“Stitches for snitches” is the urban omertà--the code of silence.
Guendelsberger was beaten up pretty badly. She suffered from a severely broken leg among other injuries. But she wasn’t hurt badly enough to get the picture. She told anyone who would listen that the attack was not racially motivated because, although all the assailants were black, her boyfriend was brown. Since he was beaten up too, but not as badly as she was, that supposedly proved her point that race had nothing to do with the attack. Anyone who thought differently was “racist” and “creepy,” she said.
In city after city the media and officials—and sometimes victims too—ignore, minimize, and even condone the racial element of the violence. Several commentors to an online article about the incident at the defunct AV Club website wondered why Guendelsberger could not acknowledge the racial component of the mob. They were met with scorn: “Unless you’re pointing that out to show how the whites have oppressed blacks, acknowledging that fact is racist.”
Philadelphia liberals, meet the Stockholm Syndrome.
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter called Guendelsberger to thank her for calming any potential racial animosity that could have resulted from her attack. This was the same Mayor who had recently declared that an outbreak of racial violence was nothing to worry about and was really the fault of bad reporting. The police chief had backed up the mayor, and the district attorney said a high school diploma is the best anti-crime tool. Just one year and a few dozen attacks earlier, the mayor and his crew had assured the people of Philadelphia that the flash mob crimes would stop because, uh … they said they were going to stop them.3
In 2010 Nutter told The New York Times the violence had “no racial component.” The official party line was that, yes, young people were committing these random acts of violence. But as for race? Nobody knew nuttin’ ’bout nuttin’, see?4
YouTube videos showed thousands of black people roaming the streets of Philadelphia committing acts of vandalism, looting, and violence. But not a word from the press about the racial component of these crimes. There were lots of video cameras. Local affiliates had plenty of video footage, but no one had the nerve to say what the video screamed: all the attackers and looters were black. Even Al Jazeera had a story: “Flash mobs can be quite effective when multiple people turn up in one place to attract attention to a just cause. … They can, however, be terrifying when they’re violent and unnecessary, as we have seen in “the City of Brotherly Love.”5
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Flash Mob in Philly
Then came the testimonials from other victims.
Police had claimed that none of the injuries imposed by the mob was serious. Turns out they had not even checked. Ronnie Polaneczky, columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, checked. She found John, a maintenance mechanic, had suffered severe brain injury and facial fractures after he was pulled from a bike and beaten.6
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Macy’s Flash Rob
The stories are legion.
February 2010. More than 100 black people broke into fights and caused destruction at a Macy’s department store a few blocks from city hall.
March 17, 2010. Dozens of black people fight in a clothing store while onlookers laugh and cheer.7
Spring 2010. Police break up a black flash mob in the Tioga-Nicetown section of Philly. Kids were bored and acting stupid, said the reporter. The video tells another story.
July 4, 2010. Hundreds of black people storm the streets of South Philadelphia beating, looting, destroying.8
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Tioga-Nicetown Mob
June 2011. The same weekend Guendelsberger and her pals ran into “nothing much,” more than forty black people in a Philly suburb descended on a Sears and ransacked it in broad daylight. Afterwards, the police chief said he feared for the safety—of the rioters.
July 2011. Stop me if you’ve heard this before—hundreds of black people created an “astonishing” amount of violence at downtown Philadelphia restaurants, hotels, and bars.9
July 4, 2011. Ten black people assault and stab a student from LaSalle University and his dog. The student is still alive, though many people do not know how. The dog probably saved him.10
Summer 2011. Jeremy Schenkel recounted the attack on him to CBS3 Eyewitness News. He said the kids were laughing as they beat and kicked him, cheering each other on. “Almost like an admiring group that was following them, just kind of ragging on people, and one of those guys said, ‘It’s not our fault you can’t fight’,” Schenkel recalls.11
There are so many stories and so many videos that some started setting them to rap music.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Ode to Crime
This list goes on and on, and none of the reporters seemed to notice the race of the criminals. It was so glaring that hundreds of readers commented online and wanted to know why the newspapers repeatedly refused to identify the race of the attackers. Many of the comments were removed for being racist.
People knew two things were important in all these stories: 1) Large groups of black people were systematically assaulting residents in their town. 2) The media was too heavily invested in not talking about the fact that the gangs of violent criminals were entirely black.
A few days after the June 2011 attack on Guendelsberger, news anchors on the local Fox affiliate weighed in. A black TV anchor worried about the “destructive tone” of the comments from people who observed that all the people in these riots were black. She said it was “sad” that people did not recognize the true nature of the violence: young people were to blame, not black people. The guest, a black radio talk show host, said the riots were not racial, and then tried to justify them because the state legislature cut money for job training and increased money for prisons. He said it was not right to blame an entire group for the acts of a few bad people. “When an African American commits a crime,” he said, “society is looking to define race. When Lochner shot [Congresswoman] Giffords, nobody said ‘what is wrong with white men?’ This isn’t a black or white issue; they need things to do.”
