For the longest time, I have been critical of the city of Milwaukee’s complete lack of action taken to reduce crime. Both the mayor and the police chief have been completely ineffective.
On the Channel 10 pundit roundtable I appear on weekly, InterCHANGE, I have been the lone voice on this issue.
The fact is there’s a certain area of Milwaukee’s inner city you can carve out where the vast majority of Milwaukee’s homicides and violent crimes take place. Ninety percent or more of the black victims of crime are victimized by other blacks. Milwaukee is suffering from a very serious black on black crime epidemic.
Black leaders have ignored it, saying nothing.
Last week, Milwaukee Alderman Bob Donovan came out swinging. In a statement, Donovan criticized black officials:
”I would be remiss if I did not castigate the elected public officials who represent many of the areas where these shootings have been taking place. There is a deafening silence, quite frankly, in the African-American community – the very community most affected by the deadly violence – and I find it mind-boggling that the individuals representing the most affected areas are perhaps the most silent and are also the ones who consistently vote against efforts to step up enforcement and to add more police officers. It is time for these "leaders" to stand up and do something about what is and has been ripping their neighborhoods apart.”
Sheriff David Clarke came to Donovan’s defense, putting out his own statement in an e-mail to Charlie Sykes, ripping do-nothing officials:
”Several weeks ago Governor Doyle made his customary periodic pilgrimage to the city to gather local, like-minded politicians to do what do-nothing-politicians do during a crisis; call a press conference to give the appearance that they are doing something, when in reality, they are frozen stiff because they do not know what to do and the best way to mask that is to stand before an accommodating local media who presses them on nothing and to say, "We're going to do everything we can." This group of inept politicians reminds me of the band that continued to play as the Titanic sank at the order of the Captain who thought it would take the passengers' minds off the fact that the ship was sinking. SOS to Doyle and Barrett; your ship is sinking.
I'm still waiting to see what the Governor has ACTUALLY done to stem the violence except to blame the gun. The same goes for Mayor Barrett and a dysfunctional City Council that continues to operate with one alderman running his aldermanic district from a prison cell in Dodge County.”
This was one of our topics Friday night on InterCHANGE. Kathleen Dunn made all kinds of typical excuses for Mayor Barrett. I did not, and this time, I was joined by Gerard Randall, who was more animated in his criticism than usual.
Randall even backed me when I once again raised the issue of black on black crime.
You can see a repeat of the program at 11:00 this morning on Channel 10.
I’ve long been a fan of Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby. He just wrote a column on this very subject, stating the black community is its own worst enemy.
Destruction in black America is self-inflicted
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | September 5, 2007
DEBATING capital punishment at an Ivy League university a few years ago, I was confronted with the claim that since death sentences are more often meted out in cases where the victim is white, the death penalty must be racially biased. It's a spurious argument, I replied. Whites commit fewer than half of all murders in the United States, yet more whites than blacks are sentenced to death and more whites than blacks are executed each year. If there is racial bias in the system, it clearly isn't in favor of whites.
But if you choose to focus on the race of victims, I added, remember that nearly all black homicide is intraracial - more than nine out of 10 black murder victims in the United States are killed by black murderers. So applying the death penalty in more cases where the victim is black would mean sending more black men to death row.
After the debate, a young black woman accosted me indignantly. Ninety-plus percent of black blood is shed by black hands? What about all the victims of white supremacists? Hadn't I heard of lynching? Hadn't I heard of James Byrd, who died so horribly in Jasper, Texas? When I assured her that Byrd's murder by whites was utterly untypical of most black homicide, she was dubious.
I thought of that young woman when I read recently about James Ford Seale, the former Mississippi Klansman sentenced last month to three life terms in prison for his role in murdering two black teenagers 43 years ago. The killing of Charles Moore and Henry Dee in 1964 was one of several unsolved civil-rights-era crimes that prosecutors in the South have reopened in recent years. Seale's trial was a vivid reminder of the days when racial contempt was a deadly fact of life in much of the country. His sentence proclaims even more vividly the transformation of America since then. White racism, once such a murderous force, is now associated mostly with feeble has-beens.
Yet many Americans, like the woman at my debate, still seem to view racial questions through an antediluvian haze. To them, white bigotry remains a clear and present danger, and the reason so many black Americans die before their time.
But the data aren't in dispute. Though outrage over "racism" is ever fashionable, African-Americans have long had far less to fear from the violence of racist whites than from the mayhem of the black underclass.
"Do you realize that the leading killer of young black males is young black males?" asked Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan 16 years ago. "As a black man and a father of three, this really shakes me to the core of my being."
From Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, came a similar cry of anguish. "Nothing in the long history of blacks in America," he lamented in 1994, "suggests the terrible destruction blacks are visiting upon each other today."
Happily, crime rates have declined from their 1990s peak. But it remains that the worst destruction in black America is self-inflicted.
In a new study, the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics confirms once again that almost half the people murdered in the United States each year are black, and 93 percent of black homicide victims are killed by someone of their own race. (For white homicide victims, the figure is 85 percent.) In other words, of the estimated 8,000 African-Americans murdered in 2005, more than 7,400 were cut down by other African-Americans. Though blacks account for just one-eighth of the US population, the BJS reports, they are six times more likely than whites to be victimized by homicide -- and seven times more likely to commit homicide.
Such huge disproportions don't just happen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously warned 40 years ago that the collapse of black family life would mean rising chaos and crime in the black community. Today, as many as 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock and 60 percent are raised in fatherless households. And as reams of research confirm, children raised without married parents and intact, stable families are more likely to engage in antisocial behavior.
High rates of black violent crime are a national tragedy, but it is the law-abiding black majority that suffers from them most. "There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life," Jesse Jackson said in 1993, "than to walk down the street and hear footsteps . . . then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved."
It isn't an insoluble problem. Americans overcame white racism; they can overcome black crime. But the first step, as always, is to face the facts.
--Jeff Jacoby, Boston Globe
