He must have thought she would learn something.
The Springfield Patch had another take: They said it was the “craziest thing I have ever seen on national TV news.”4
In Chicago, a columnist said much the same thing the year before. As noted in the last chapter: Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich revealed to readers in June 2011 that the Tribune and other media refused to report the race of the flash mob participants. She confessed that they were indeed young black men, but then towing the line explained that it didn’t matter their race and mentioning the fact only reflects poorly on the good black kids.5
Now you know.
11
MILWAUKEE
Memorial Day. Juneteenth. July 4th. Riots flow like good,
sweet Milwaukee beer and brats.
“Big Mike” Hagler does not want to hear any more excuses for race riots at the Wisconsin State Fair. Or for fights and gunfire at the Juneteenth celebration in downtown Milwaukee. And he has a simple solution for the hundreds of black people who terrorized the Mayfair Mall: Knock it off!
“Every time there is an event going on, people want to pull out guns and go crazy,” said Mike Hagler. “Everything is getting cancelled: State fairs. Summerfest.” He continues:
All people want to do is fight. Y’all acting like animals. And it is crazy to say it is our own people acting that way.
It’s crazy when you go to an event and there be a majority white people there. As soon as black people come around that get to moving out of the way. They already know what is going to happen.
It’s like when you want to go to Juneteenth. I ain’t going to go to Juneteenth because people already know what is going to happen. People are going to be shooting and fighting.
Big Mike has lots of videos calling out black mob violence in Milwaukee. And Big Mike is still a teenager.
It cannot be as bad as he thinks right?
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: “Big Mike” Hagler
WHAT BIG MIKE IS TALKING ABOUT
In New York, the locals talk about the best place to get a bagel. In San Francisco, it’s the Italian restaurants.
In Milwaukee, the discussion often turns to race riots: Which one was the worst? Was it the spontaneous violence of the State Fair of 2011, where hundreds of black people beat and terrorized the crowds in and out of the fairgrounds? Or was it the annual rolling race riot and black celebration known as Juneteenth? If so, what year? Violence is a regular feature of this annual downtown party. A lot of it has been caught on video and is available on YouTube.
Others hold out for the Fourth of July. For at least three years, groups of hundreds of black people have done all sorts of bad things, requiring mounted police, helicopters, and paddy wagons to bring it under control.
And let’s not forget the random acts of racial violence in buses, on street corners, at shopping centers, and in other public places that are so popular on YouTube. Hadn’t heard about that? Neither had I. We both need to get out more.
Let’s start with the July 4, 2011.
It started out like a flash rob that could have been in Philadelphia or Chicago or any of the dozens of other places around the country where black people meet at, rush in, and rob a store. Fifty to a hundred black people rushed into a BP store after the fireworks. They looted it and ran off. But then this crew took it to a new level. They headed to a nearby park, where ten to twenty local white kids were enjoying a Fourth of July firework gathering.
Milwaukee Police Chief Flynn described what happened next as “fights,” which is a curious way to describe a large group of black kids beating up a small group of white kids. How about race riot? Though some reporters blanche at that term unless the perpetrators issue a press release stating their racial intentions. Perhaps some of the victims tried to defend themselves, but that is not clear either.
Police came. The mob ran away. Police refused to take a report or investigate the riot. Or show any curiosity in the convenience store videotape—that night anyway. The next day, victims started calling police wanting to know the status of their investigation. The police on duty knew nothing about it. No one had even filed a report.
They called reporters and things started to happen.
Soon the police chief and Mayor Barrett held a press conference. The chief tried to downplay the racial angle. Over the weekend, said the chief, the city had victims of crime that were black and white and Asian, so that proved that “crime was colorblind,” and he did not appreciate that some people on blogs and talk radio were trying to “sensationalize” it.1
At least there was not much danger of that from the initial coverage by the local daily paper. (This is almost word for word what Emily Guendelsberger, the liberal Philadelphia reporter, said after a black mob beat her up. And what Mayor Nutter said before reality forced him to open his eyes, if only temporarily.)
The level of violence finally forced the local paper to do what the local police would not: Talk to the victims.
Shaina Perry remembers the punch to her face, blood streaming from a cut over her eye, her backpack with her asthma inhaler, debit card, and cell phone stolen, and then the laughter.
They just said “Oh, white girl bleeds a lot,” said Perry, 22, who was attacked at Kilbourn Reservoir Park over the Fourth of July weekend.2
The next day, more and more victims of this racial violence came forward, describing the attacks, the laughing, the beating, the weapons. “They were just having a good time,” said one of the victims of the attackers, referring to the laughing and joking during the violence. Another victim said, “I heard laughing as they were beating everybody up. They were eating chips like it was a picnic.” Sound familiar?3
The chief started singing a different tune, saying the members of the mob were barbarians. But by then it was too late: The people of Wisconsin and Milwaukee knew two things: One, they had a full-scale race riot; and two, the police were not capable of calling it by name, let alone do anything about it.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Juneteenth
This attack came after the black holiday celebration in Milwaukee known as Juneteenth. News accounts are sketchy at best. But one year later, after another massive disturbance where fifty-four people were arrested as a helicopter kept tabs, witnesses recounted their experiences from 2011.