It’s classic: they didn’t do it. Here’s why they did it.
They went on to blame young people some more, and despite overwhelming video evidence, despite the fact that everyone arrested was black, despite every bit of evidence to the contrary, they repeated that it was not about race.
Why couldn’t we see that?
MAYOR NUTTER HAS A EUREKA MOMENT
One month later, Philadelphia’s black mayor, Michael Nutter, changed the game. After years of denying and deflecting and condoning, Nutter took to the pulpit of his boyhood church and mentioned the “R” word: Race. In a Sunday speech in July 2011, the mayor admitted his city had a problem with violent black people:
You have damaged your own race.
Take those God darn hoodies down, especially in the summer. Pull your pants up and buy a belt ’cause no one wants to see your underwear or the crack of your butt. Nobody.
If you walk into somebody’s office with your hair uncombed and a pick in the back, and your shoes untied, and your pants half down, tattoos up and down your arms and on your neck, and you wonder why somebody won’t hire you? They don’t hire you ’cause you look like you’re crazy.12
The head of Philadelphia’s chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, J. Whyatt Monde-sire, said it “took courage” for Mr. Nutter to deliver the message. “These are majority African-American youths and they need to be called on it,” Mr. Mondesire said.
The black Web site TheGrio.com said “Nutter just seemed so disgusted that he just had to, as he put it, talk about things black people think but won’t say.”13
After years of joining with the mayor in ignoring organized racial violence, the Philadelphia Inquirer congratulated the mayor for moving “quickly against mayhem mobs.”14
After Mayor Nutter got religion, so did Guendelsberger: “I am afraid of young, black men now. It’s very a
nnoying because there are a lot of young, black men in Philadelphia. I honestly just wish I could go back to how I was before,” she said.15
No folks. To quote the master comic: I am not making this up.
All the kids needed, said the mayor and his crew, was a place to go, something to do. In the big Democrat-controlled cities, such as Philadelphia and Chicago, Democrats have been singing that song since 1964. I guess they hope one of these days they’ll get it right.
How about bowling? So the Mayor organized a “Teen Night” at a bowling alley for the kids, which was going well until someone got stabbed in a fight after the bowling.16
And of course the attacks continued.
On July 29, 2011, a man in hospital scrubs was walking down the street at 2 p.m. Coming towards him were seven black students from Mastery Charter School in Philadelphia. Oprah gave the school $1 million. Not as a reward. The Oprah dollars came before the attacks so that the black children could have shiny new computers and nice uniforms, which they were wearing during the attack. As the man passed the students, they turned and pummeled him. It was all caught on tape from two surveillance cameras. Maybe we’ll see this on the Oprah Network.17
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Mastery Charter School Mob Team
At the time, Fox News bragged “this video, which you will only see on Fox,” was a big deal. Fox took it down, but kudos to LiveLink.com for having the foresight to capture the original Fox report.
In 2009 a year before this racial mob violence started making news, other cases of racial violence were going on at Philadelphia schools. The schools were bending over backwards to overlook it. It got so bad that it took a Department of Justice investigation to make them stop denying it.
In September 2011 two white kids in the Philadelphia community of Port Richmond may or may not have laughed at a black person who may or may not have fallen off a bike. It’s unclear what happened to trigger the event, but what we do know is that a crowd of about forty black people chased the two boys into a nearby house. The Inquirer described what happened next:
Inside his house, LaVelle, 37, called to his wife, Kim, 30, to go to their bedroom with their twin 13-month-old boys, Mark and Mason, and to call police. He also ordered his two other sons, 11 and 17, and his nephew, 7, to stay upstairs.
With the two teens hiding in the house, LaVelle, 5 feet 10, 220 pounds, a well-known sports-league organizer and coach in the community, went outside to try to calm the angry mob.
They were standing on his steps. One shouted, “‘Something’s going to happen now!’” LaVelle recalled in an interview Friday at his house. LaVelle got nervous and went back inside, locking his door with a deadbolt.
But the attackers pounded on his front windows and kicked his wooden door so hard, it flew open and some of them entered his house.
“The first guy hits me with a pipe. The second guy knocks me in the face. All I’m hearing is my wife and kids screaming,” said LaVelle, who feared that the next time they saw him, he would be in a casket.
He said that he was able to push the attackers out the door, but then a third man—who had a gun—tried to extend his arm. LaVelle grabbed onto the gunman’s lower arm and shoulder so he couldn’t raise the weapon.18
The Port Richmond police arrived, wrote a report, and left. Two hours later, the mob returned and threatened the occupants, trying to intimidate them not to testify in court. And this was just one of a rash of mob attacks on individual homes. In Kansas City the exact same thing was about to happen until the homeowner pulled out a rifle. The crowd went elsewhere to wreak havoc.
Months later, another victim, Anna Taylor, was identified for the first time. She was badly beaten in a Philadelphia race riot and may never fully recover.
