And one year later, they missed it again. The Journal-Sentinel admitted the first they heard of the July 4th riot was when one of its readers called and told them.
Here’s the late account of a big riot:
One bystander, who was attending the fireworks, called the Journal Sentinel Wednesday to say he saw a crowd of possibly 100 youth screaming and running in the area. He said he also saw about 20 Milwaukee police officers in squads, bicycles and on horseback. A police helicopter was also circling above, he said.19
In a written statement, the police said everyone was safe. But if the newspaper went down there and figured out what was really going on, there is no record of that. For the second year in a row, I guess we’ll just have to take their word for it.
Juneteenth 2012. Big party. Parade. Also lots of cops, police on horseback, and helicopter.
What happened at this overwhelming black event?
We don’t really know anything from the papers, except that fifty-four people were arrested. A few days after the event, Journal-Sentinel columnist Eugene Kane weighed in. He did not attend the party because he was too busy taking a walk. “But most people I talked to said it was enjoyable despite the steamy weather.”
Look at the bright side, he suggested:
Unlike previous years, there were no flash-point incidents reported. No bottles were thrown at officers, and no fights broke out after the festival ended.
No ugly scenes were caught on camera, only to be replayed on local TV for days.20
Curiously, it is very difficult to find news accounts of these events.
People writing on one of Kane’s social media message boards (whatever that is) had a different opinion than his immediate circle of friends.
Chanin Kelly-Rae, an African-American woman who now lives in Seattle, said the arrests at Juneteenth Day recalled her own experiences.
“I wouldn’t go to that festival for all the tea in China,” wrote Kelly-Rae, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and spent several years teaching in Milwaukee Public Schools before leaving in 2001.
“I grew up in Milwaukee and remember all too well this event. I also know my parents made us stay away because someone usually got shot, robbed, there are fights and all sorts of risk,” she said.21
In 2011 the newspaper did not do much with it, but at least one local TV reporter filed a story about how disappointed he was that a “few people” were causing trouble. And most of the people had a “positive” experience there.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Few People Were Causing Trouble
I probably would have believed the guy had it not been for the video taken from a helicopter showing a crowd of hundreds of black people, maybe more, stopping a car, beating the driver, then wrecking the car. Then doing it again to a different car and a different driver.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Helicopter View
Other video showed thousands of black people milling about, with one hitting a policeman, and others ignoring directives to disburse. The reporter said that was from a “few troublemakers.” The video of the violence was rolling as the reporter was describing the wonderful atmosphere. And oh yeah, he said this was the second year in a row they had trouble at Juneteenth. If you are keeping count, by the summer of 2012 it was three years in a row.
Two people were arrested and four were cited. The local paper had lots of pictures of people cooking ribs, eating corn, playing basketball, and dancing. But not one shot of the fifty-four people arrested for disorderly conduct. Not one of the two people caught with guns. Maybe next year.
One blogger, calling herself the Milwaukee socialite, was trying to encourage people to attend. Before saying “See you there,” she had to express her reservations and explain why she would be missing most of the event:
“I will not be getting there until 5PM especially since June-teenth seems to be the meeting place for thugs with pit bulls, but methinks I can spend my lunch at the opening ceremony to snap a picture or two!”22
Kane and the Journal-Sentinel were also probably too busy to cover the race riot just a few weeks before over Memorial Day—at the same lakefront park where all the trouble takes place on the Fourth of July holiday season. Police closed the beach after violent disturbances involving hundreds of black people. The closure was reported in a very matter of fact tone as if it was a given. Afterward, hundreds of black people leaving the beach descended on a nearby shopping district where they wrecked and looted a Whole Foods grocery store and a McDonald’s. FOX6 News obtained amateur cell phone video showing the chaos:
“There were cars stopping, yelling at the kids, telling them to stop; one man said ‘stop fighting stop fighting’ they kept on fighting,” said eyewitness Allen Miller. “Other kids were trying to pull them apart. They just would not stop.”
“I seen like, eight motorcycle cops, two horse cops, about five cop cars, seven cops across the street. They were right here on the sidewalk right in front of McDonald’s, and they were climbing over the rail bottoms, standing here yelling to go, stop, or keep fighting,” Alan Miller, who witnessed the ordeal, said.
Miller is a regular at the McDonald’s, and has seen this kind of thing before. He says it won’t be the last time either.
“I figured everyone walking down to the lake cause it’s a nice day, I think something’s going to happen that day,” Miller said.
The incident is similar to one last Fourth of July when a mob ransacked a gas station just a few blocks away.23
Police made four arrests—all day. If you look at the crime statistics—this riot never happened. So for everyone keeping track, we covered the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, and the State Fair.
“Colin, what about St. Patrick’s Day, 2012?” you might be asking.