My girlfriend and I walked up to Juneteenth last year from Riverwest; we got there right at the end…. Anyways, on our walk back home, a half a dozen squad cars rushed past us and one squad car stopped. The officers were wearing full riot gear and said something to the likes of ‘What the hell are you (white) people doing in this neighborhood? Get the out of here, don’t you know there is a riot going on a block away?4
They did not know the kind of danger they were in.
Longtime Milwaukee resident Sandra Richardson knew. When she grew up, she remembers Juneteenth as a peaceful, happy celebration. Today that is different, she told the Journal Sentinel: “If young African American male and female would truly know the meaning of Juneteenth, it would be less violent.”5
Not everyone is so candid. Several of the victims of the “White Girl Bleed a Lot” beat down refused to describe the attacks as racial. They said it would be too divisive.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Victims at Riverwest in Denial
Two local media personalities had no problem with it. They knew the divisive part was over. Now was the time for justice. Talk show host James Harris, of 620 WTMJ in Milwaukee, told a television audience the facts about the “White Girl” beat down:
It wasn’t a color-blind crime. And it’s something that’s happening all over the nation. We have this epidemic of black young teenagers that are having mob violence, mob activity from Washington DC out to Denver over in the South as well.
It is part of the perfect storm of entitlement, dependency, political correctness, and this whole idea of white guilt where we’re afraid to identify who it is that’s attacking and the reasons why they are
doing it….
(The Mayor and Police Chief) were more worried about being accused of racial profiling that the fact that black mobs were roaming down the streets hurting people.
This reason why this was a PC response was because it was black mob violence. You guys (fellow panelists) are in denial … We have a real problem. A real sickness in the [black] community, that until you address it, it will continue to explode …
Milwaukee and other major metropolitan areas are facing a crisis of black teen mob violence this summer. And if the powers that be refuse to identify the problem, how in the world do they expect to combat it?6
That’s a whole lot of truth-telling in one place at one time. So now we know that even truth-telling cannot stop racial violence—at least in that dose—because just a few weeks later it all began again.
This time at the bucolic Wisconsin State Fair in Milwaukee.
August 5, 2011, hundreds of black people beat up white people, damaged their cars, hurled racial epithets, and caused chaos inside and outside the gates of the State Fair. Groups of black people ran down the midway, pushing and beating people, stealing from vendors. It was complete chaos for two hours. Then it continued outside, where state police directed traffic while a race riot raged yards away.
They were attacking everybody for no reason whatsoever.
“It was 100% racial,” claimed Eric, an Iraq war veteran from St. Francis who says young people beat on his car.
“I had a black couple on my right side, and these black kids were running in between all the cars, and they were pounding on my doors and trying to open up doors on my car, and they didn’t do one thing to this black couple that was in this car next to us. They just kept walking right past their car. They were looking in everybody’s windshield as they were running by, seeing who was white and who was black. Guarantee it.”
Eric, a war veteran, said that the scene he saw Thursday outside State Fair compares to what he saw in combat.
“That rated right up there with it. When I saw the amount of kids coming down the road, all I kept thinking was, ‘There’s not enough cops to handle this.’ There’s no way. It would have taken the National Guard to control the number of kids that were coming off the road. They were knocking people off their motorcycles.”
Another witness, who asked to remain anonymous, said, “it was like a scene you needed the National Guard to control.”
“To me, it looked like a scene out of a movie,” claimed the anonymous witness.
“I have not seen anything like this in my life. It was a huge mob, and it was a fight that maybe lasted one to two minutes.”
Norb Roffers claimed that as he left the state fair with his wife, crowds near that entrance were large. “As we got closer to the street, we looked up the road, and we saw a quite a bit of commotion going on and there was a guy laying in the road. He wasn’t even moving. Finally a car pulled up. They stopped right next to the guy, and it looked like someone was going to help him. We were kind of stuck, because we couldn’t cross. Traffic was going through. Young black men running around, beating on people, and we were like ‘Let’s get the heck out of here.’ The light turned, and I got attacked from behind. I just got hit in the back of the head real hard. I’m like, ‘What the heck is going on here?’ I heard my bell ring.”
Roffers further described what witnesses said happened to the man who was lying in the street.
“People were saying he was on a bike. They tore him off his bike and beat on him. We were walking to the west on Schlinger. I was watching behind me a lot more diligently, making sure there wasn’t anybody coming to get us anymore.”7
The local TV had a report about the extreme violence and chaos. The attacks were “racially motivated” said witnesses.
Seven police officers were injured. Thirty-one black people were arrested. “The violence left workers and patrons of the fair in West Allis shaken and reminded many of the mob-like disturbances that occurred over the Fourth of July weekend in Milwaukee.” Police Chief Flynn and Mayor Barrett said they were going to get tough.8
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Wisconsin State Fair
Do they get these characters out of central casting when they want to find ineffectual public servants?
