Category Archives: Crime

UPDATED: An All-American Boy, Terminated By Trash, Unmentioned By Trash (BHO Speaks. Not)

Barack Obama, Crime, Islam, Jihad, Media, Race, Racism, Terrorism

“A nineteen year old, suburban boy. Strawberry blond, athletic, bright and smiley. … When I look at this picture of Brendan Tevlin,” writes Martha MacCallum, for the Fox News Insider, “I think, he could have been my son.”

Brendan Tevlin was murdered in suburban America by a Jihadi, as he drove home to mom. A precious boy’s death at the hands of the detritus of humanity did not rate a mention by the moron media.

MacCallum writes from the heart. Her lede hints at a president that saw fit to tell the nation that he identified with the Trayvon Martins of the world, not the Tevlins.

MacCallum’s plainspoken column reaches deeper than the convoluted fare of most. From her perch at Fox News, the anchor can’t be expected to go further and state that Barack Obama has often demonstrated he is the president of black America; cares most about things African (he’s sending the military to degrade Ebola).

UPDATE (9/19): Breathe a sign of relief. The president of black America has felt your pain. Not.
No, Barack Obama has not mentioned the blonde, blue-eyed boy who died by ugly, malevolent Muslim. He did, however, convey his dismay over “the footage of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice punching his then-fiancee.” Or so White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday that.

American Cops’ Killer Culture

Crime, Criminal Injustice, IMMIGRATION, Law

Police need to be put in their place. Stripping them of their green camouflage outfits, armored vehicles and machine guns and equipping them all with a dashcam is a start. “Scrap the federal subsidy programs for municipal police departments that gives them the second-hand military hardware from Tikrit and Kandahar,” counsels Mark Steyn, “and replace it with one that ensures every patrol car has a camera.”

The truth of the matter is that the culture of US cops is that of a craven disregard for American lives.

… when the police are dressed like combat troops, it’s not a fashion faux pas, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of who they are. Forget the armored vehicles with the gun turrets, forget the faceless, helmeted, anonymous Robocops, and just listen to how these “policemen” talk. Look at the video as they’re arresting the New York Times and Huffington Post reporters. Watch the St Louis County deputy ordering everyone to leave, and then adding: “This is not up for discussion.”

Really? You’re a constable. You may be carrying on like the military commander of an occupying army faced with a rabble of revolting natives, but in the end you’re a constable. And the fact that you and your colleagues in that McDonald’s are comfortable speaking to your fellow citizens like this is part of the problem. The most important of the “nine principles of good policing” (formulated by the first two commissioners of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 and thereafter issued to every officer joining the force) is a very simple one: The police are the public and the public are the police. Not in Ferguson. Long before the teargassing begins and the bullets start flying, the way these guys talk is the first indication of how the remorseless militarization has corroded the soul of American policing.

Which brings us back to the death of Michael Brown. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that everything the police say about this incident is correct. In that case, whether or not the fatal shooting of Mr Brown is a crime, it’s certainly a mistake. When an unarmed shoplifter* in T-shirt and shorts with a five-buck cigar box in one hand has to be shot dead, you’re doing it wrong.

American police have grown too comfortable with the routine use of lethal force. To reprise a few statistics I cited three months ago:

So the biggest government in the free world chooses not to keep statistics on how many people get shot by law enforcement. So be it. It does keep figures on “justifiable homicide”, which it defines as “the killing of a felon by a law enforcement official in the line of duty”. When is a police homicide not “justifiable”? Ah, well. At any rate, for 2012, the corpse count was 410.

By comparison, for the years 2012 and 2013 in England and Wales:

‘No fatal police shootings.’

In the Netherlands:

‘The average for the last 35 years is three dead and 15 injured…’

In Germany, a nation of 80 million people, police in 2011 fatally shot six persons. In Denmark, police shot 11 people in 11 years, and this was felt to be so disturbing that the National Police Commissioner held an inquiry into why his cops had gotten so trigger-happy. In Australia, 41 people were shot by police in eight years, and the then Justice Minister Amanda Vanstone … thought that that was too high. In Iceland, police have fatally shot just one suspect. That’s one guy in the entire history of the country. He was killed by police last December.

So comparisons between the kill rates from American police and those of other developed nations aren’t worth bothering with. Indeed, the “justifiable homicides” of US cops are more like the total murder count for other advanced societies:

In Oz, the total number of murders per year is about 270, so a nation of 23 million would have to increase by 50 per cent to commit as many homicides as American law enforcement. In Canada, whose urban police departments have absorbed certain American practices, a dozen or so people get shot dead by cops each year, which is again somewhat short of the US rate. Indeed, that 2012 “justifiable homicide” figure of 410 compares to a total Canadian homicide count for 2011 of 598. In other words, in America 120,000 or so full-time law enforcement officers rack up the same number of homicides as about 24 million Canadians.

