Black Crime and Population Control

For the longest time I have been wondering why the African-American population has not grown much over the past couple of decades. As I've written the last two pieces on Camden and Detroit respectively it hit me as to how devastating black crime is on the African-American population.

As I've written before, the number one cause of death for African American males between the ages of say 12 and 40 is assault (usually a homicide). Going back to the Camden post we find:

The next year, 2012, little Camden set a record with 67 homicides

That was a record. Now for the longest time I could not understand the gravity of the murder rate in terms other than it's impact on business, employment and community stress. But now, all late, it has dawned on me how bad this is. If you the reader don't understand, then lets look at it in terms of a school. The average urban school class has 30-35 students. I'm going to go with the smaller number. If you have 67 people killed, it would be like every year, two classes of students simply disappearing.

I looked at an article on a Boston high school in which the school in question had 1842 students. A 67 person murder rate, over ten years would see 1/3 of the school population disappear. That doesn't include the shooters. If we add the shooters, then over ten years 1340 persons no longer in the population due to being dead or being put in jail for the crime. That would be close to an entire school population gone every 10 years (of course many, if not most murders go unsolved and so the number of shooters do not match the number shot. Also as with other crimes, one person may have killed multiple people. Therefore the math would be off by quite a bit but is still alarming considering that even unfound killers are a drain on the communities they live in). Multiply that by all the mostly black communities spread out across the United States. Every 10 years black folks in America eliminate one school's worth of people in each of their communities.

How much loss is that? No one can say.

Even considering that murder numbers vary from place to place and the "entire school" argument has it's noted issues, it is still staggering to consider that at the very least, a classroom's worth of people are disappeared each year.

If you are a teacher in a college or university when you next go to teach your class, imagine that all of your students in one of your class being gone next year. If you are a teacher in a high school, imagine that your classroom would be empty next year because all the children that would be there are dead. That's what this high murder rate is. Worse than anything that happened in Sandy Hook. And it happens every year.