Before the July 4 beat down, before the State Fair riot, before the Memorial Day melee, the people of Wisconsin had a preview of racial violence in January 2011 at a local mall.
Over a hundred black teenagers met in January 2011 at the Mayfair Mall, the nicest mall in the whole state.
“There’s kids running all over the place. They’re just screaming, running. I’ve got a customer on the floor over here. They’ve busted out a glass table. Get people over here,” a Boston Store employee told 911 dispatchers.
“We need police right away. At Boston Store. They’re taking over the store. Hurry. The kids are all over the place. All over. The top level. They’re just everywhere. Running, screaming, breaking things,” another frantic employee told 911.9
After they were done trashing several shops inside, they took the carnage outside:
The police report said dozens of kids forced their way onto a bus without paying and wouldn’t get off. While police were clearing the bus, a fight involving forty kids broke out outside McCormick and Schmick’s restaurant. The restaurant went into lockdown after diners reported hearing gunshots.10
At least the black people in Minnesota had an excuse. When they trashed Mall of America, they thought Li’l Wayne was going to be there.
A few days after the mall carnage in Milwaukee, Shelley Walcott, a black TV reporter, wrote an Open Letter to the Kids Who Tore Up Mayfair. She told them to cut it out, because if not, people would talk bad about them.
None of you seem to have any concept of what’s being said about you out here in the real world.
Look, as a working journalist I am supposed to stay neutral. But through your actions last week you are making things worse on yourself, and the entire black community.
You just reinforced that old standby stereotype that we are all nothing but uneducated troublemakers.
And they’re saying that you are just going to be a product of your environment, and will probably end up pregnant and poor … or in prison.11
Ah yes, the good old “Stop rioting or people will not say nice things about you” approach. Why not? They tried everything else. There’s no word from Shelley about her advice to the black people who tore up the State Fair and who beat those kids on the Fourth of July.
Meanwhile, one of the “teens” arrested for rioting at the state fair is keeping it real. He said he attacked white people because he could. “Police say the teen told investigators whites were chosen because he considered them ‘easy targets.’”12
One of the deniers’ favorite weapons is the crime rate and how it is going down. At the same time, what is going up is the number of stories all over the country that say police are refusing to take crime reports. The Journal Sentinel in Wisconsin reports that one of the reasons that the chief of police in Milwaukee is able to say that the crime rate is going down is because the police are not reporting hundreds of crimes.13
This underreporting is also happening in Chicago, where the Second City Cop blog said on a busy night only one in ten crimes are actually showing up on the books.
In Baltimore, “St. Patrick’s Day violence exceeded initial reports. … Youths marched seemingly at will through the Inner Harbor and streets north and west, frequently clashing… Dozens of officers called in from across the city scrambled to keep up with the attacks.”14
It’s happening in Seattle too. There a local TV new station asked “Is crime going unreported in parts of Seattle?” And they talked to the friends of a murder victim who said yes. They said they stopped wasting their time reporting crime to police because they say police could not do anything about it.15
In Atlanta in 2010, hundreds of black people rioted at the Screen on Green outdoor movie festival. “There were hun
dreds of black teens, apparently there to fight, yelling obscenities, threatening each other, both sexes,” said a poster to the Topix news site. The next day, police said only one incident was reported.16
The Department of Justice backed up these claims. A 2012 Department of Justice study says “Nearly 3.4 million violent crimes went unreported” every year from 2006 to 2010.17
Even The New York Times admitted that officers were underreporting crime to make the stats look good. The headline says it all: “Police Tactic: Keeping Crime Rates Off the Books.”18
One year after the “White Girl” beat down, it happened again. Hundreds of black people were fighting and terrorizing people trying to enjoy the fireworks … at the same place.
Once again, the newspaper did not have a clue what was happening.
How could this happen?
Let’s talk about police reporting. Very few print reporters start out to be police reporters. It is a dead end beat. Most of the job involves carrying a portable police scanner, going to house fires, and showing up at police headquarters to look at crime reports. And because most editors equate crime with black lawlessness—and they don’t want to be accused of racism—most crime stories are small. It has to be a big story to make it in the front of the papers.
There is only one unforgivable crime for a police reporter: Miss a major public safety disaster. The police reporter monitors the police scanner to hear the chatter among the officers to find out what is happening. The first time an editor ever handed me a police scanner, he informed me about the weekend cop reporter who turned off his scanner to play some basketball. The next day, readers and editors of the paper in Colorado Springs wanted to know why the largest train wreck in the history of their city was not mentioned in the paper. That is why anyone who has ever worked any amount of time as a police reporter simply cannot understand how a major daily paper can miss a major civil disturbance as they did in Milwaukee in 2011. Either the reporters at the Milwaukee papers don’t use scanners, or they knew about this civil disturbance and chose not to report it.
White Girl Bleed A Lot Page 11