That strikes me as on the high side.

In Ferguson, both parties agree that the first shot was fired from inside the car. The rest were fired by the officer when he’d got out of the car, with Chief Jackson conceding there could have been ten bullets fired. For purposes of comparison:

In 2011 the German police fired 85 bullets. That’s all of them. The entire police force. The whole country. Eighty-five bullets in one year. That’s seven bullets per month. One bullet for every million German citizens.

So the Ferguson PD used as many bullets on Michael Brown as the Polizei used on ten million Germans. But, by American standards, that’s relatively restrained. The same year as those German figures – 2011 – the Miami PD blew through the Polizei’s annual bullet allowance on just one traffic incident:

Police killed Raymond Herisse, 22, of Boynton Beach in a barrage of gunfire after they said he refused an order to pull over while speeding down a crowded Collins Avenue in his Hyundai…

Twelve officers – from Miami Beach and Hialeah – unleashed more than 100 rounds at Herisse, police said. The hail of bullets also struck and wounded three bystanders.

By comparison, those 85 German bullets per annum were aimed somewhat more precisely …

That’s to say, of those 85 bullets, 49 were warning shots. America no longer does “the warning shot”. But whatever happened to “the shot”? With the 36 non-warning bullets fired by German police that year, they killed six people and wounded fifteen. That’s a bullet-and-three-quarters per target. Whether shooting to kill or to disable, they’re trying to do it with a single shot. American policing takes a third of Germany’s annual bullet allowance just to off a dog:

In July, three officers fired 26 shots at a pit bull that had bitten a chunk out of an officer’s leg in a Bronx apartment building. And there have been other episodes: in 1995, in the Bronx, officers fired 125 bullets during a bodega robbery, with one officer firing 45 rounds.

Just what happened on Saturday is still being investigated. Police experts, however, suggested in interviews yesterday that contagious shooting played a role in a fatal police shooting in Queens Saturday morning. According to the police account, five officers fired 50 shots at a bridegroom who, leaving his bachelor party at a strip club, twice drove his car into a minivan carrying plainclothes police officers investigating the club.

The bridegroom, Sean Bell, who was to be married hours later, was killed, and two of his friends were wounded, one critically.

Three months ago I asked this question:

Are American civilians so different from Europeans or Aussies or Kiwis or Canadians that they have to be policed as if they’re cornered rebels in an ongoing civil war?

A startling number of American readers wrote to say, with remarkable insouciance, that the US could not afford the luxury of First World policing. Large tracts of America had too many illegal immigrants, drug gangs, racial grievances, etc. Maybe. But the problem is that, increasingly, this is the only style of law enforcement America’s police culture teaches – not only for the teeming favelas, but for the leafy suburbs and the rural backwaters and the college-town keg party, too. … MORE.

Contrast the policing of America proper with the policing of US borders, where border patrol dare not so much as turn away a trespasser.

UPDATE II: Racism Rhetoric Is Rubbish (Catchall Phrase For The Feeble-Minded)

Crime, Fascism, libertarianism, Race, Racism, Reason, South-Africa

Police brutality? Yes! Militarization of the police force? You bet! “A Government of Wolves”? Yes again, and worse! “The Rise of the Warrior Cop”? For sure! But racism? No! That’s bullshit. So why have some libertarians adopted this rhetoric? The same people who would argue against (color-coded) hate-crime legislation—and rightly so, for a crime is a crime—are suddenly accusing white America of racism (thought crimes).

Sheepishness? No doubt, but racism? Enough of this nonsense:

This doesn’t mean that racism is not also involved. Polls show that a majority of white Americans are content with the police justification for the killing. Police apologists are flooding the Internet with arguments against those of the opposite persuasion. Only those who regard the police excuse as unconvincing are accused of jumping to conclusions before the jury’s verdict is in. Those who jump to conclusions favorable to the police are regarded as proper Americans. …

Could it be that the ordinary Americans Paul Craig Roberts maligns as likely racists are really, truly waiting for more information, or suffer an authoritarian, submissive frame-of-mind, or are uninformed about “police state USA,” or have simply experienced “black crime” first hand, or are fearful of experiencing “black-on-white violence” in all it ferocity”?

UPDATE I (8/23): Et Tu, Stossel?

John Stossel mars a perfectly reasonable column, separating the “liberal from the libertarian response to Ferguson,” with a nod to the endemic racism meme:

Yes, centuries of white people abusing the civil liberties of blacks have left many blacks resentful of police power, and in recent years, white police officers have shot, on average, two young black men every week. But none of that justifies violence and looting like that which followed Michael Brown’s death. Criminals who ransack stores are always wrong to violate the rights of innocent third parties.

It reminds me of the root-causes excuse offered up by lily white liberals for the dysfunction of many young black South Africans, who were born well after the end of apartheid.