Nothing happened, if you ask police or check the newspaper. But if you go to YouTube, you see a lot of fighting, police with billy clubs, police on horses, and I don’t know if that police helicopter was around or not.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Fighting and Billy Clubs
Maybe the police scanner in the newsroom was broken that day.
Every once in a while people who read my articles will say: “That wasn’t a riot.” Or, “you have no evidence that was a race riot.” I may doubt myself for about one second; then all I have to do is look to the Internet for proof. I watched a YouTube video from November 2011. There were a few dozen black people fighting in a Walmart parking lot. Apparently the fight started inside and then spilled out to the parking lot. One person got run down by a car.
So you tell me what that sounds like.
The Journal-Sentinel might be sleeping their way through many of these disturbances, but every once in a while the self-proclaimed “watchdogs” wake up long enough to report something useful. In 2012 they did confess that Milwaukee police were underreporting violent crime to make the city look safer than it really was.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Walmart Riots
When Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn touted the city’s fourth-straight year of falling crime in February, hundreds of beatings, stabbings and child abuse cases were missing from the count, a Journal-Sentinel investigation has found.
More than 500 incidents since 2009 were misreported to the FBI as minor assaults and not included in the city’s violent crime rate, the investigation found. That tally is based on a review of cases that resulted in charges – only about one-fifth of all reported crimes.24
They do report that the department mishandled cases involving people who were arrested. But there’s not a word about cases of mob violence where police were present and no one was arrested.
OK, watchdogs, you can go back to that shady tree next to the barn now.
“But, Colin,” you ask, “what about River Splash? Or Greek Fest? Or the other festivals with fighting and gunfire where things got a ‘little out of hand?’”
You look ’em up. Big Mike knows. I am through with Milwaukee.
Except for one thing: In 2010 Juneteenth became a Wisconsin state holiday.
12
IOWA
Not Peoria or Akron but Iowa? That’s impossible. Isn’t it?
Surely racial lawlessness has no place in an out of the way place like Des Moines, Iowa, home of the Iowa State Fair. Maybe Des Moines is not as out of the way as we think.
The problem started opening night of the 2010 Iowa State Fair. Large groups of black people congregated and started destroying property. By closing time, inside the fairground, these large groups of black people were shouting it was “Beat Whitey Night” and doing what they said they were going to do: beat whitey. It was caught on tape.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Beat Whitey Night
There is no question that the beatings and vandalism happened. And nobody questions who did it. But there has been something of an intramural discussion about whether or not the black people were chanting “beat whitey night.”1
You can see one of the actual police reports at theSmokingGun.com. The officer wrote that one of the victims “suffered severe injuries to his eyes, cheekbones, and nose.2
One reporter claimed it never happened:
Capt. Randy Dawson of the Des Moines police department’s Criminal Investigation Division said that Murillo was off-duty working at Mercy Medical Center and filed a report saying he’d talked to “officers” who told him they heard it was “Beat Whitey Night” prior to the first incident of violence. Dawson says he cannot find anyone who will own up to making the claim.3
Gabriel Stoffa, a reporter for the Iowa State Daily, also had it all figured out:
“Teen flash mobs are partly our fault. Kids are lacking in adult efforts to guide positive upbringing … All we can do is keep hoping and provide positive examples.”4
It goes on like that for five hundred words. You could not pay me to read it again.
The great thing about Stoffa’s article is that it reveals his attitude, which is a perfect reflection of attitudes in newsrooms across America: It’s not their fault. It’s ours.
So we are lucky. We caught them telling the truth. In Chicago, Steve Chapman of the Tribune told us race had nothing to do with anything, and anyone who thought different was racist. Now we know that Chapman was lying to himself. What he really meant to say is what Stoffa said, that it was our fault. Thanks, Stoffa, but you might want to stay out of Chicago.
PEORIA? IMPOSSIBLE.
Let’s continue this tour of the Midwest. From Des Moines let’s go to Peoria, Illinois: The Test Market Capital of the World. Peoria was made famous by everyone from Richard Nixon to Bugs Bunny for asking the famous question: “Will it play in Peoria?” because Peoria represented everyone. If the people of Peoria liked something, most people would.
Apparently, this was a long, long time ago, because the people of Peoria today are playing a different game.
Let’s get some details.
It was the Fourth of July. (My these rioters are patriotic.)
The papers tell one story. The video tells another.
The paper talks about a dumpster full of live fireworks catching fire, exploding at random. Firemen are called. A crowd of thousands in the housing project block the access to the fire, and throw lit industrial fireworks at the police and firemen. They also threw bottles. It sure sounds like they were rioting, but curiously the paper called it a near-riot.
One officer drove through a locked, gated portion of the wrought-iron fence that surrounds Taft to provide additional access to distressed officers. Doug Burgess, the Peoria police public information officer, said as many as 200 pepper balls were fired before the crowd came under control.
“Every officer that responded said pretty much the same thing—that it was chaotic and like a riot,” Burgess said. “Every officer received bruises and burn marks.”
