Liberals and the Knockout Game

The “knockout game,” in which young black men try to knock out an unsuspecting stranger with a single punch, is finally getting national attention — as it should. It’s nasty business. If whites were knocking out blacks it would be a national scandal.

But since whites are the victims, and since the capacity of elite whites to excuse black violence is one of the wonders of the modern world, the New York Times and National Public Radio have told us there is nothing to worry about. As late as November 22, New York City Police Chief Raymond Kelly was saying, “We’re trying to determine whether or not this is a real phenomenon.”

It’s a real phenomenon, alright. Even Al Sharpton says so, and he’s not known for noticing black misbehavior. There have been hundreds of reports of the game, and some of them go back years. A 2009 article from Denver, Colorado, quoted a black minister, Leon Kelly, who runs a gang-prevention program:

“They knock a young white guy out with one blow to see if his knees will wobble and surround them and take their money.”

Rev. Kelly added that young blacks record the attack on video, replay it endlessly, and roar with laughter when they see the victim go down.

That Denver story is four years old. And by 2010, people were already calling the game “polar bear hunting” because blacks like to play it with whites.

It’s much harder to say whether there has been a real increase in polar bear hunting or just more talk about it. Looking up crime records would probably not help because most cases — even if they were reported — would simply be classified as assaults or robberies.

In fact, it makes hardly any difference if there has been a big increase. There is already so much black-on-white crime that even if there were ten times as many knockouts as there were three years ago, the numbers would be lost in rounding error.

There is a huge amount of black crime — a lot of it directed at whites — and has been for years. The media can screech all they want about police bias and “racist” justice, but the Department of Justice collects data that give us a very precise picture of interracial crime. Since 1972, the department has run something called the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which covers a huge sample of nearly 160,000 people. DOJ then calculates what the total crime figures should be for the whole country, based on the sample. And every few years, NCVS asks what race the perp was.

The NCVS is more accurate than police reports, and for two reasons: First, only about half of all violent crime victims call the police, so official reports are always undercounts. Second, police records don’t make it easy to track interracial crime, whereas the NCVS specifically ask about it.

Unfortunately — in fact, astonishingly and unforgivably — the NCVS lumps all Hispanics in with whites. Its operating manual for interviewers (page C3-64) says:

If a respondent answers the offender’s race question with “Spanish, Hispanic, or Latino” . . . mark Box (1) “White.”

This means that when the NCVS says “white,” it really means “white and Hispanic.” There are signs the DOJ has finally noticed that there are a few Hispanic criminals in the country and that it will start counting them, but for now we are stuck with boneheaded numbers about “whites” that include Hispanics.

The NCVS counts single-offender and multiple-offender crimes separately. In 2008 — the latest year for which we have numbers — blacks acting alone attempted or completed 430,000 acts of violence against “whites,” while the figure for “white” violence against blacks was 91,000.

That same year there were 142,000 multiple-offender violent crimes against “whites” by blacks–that is to say, a bunch of blacks got together and raped, robbed, and/or attacked a “white” person. What about group attacks by “whites” on blacks? The NCVS sample reported so few that the official figure was rounded down to zero. That’s right: a group attack by “whites” on blacks is so rare that the huge NCVS sample of 160,000 people came up dry.

Multiple-offender “knockout” attack.

If we add single-offender to multiple-offenders crimes, we get 572,000 violent crimes by blacks against “whites” versus 91,000 cases that go the other way. Given that the combined white and Hispanic population is about 6.5 times greater than the black population, these numbers mean that a black person is 38 times more likely to attack a “white” than the reverse.

There is another way to look at this. When a black criminal goes looking for a victim, he chooses a “white” about 54 percent of the time. This means that despite all the hand-wringing about black-on-black crime, there is actually more black-on-“white” crime. “White” criminals choose black victims less than 5 percent of the time.

This is what the American people have been telling us year after year, but the New York Times and National Public Radio refuse to listen.

The only interracial crimes we hear about are those rarities committed by whites — especially if the police call them “hate crimes.” I don’t understand all the shouting about “hate crimes.” If black thugs rob a white man or gang rape a white woman, does it really matter whether anyone said “white mother-fu**er” while they were doing it? If a black person is beaten up by whites, does he care whether he was called rude names?

We are supposed to be outraged by “hate crimes,” because they are bad for race relations. That’s why they get special penalties. But which is worse for race relations: the 2012 total of 2,695 officially recognized hate crimes or the other 660,000 in which the perp did not utter the magic words?

If the country really cared about improving race relations, it would impose stiffer penalties on all inter-racial crime — but that would never do. It would have a “disparate impact” on blacks, who — all by themselves — commit 65 percent of the interracial crime.

In any case, does anyone doubt that virtually all black-on-white crime, including the knockout game, has at least some racial motivation? As John Derbyshire points out, our country is trying just about as hard as it can to teach blacks to hate us. Every time blacks come up short, whether it’s on test scores or crime rates or poverty or illegitimacy, we pat them on the head and tell them it’s not their fault. We tell them to blame vicious, hateful white people, past and present.

If Hollywood makes a movie about race — even if it’s supposed to be about a historical event — it turns the white people into sadistic psychopaths. I have lost count of how many newspapers and universities and state governments and Christian denominations and US Presidents have apologized for slavery. And the campaign to wipe out “negative stereotypes” has one official and honored exception: the white racist. With all these white people telling blacks how awful white people are, it’s a wonder there isn’t more black-on-white violence.

Part of the mania for excusing blacks is the refusal even to recognize the reality of the things liberals are so desperate to excuse. Ann Coulter complains that liberals are trying to play down the knockout game by pointing out that there has always been loads of black crime, so it’s no big deal. Miss Coulter should know better than to complain. It’s a huge step forward for the non-Fox media to admit there is any black crime at all.

So our rulers are right: There is such a fantastic amount of black-on-white crime that the knockout game doesn’t amount to much. But at least the game is forcing them to take a look at something they don’t usually even admit exists.