I Have My Own Reasons January 4, 2008
Posted by Webmaster in Black Crime.comments closed
Key factor in murder trends: youth, gang violence.
New York - Murders are down to a 40-year low in New York and Chicago. Yet homicide rates are on the rise in Baltimore and Detroit – and dramatically so in New Orleans.
In that variance is a positive story about cities’ successful attack on crime and gun violence, but also an alarm about rising gang-related and youth violence, particularly within the African-American community.
Across the US, the incidence of intentional killing is still relatively low compared with the early 1990s, when crack and gang violence had a deadly grip on America’s large cities. Indeed, the homicide rate is almost half what it was then. But it is ticking up – in some cities quickly because of surges in the number of young people involved in gangs.
An analysis of federal crime data by Northeastern University’s James Alan Fox found a 52 percent jump in the number of murders committed by male African-American teens between 2002 and 2006, and smaller increases in those committed by black men and women. In contrast, the number of killings committed by whites of any age during the same period showed no increase.
The article goes on to blame the lack of money and resources. In the cases of both the cities where the rates are decreasing, and the ones where they’re increasing, I think it’s simply a matter of stabilized territorial disputes among drug gangs in the former, and unstable ones in the latter — in the latter cases, as existing bangers and dealers get sent to prison, this opens up the field for new “boundaries.” And fights over boundaries leads to increasing rates of violence.
However, Baltimore is a special case:
Since 2000, cities with populations over 250,000 have seen a 10 percent drop in the number of police because of budget cuts, according to Fox. Some of those resources have shifted to homeland-security efforts. In many medium-sized cities, such as Baltimore, that shift has been accompanied by a drop in resources for antidrug and antigang efforts
(snip)
“The criminal justice system is also insanely lenient here [in Baltimore], particularly with offenses involving firearms,” says Daniel Webster, codirector of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I don’t think judges here appreciate that the person in front of them today for illegally possessing a firearm, next week could be in front of them as a defendant in a murder case. Everyone points the finger at everyone else. It’s a sad state of affairs, but it is fixable.”
Remember, Baltimore is the home base for the “Stop Snitching” DVDs. Combine that with the fact that, in the wake of former white Mayor Walter O’Malley becoming Governor of Maryland, and that a black woman succeeded him as mayor, just about every position of authority in Baltimore is run by black women. It’s not a good mix. Because of the “Stop Snitching” ethic, the Baltimore City State’s Attorney recently had to drop one-fourth of her jurisdiction’s outstanding firearms offense cases. It’s not that the criminal justice system in Baltimore is “insanely lenient” when it comes to gun offenses, it’s that they can’t gather evidence because nobody wants to “snitch.”