UPDATE II (8/24): Racism: The Catchall Phrase for the Feeble-Minded. Jack Kerwick explains why:

… anyone who is interested in thinking clearly and honestly must realize that “racism” is the rhetorical ware of bumper stickers and t-shirts: Because it means—and is intended to mean—all things to all people, it has become meaningless. All that we do know is that “racism” is a dreadful, probably the most dreadful thing, of which a white person can be accused.

Ebony, Ivory And No Harmony

BAB's A List, Crime, Education, Race

By Myron Pauli

Twenty years ago, I met a Yugoslavian physicist visiting MIT who assured all that Yugoslavia would not collapse into civil war and that only a few “kooks” were stirring up ethnic antagonism. It turned out he knew his quantum chromodynamics better than his kinsmen. Similarly, when I saw übercynic Fred Reed’s portents of civic collapse. It exceeded even my own pessimism. Next week, of course, was Ferguson, and Fred seems once again prophetic. Fred even specifically mentioned that the pervasive racism is in the “real world” and not in physics departments!

The issue of police militarization, of course, is a legitimate concern, even for Finnish libertarians who do not want to see their local trigger-happy cops armed for the Battle of the Bulge with hypermilitarized SWAT teams knocking down doors at 3:00AM. This is not, per se, a racial issue but a civil liberties issue.

However, when the local cops smash down Grandma O’Leary’s door at 3:00 AM to look for some pot and wind up shooting her dog and tasering granny, it is not likely that white people take to the streets and riot. While the all-pervasive black-on-white violence, like the torture/rape/murder spree of Reginald and Jonathan Carr, might have brought out the local Klan in the bad old days, most people let the criminal justice system, however flawed, take its course. One can certainly spot a white person mouthing racist vitriol but neo-fascist pogroms seem to be passé.

Now, let us switch to black victims of crime. Between the killing of Travon Martin and the exoneration of George Zimmerman, roughly 6,000 black Americans were killed by black Americans – not much protest. In that same interval, 400,000 black babies were aborted – presumably not all suffering from Down’s syndrome, Siamese twins, or major medical abnormalities – but not much protest. In Africa, we have the Lord’s Resistance Army of Uganda, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Diamond Gangs in Sierra Leone, and other examples of mass rape, mass mutilations, and genocide. Remember Rwanda? Does anyone care about 5,400,000 killed in Civil War in the Congo ?

Perhaps the outrage is only due to cop-on-black violence. The bullet blitzkrieg that struck down 3 blacks leaving a strip club in Queens looked like it might go viral. However, the first cop to start the blitzkrieg against Sean Bell and his drunk pals, Gerald Isnora, was himself black – hence, nothing to get upset over! Would anyone have cared if Travon Martin or Michael Bell were killed by a black drug dealer or a rival boyfriend? However, if the shooter is white, then it is time to take to the streets regardless of whether the facts have been established. Time for Al Sharpton to get on his horse like Paul Revere to shout “the whiteys are coming!”. Death is not required – even beating Rodney King or an auto accident that kills Gavin Cato in Crown Heights is enough to get the riots going and the subsequent looting of plasma TV’s from Costco. As Fred puts it, beneath the surface is a cauldron of hatred – as in the Crown Heights riots.

The relatively irrelevant “facts” that Bell and Martin may not have been saints does not imply that trigger-happy cops and cop-wannabees have some inherent authority to blast petty delinquents at will. Nevertheless, the fact that black racists make these unproven charges and that white racists “justify” them only shows the dreadful abyss into whihc this country has been heading.

I don’t recall the America of the Eisenhower-Kennedy era being so polarized. Electing Obama did not improve harmony and might have made things worse. Nor have 50 years of “Civil Rights Laws” helped the underclass – one mile away, Ballou High School in DC is officially “integrated” but it is over 98 percent black with only 20 percent of kids at grade level and zero students who have ever passed an Advanced Placement Course. The Chamber of Commerce prefers importing illegal aliens to hiring blacks. Anger begets paranoia and paranoia begets anger and guilt-tripped whites encourage more anger, while little gets solved waiting for the next incident and riots.

Yugoslavia?!

******
Barely a Blog (BAB) contributor Myron Pauli grew up in Sunnyside Queens, went off to college in Cleveland and then spent time in a mental institution in Cambridge MA (MIT) with Benjamin Netanyahu (did not know him), and others until he was released with the “hostages” and Jimmy Carter on January 20, 1981, having defended his dissertation in nuclear physics. Most of the time since, he has worked on infrared sensors, mainly at Naval Research Laboratory in Washington DC. He was NOT named after Ron Paul but is distantly related to physicist Wolftgang Pauli; unfortunately, only the “good looks” were handed down and not the brains. He writes assorted song lyrics and essays reflecting his cynicism and classical liberalism. Click on the “BAB’s A List” category to access the Pauli archive.