PJB: The Color of Crime

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The arrest of Jose Carranza in that Newark massacre, amid reports he had Hispanic accomplices and the murders may have been part of a gang initiation, has also elevated the issue of the black-brown war raging in U.S. big cities.

In the Aug. 10 Washington Post story that covered the Carranza arrest, the same page had two related articles. One was headlined, “Study: Almost Half of Murder Victims Black,” the other, “Slaying of Popular Editor Stuns Blacks in Oakland.”

The second headline reveals an ideological slant. One would assume that everyone in Oakland was stunned by the daylight execution of African-American editor Chauncey Bailey, allegedly by a teenage foot soldier at Your Black Muslim Bakery, which Bailey was investigating.

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“Nearly half the people murdered in the United States are black,” declared the opening paragraph, “part of a persistent pattern in which African-Americans are disproportionately victimized by violent crime, according to a new Justice Department study.”

Among other conclusions reported by the Post:

* Blacks are more likely than whites or Hispanics to be victims of crime.

* Blacks are more likely than any other group to be victims of “serious violent crime,” such as rape, assault and robbery.

* Blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be confronted with a firearm during a crime.

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“Black victimization is a real problem, and it’s often black on black,” said David Harris, a law professor at the University of Toledo who studies crime statistics.

“Often”? Correction, Harris. As the Post reports and Justice concedes, in more than nine out of 10 cases, black victims are murdered by fellow blacks.

Utterly absent from the Post story and Justice Department stats is anything about white victims of crime. Not a word. Do white folks not count, though they are two-thirds of the population?

Yet, in “The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Justice in America,” produced by the “right-leaning” New Century Foundation in 2005, using the same FBI and Justice surveys, startling facts emerge:

* “Blacks commit more violent crime against whites than against other blacks.” Forty-five percent of the victims of violent crime by blacks are white folks, 43 percent are black, 10 percent are Hispanic.

* Blacks are seven times as likely as people of other races to commit murder, eight times more likely to commit robbery and three times more likely to use a gun in a crime.

* “Blacks are an estimated 39 times more likely to commit violent crime against a white person than vice versa, and 136 times more likely to commit robbery.” (If decent black folks have trouble hailing a cab, and they do, these numbers may help explain it.)

* Black-on-white rape is 115 times more common than the reverse.

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What do these statistics tell us? A message the Post will not report. The real repository of racism in America — manifest in violent interracial assault, rape and murder — is to be found not in the white community, but the African-American community. In almost all interracial attacks, whites are the victims, not the victimizers.

Why does the Post not report such statistics? My guess: Because the stats would shatter the Post’s cultivated image of America as a land where white racism is the great lurking malevolent monster. Stories that conform to the image get play. Stories that contradict it are buried.

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