The blow that Taylor absorbed was so powerful that she lost a front tooth and its root, and the roots of nearby teeth still may die, her dentist told her. The punch also split her upper lip so severely that much of it was hanging from her face and she was unable to speak.
Taylor’s mother, Peggy, a Germantown social worker, said her daughter needed so many stitches inside and outside her mouth at Hahnemann University Hospital after the assault that “we just couldn’t count them.”
The mob took over South Street that warm Saturday night, the first of spring, as though popping up from nowhere, witnesses said. It seemed to be following the patterns of three similar mobs that had quickly assembled in Center City on March 3, Feb. 16, and Dec. 18.
“They had smiles on their faces as they scared people at random,” Assistant District Attorney Angel Flores said in an interview with The Inquirer a week after the March 20 attacks. “They thought that assaulting others was a form of enjoyment.”
Indeed, the young man who hit Taylor was laughing as he punched her and said, “Bam, there’s another one,” according to Taylor. “It was frightening.”19
In Atlantic City on July 4, 2011, hundreds of black people were milling around Bally’s Casino on the boardwalk near midnight. Soon there were fights and pandemonium, “people running for their lives as a man shoots onto the Boardwalk just hours after Atlantic City’s Fourth of July celebration ended.” And of course the whole thing was caught on video, including the shooting.20
Philadelphia TV reporter Steve Keeley of Fox 29 got so impatient with the bumbling of the ineffectual prosecutor, he demanded he stop using “psycho babble” and start talking about the criminals in a way people can understand.
JUST BLOWIN’ OFF SOME STEAM
After reviewing thousands of videos with more than five hundred episodes of racial violence, I thought at some point I would lose my capacity to be surprised.
Then came Temple University.
In just a bit you will read about an event that just might be crazier than the episode that gave this book its name. Until then, here is a little background. Temple University is a Philadelphia school that, like Columbia and the University of Southern California, is located in a high crime, urban neighborhood. (Urban? Now they have me using euphemisms.) So the people who run Temple University decided they needed to do something about violent mobs. Naturally, they contacted their medical school because it’s a public health thing. After lots of deliberation, they decided to hire community activists from the neighborhood—people with “street cred.”
Imbued with street cred, they go around and talk to the leaders of the violent flash mobs in Philadelphia and convince them to stop beating, looting, stealing, vandalizing, and all that.
They spent $500,000 to hire three outreach workers. One of them was a twenty-six-year old guy named Brandon Jones. “Brandon Jones knows the streets of South Philadelphia, and he understands what his young clients are going through in their daily lives. He can relate,” wrote Pearl Stewart in Diverse. She went on to write—and here’s the kicker—“Jones says he understands the high energy level of youths and the need ‘to blow off some steam.’”21
Here is what kind of terrible person I am: I would not have believed the above quote if someone told me, if I read about it, or if I heard about it on TV or radio.
I would only believe it if I read it myself. You can check out the article yourself.
SCAN ME!
ARTICLE: Just Blowin’ Off Some Steam
After Nutter delivered his stinging rebuke of massive black violence in Philadelphia, it is tempting to say all was well. It did seem better. At least for a while.
In February 2013, Philadelphia Magazine wrote a story about how white people are afraid of black violence, even afraid to speak about it. Nutter went ballistic. Gone were the conciliatory words and calls for personal responsibility. Nutter asked the city’s Human Relations Commission to investigate the bad man who wrote the article.22
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Black People Assualting People
Then three weeks later it happened again. Two hundred black people on the streets of downtown Philly, fighting, rampaging.
Which, of course, is where we started.
This book is about predators and victims. But some people fight back. We’ll talk about them too.
2
THE KNOCKOUT GAME, ST. LOUIS STYLE
“White boy in’ the wrong place at the right time. Soon as the car door open up he mine”
Ready to play the Knockout Game?
The rules are pretty simple: Find a white guy—alone is important. Make sure he looks defenseless. Punch him in the face as hard as you can. Don’t stop until your arms get tired or he gets knocked out. Or worse. If he goes down, you win. It’s called the Polar Bear Game in Illinois, but we’ll get into that later. Versions of these games exist across the country, but the St. Louis version is the most popular. You can play anywhere, but a “vibrant and culturally mixed” district is probably best.
Over the last two years, the number of Knockout Game attacks has ranged from twenty (if you believe the police) to one hundred (if you believe people actually playing and watching the game). Or even more, if you believe a local judge.
And that is just in St. Louis.
In October 2011 fifty-one-year-old Matt Quain was on his way home from a local grocery story, ready to celebrate a Cardinals’ victory in the World Series when he was attacked by a mob of black people. They left him with a broken jaw, black eye, and stitches in his face. St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay came across Quain in the gutter, unconscious:
The group walked in front of the mayor’s car, across Grand. Slay noted how relaxed they looked. He glanced back at the library. He saw a man face down in the street, motionless, feet inches from the curb, blood pooling on the pavement. … They looked like little kids, he thought. They laughed and held aloft cellphones like they were snapping pictures.1
White Girl Bleed A Lot Page 2