongoing.
“It appears to be a chance encounter between a child and an animal that should not be out on our streets,” Shannon said.
Williams...
Get out of the big cities, ladies and gentlemen.
For in a city where progressivism dominates the thinking of those architects of bail reform, a black man was just busted for assault and set free, then beat two random women of undetermined race, arrested, and cut loose again. [Man busted for assault set free, allegedly beats two random NYC women – then cut loose again, New York Post, December 6, 2021]:
A homeless man charged with beating a guy last year was dumped back on the street thanks to so-called bail reform, only to allegedly pummel two women in Upper West Side attacks Thursday — and be freed again.
Darrell Johnson, 23, left one of his random female victims so brutally beaten that she suffered a “disfiguring laceration” to her face, law-enforcement sources told The Post on Monday.
Last year, Johnson — who has more than a dozen arrests on his rap sheet dating to 2014, according to sources — was hit with assault and harassment charges in the man’s beatdown.
He allegedly punched his victim “about the face with a closed fist multiple times” in a Harlem building, according to a court complaint.
Johnson then allegedly “used his feet to kick and stomp” the man in the Aug. 3, 2020, attack.
But a Manhattan judge had to release him without bail because none of the charges were eligible for the restriction under revamped state laws. Before the laws were changed, judges could use their discretion on setting bail.
Then with that case still pending, Johnson was back on the street — where he allegedly approached a 50-year-old woman at Broadway and West 79th Street in Manhattan around 9:20 a.m. Thursday and assaulted her in a “violent, unprovoked” attack, sources said.
The victim was so brutally beaten that sources said she suffered a “disfiguring laceration” to her face in the attack.
Just three minutes later, Johnson allegedly assaulted another woman a block away.
In that incident, court records allege that Johnson walked up to the 32-year-old...
Humiliating a conquered people… this is what Bolsheviks do.[Charlottesville’s Robert E. Lee statue will be melted down by city’s African American history museum, Washington Post, December 7, 2021]:
But the Charlottesville City Council voted 4 to 0 to hand the bronze statue over to the only local bidder: the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, a Black-led museum whose “Swords Into Plowshares” idea would repurpose the metal entirely.
Andrea Douglas, the museum’s executive director, said in a video that the project aims “to create something that transforms what was once toxic in our public space into something beautiful and more reflective of our entire community’s social values.”
Artists will consult Charlottesville residents in the coming months, including in forums early next year, to determine what the public art might end up looking like. Douglas said she hopes that collaborative process can also provide a framework for other communities debating what to do with toppled Confederate monuments.
The movement to take down the Lee statue began in 2015 with a petition crafted by Zyahna Bryant, who was then a local high school student. City lawmakers responded by voting to remove the Lee statue in February...