Revelers there have traditionally held private firework displays on the Fourth and previously made targets of police and passersby, though not to the same extent as Monday.5
I say rioters. You say revelers. Let’s call the whole thing off.
The dictionary says revelry is “gay or festive activity, a convivial occasion.” I guess the papers use a much looser definition. The papers also said it was traditional. That’s just the way things are in Peoria, right?
The video tells another story. This riot was in a Peoria housing project and all the people lining the streets as the fire trucks attempted get to the blaze were black. There were no arrests. The police fired two hundred pepper balls into the crowd before it dispersed. Playing in Peoria is certainly getting “convivial.” Look it up.
A few days later, twenty black women were throwing rocks at houses and attacked a man in Peoria. Burgess, the police public information officer, said the episodes were not race riots because the people doing the rioting did not say it was. Or something like that. At least it’s several steps up from the outright denial that characterized official reaction just a few weeks earlier when Peoria community group president Paul Wilkinson put his town on the race-riot map with this blog post heard round the world:
Tonight, around 11 p.m., a group of at least 60-70 African American youth marched down one of the side streets (W. Thrush) to the 4 lane main drag (Sheridan). They were yelling threats to white residents. Things such as ‘we need to kill all the white people around here.’
They were physically intimidating anyone calling for help from the police. They were surrounding cars. Cars on the main drag had to slam on their brakes to either avoid the youth blocking not only all four lanes, but a large section of the side street as well. Fights were breaking out among them.
They were rushing residents who looked out their doors, going on to porches, yelling threats to people calling the police for help.
Cars were doing U-turns on the streets just to avoid the mob, mostly male. One youth stated his grandfather was white and several assaulted him on the spot. One police officer answered the call. The youth split into two large groups, one heading north, the other south.
They were also yelling racial threats to the police officer but he was outnumbered. Another police car did not show up until after the youth finally dispersed and the patty wagon (van) also eventually showed up.
This is the fifth large mob action in about a month with smaller groups of 10-12 are out threatening children and adults a few evenings a week or later into the night.6
Peoria resident Kenny Sheridan told the Journal Star he saw the large group of black people “hollering and stopping traffic … running wildly around yards and porches. … He did not hear anyone yell that they wanted to kill white people.”7
Journal Star columnist Phil Luciano said Wilkinson was a blogger, not a real journalist, so his account of facts could not be trusted. City Council member Barbara Van Auken said Wilkinson turned the incident into a national embarrassment.
But did it really happen? Luciano was not convinced, in part because Wilkinson did not go take a video at night during the riot.
YouTube is full of video of race riots from across the country. That has not stopped the denials. But Luciano did remind his readers that, “police didn’t find any evidence of any wrongdoing. And no arrests occurred.”8
In October the doubts disappeared. In two acts of racial violence in less than a week, fifty black people surrounded two cars, shouted racial epithets, and made threats. No one was injured or arrested.
A few days later, thirty to forty black people surrounded a car driven by a twenty-one-year-old white woman. They broke her window and one man pointed a gun at her. No arrests were made. No photos were taken. No one called it a race riot.
In the meantime, city officials were mulling over “what should be considered appropriate behavior for teenagers and young adults,” the Journal Star reported.9
While leaders were wondering about appropriate behavior for kids, others wonder about appropriate behavior for people who are supposed to gather news, then report it without fear or favor.
In the meantime, at least nine race riots took place in less than one year … in Peoria.
Peoria? Des Moines? Milwaukee? Who knew? It’s those darn teens.
13
MINNEAPOLIS
This is what it sounds like when liberals cry.
After the first edition of this book came out, the dam broke. People in Knoxville, Charlottesville, Denver, Dallas, and all over the country started asking, “Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?”
No I had not. Guess I should get out more often. I had thought Minnesota was kind of quiet. Wrong. Totally wrong. Turns out Minneapolis has the strangest combination of black violence and official acquiescence in the country. Minneapolis has had more than twenty episodes of violent racial behavior in the first half of 2012 alone.
SCAN ME!
VIDEO: Marauding in Minneapolis
But let’s start with the biggest.
In Minneapolis, in 2011, more than eight hundred black people marauded through downtown, fighting, breaking, yelling. (Salon magazine got mad at me for not supplying a better count. Hey, the guy with the clipboard who hands out numbers at these kinds of affairs was on vacation that week. Sorry.)
A few days later, a gang of black women beat a white woman and her fifteen-year-old and four-year-old daughters after she confronted them about harassing her children over some sunglasses.1
A few weeks later, a group of black people attacked some kind of mobile alcoholic beverage cart in Minneapolis—stealing, threatening, all the usual. The newspapers dutifully reported the crime, and dutifully ignored the race of the attackers, except for the University of Minnesota student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily. The first edition of this news report said the attackers were black. That was missing from the updated edition of the student paper.2
White Girl Bleed A Lot Page 12