Garvey's Ghost: Black Talk

Homicide

This was supposed to be a part of that previous post but I had a hard time refinding the article in question.
The Pittsbburgh Tribune-Review has an article entitled Homicide plagues minority areas. that discusses the homicide rates of blacks in Pittsburgh, a place I visited in February 2004 and had no clue as to what was going on.

quote:
A wave of street killings is sweeping through Pittsburgh's black neighborhoods, leaving a trail of grieving families, overworked police and bewildered community leaders.

The onslaught pushed the murder rate in Pittsburgh last year to ninth-highest among cities in the biggest U.S. metropolitan areas, higher than in Miami and Los Angeles and triple New York's rate.

Ouch. But it gets "better."

One-fourth of Pittsburgh's population is black, but 22 of the city's 25 homicide victims this year have been black. Ten men have been charged in 11 of the black killings. All are black, though charges in one case were dropped...

...Murder in Pittsburgh and other American cities peaked during the crack-fueled gang wars of the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s, the killings had begun a steady decline as death and prison wore down the crack trade.

But the body count is creeping back up. The increase here is due almost entirely to murders of blacks, which have doubled in Allegheny County since 2000.

Turf battles over cheap heroin spur many killings, police and experts say...

..Statistics can't describe the pain of Clifford Wilson, 45, a Homewood resident for 35 years. His son, Preston Wilson, 19, was gunned down in North Braddock in September.

"When I was coming up as a kid, it was nowhere like the way it is now," he said. "There was unity in the community. There were fights, but we settled them with our fists. But then crack got in, and it just went crazy."

Wilson said his son was a drug dealer and gang member who lived on his own. The teen had a metal rod in his hip from a previous shooting and was on crutches when he was killed.


So that first shooting was not warning enough that his life was at risk? He just did not care.

Only one in eight residents of Allegheny County is black. But three in four of the county's murder victims last year were black, and the imbalance is growing.

Whites kill whites too, but the number of white murders has changed little since 1990, hovering at about 30 a year. Fewer than 10 percent of homicides last year involved whites killing blacks, or vice versa.

And while murders of innocent bystanders draw more attention, most black victims here and across the nation are men in their late teens or early 20s, usually involved in selling drugs, shot by other young black men in neighborhoods like Homewood, the Hill District and the North Side.

About 70 percent of Pittsburgh murder victims last year had criminal records, according to police statistics. Those victims averaged more than five arrests, mostly for drugs.

So let's put the theory to bed, once and for all, about how whites are killing each other too. The fact of the matter is that blacks (at least here) at killing each other at a higher rate than whites. let's do the math:
Pittsburgh PA has a population of 350,363 people. Allegheny County has a population od 1.3 million people. According to the article only 1/8 of the population is black. That's 162,500 people. 125 people were killed in Al. county last year, 30 of which were white meaning 95 were black ( or at least non-white) which is 75%. Since less than 10 percent of involve black victims of white pepetrators (<10) then we can see that the number one killer of blacks, and specifcally black males are in fact other black males. Most of these murders are done by people who are involved in drugs. This is not to say that black males are inherently violent. I personally know this to not be true. even with the large 75% numbers we must me mindful that 95 represent only .05% of the total black population of Allegheny county.

But why do these murders keep happening? simple:

"I've been on the job long enough now that a lot of people who didn't hear nothing, see nothing, know nothing -- now I'm standing over their son's body, and they're (asking), 'Why won't somebody come forward?'" he said.

"And you almost want to say, 'Well, remember I interviewed you last year? Now you want everybody to come forth, but when I talked to you last summer, you said, "I ain't no snitch. I ain't got nothing to do with that."'"

Sometimes witnesses are scared, Logan said. Many times, they want vengeance and prefer to take care of the matter themselves.

Some dumb, Street code that protects absolutely nobody. When this so called "code of the streets is broken:

In an infamous case from 2002, masked men sprayed a Homewood sandwich shop with gunfire, killing 8-year-old Taylor Coles, her father and another man and wounding her mother.

After neighbors and authorities responded with indignation, the shootings subsided. Only one more person was killed in Homewood that year.

So clearly the reason for the high rates of murder in some black communities is simply because the community tolerates it. "That's the way niggas is." It's not the schools. It's not the jobs it is simply the willingness of the people to accept the actions of the few.

Remember a few posts back I discussed the ideology of recent bantu refugees from Somalia. Here's an example of the sharp contrast in attitude:

quote:
Philadelphia native Ron "Karim" Watson Jr., 43, said he moved to Pittsburgh to turn his life around after four years in prison for armed robbery.

Watson said he makes a decent living now as a crane operator. He goes to bars in Homewood and elsewhere to recruit workers for the union, with varying success.

"Some guys will pull out $2,000," he said. "They say, 'This is my job.' I say to them, 'But you might not live to be 30.'"

There you have it. unwilling to make the long buck. Rather have large money now and take a few people out when you go. And these are the individuals that people would rather Cosby talk nice about?

A last comment too for those parents of the largely teen perps and victims:

Adrienne Young founded Tree of Hope, a group that helps families who have lost loved ones to murder. Her son, Javon, was a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University when he died in 1994 during a robbery. He had no police record and was an excellent student, she said.

"There's lots of mothers out there who think as long as their son is helping them pay the light bill or make a car payment, or buy a house -- and I know people like this -- that whatever he's doing is all right, until he gets killed," she said. "I say to them, 'Don't you realize you were a part of your son's demise?'"

Links:

http://pittsburghlive.com/x/tribune-review/trib/pittsburgh/s_203987.html