'Don't Make the Black Kids Angry': The hoax of black victimization and those who enable it.

by Colin Flaherty

  Louisville: Let’s Get It Started.

  Violence. Denial. Demands. Oh my!

  “There are still generations of people, older people, who were born and bred and marinated in it — in that prejudice and racism — and they just have to die!”

  -- Oprah Winfrey

  [6]

  Louisville has it all: The relentless black mob violence. Media denial. Official obfuscation. Forgotten victims. Pitied predators. Cooked books. Unfiled police reports. Confused citizens. And finally, the black activists and snarky enablers who alternately deny -- then explain and even encourage -- black mob violence.

  And oh yeah: it’s been happening a long time.

  So let’s get it started: In March 2014, hundreds of black people went on a three-hour rampage: Beating, stealing, laughing, destroying property, creating mayhem. Much of it on video. All starting at the downtown Waterfront Park, spreading out in a ring of chaos and terror.[7]

  City officials were quick to dismiss the riot. They said not many people were involved. Not much damage was done. And gosh darn it, that had not happened there in a long time.

  Not true, any of it.

  And the fact that everyone involved in the violence was black? Not a word -- at least from the reporters. Activists would play the race card soon enough, but soon after the riots, lots of words came from 911 calls and eyewitnesses and victims making it clear the huge gap between what reporters and officials said happened and what really happened.[8]

  Let’s start with the denials -- and deceit.

  "I want to stress that this situation was not common for Waterfront,” said Louisville Police Chief Steve Conrad. “It was not common for downtown Louisville and as a matter of fact it is not common for any neighborhood in our community."[9]

  Not true. Not even close. It took the local paper days to piece it together, even though part of the violence took place in its parking lot. On video.[10]Ten years ago, they could have gotten away with that. Not today. Thanks, YouTube.

  This beat down began at the popular Big Four Bridge, a converted railroad trestle that is now a regional bike and pedestrian attraction. A hangout. Reporters wore kid gloves, predators did not. Amy Reid described what happened to her father, mother and children:[11]

  “These incidents actually started around 7 p.m. when these vicious little hoodlums attacked my 61-year old father on the Big Four Bridge, in front of my mother and 2 small children, while they screamed for help and he pleaded for them to stop,” Reid posted in the comments section of the Courier-Journal.

  “Bystanders just stood and watched it happen, no one would help. Louisville Metro Police arrived, and would not let them file a report and would not help them get off the bridge to their car safely. My girls are still traumatized and cannot understand why someone would want to hurt their grandpa.”

  After the mob tired of beating Amy’s family, the attackers returned to taunt them: “They made mocking sounds like boo hoo hoo,” Amy Reid’s mother told Wave 3 TV news of the attack on her and her husband and grandchildren. [12]

  When a policeman showed up, he said it would not do much good to file a police report if they could not identify the attackers. Amy Reid’s parents and children had to walk past their laughing assailants to return to their car, without police protection.

  Without filing a police report. So it never happened.

  Samantha Craven saw another of the attacks:

  “I seriously just witnessed a man get beat (almost) to death on Broadway right by 4th street live,” she wrote at the Wave 3 news site. “He was jumped by AT LEAST 30 kids!! There was blood everywhere... This is the craziest shit I've ever seen in my life! I'm shaking... I wanna cry...”[13]

  Later, via email, Craven described the attackers as black: “As we drove away, we noticed the group still walking, laughing and carrying on a few blocks down.”

  Always laughing. We have a former prison shrink to tell us what that means, both here and around the country. But let's say this for starters: They are having a good time.

  WHAS TV News described the assaults as a “fight.” But it was hardly that. This was an attack. “It was a group of black teens,” said Craig Roberts of Louisville. “Wonder why they won’t mention that.”

  This book will not answer the why. It will answer the question of how it happens, over and over. Violence. Denial. Deceit.

  Viola Leffler was with her boyfriend and five children when a black mob stopped her car, reached in and beat her. “Before we got to the stop light, we noticed 50 to 100 teens coming to the middle of the street so we couldn’t go any further,” a bruised and bloody Leffler told WDRB TV. “All of a sudden, one throws a garbage can at our car.” [14]

  Leffler’s boyfriend “got out to see what was going on.” He must be good looking because he is not too smart.[15]

  He got pounded, big time. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew was throwing rocks at her car even as they surrounded it.

  Leffler did not drive off because she did not want to run them over, she said. “The boy came out of nowhere and punches me in my eye,” she said. “Knocks me out.” Somehow Leffler and her brood made their way to the nearby Bader’s food market, where they called police.

  But Bader’s had its own problems: The same crowd was on its way there. Soon 50 to 100 black people were forcing their way in, attacking store employees, looting candy and groceries. All on video. All the time laughing.

  The owners and workers at Bader’s laughed as well when they heard the police and mayor protest that black mob violence was unheard of downtown. They’d seen it before, plenty of times.

  Bader says crowds of “teens” terrorize the area almost every weekend once the weather warms up. "It's not isolated. It's been going on for years," store manager Adam Bader told WDRB news. He said the teens usually start in Waterfront Park and work their way south.

  "Usually we catch it in time, we'll lock the door," said Bader. "But you have to shut your store down for 35 minutes to an hour, and we lose $300 to $400."[16]

  Bader said “Thunder Over Louisville Night” in 2013 was especially bad. "All hell just broke loose. We had the VIPER unit, military police here. We had to shut down the store for a good three hours."

  Remember reading about that? Exactly.

  Reporters may be shy about letting their readers know that race is the central organizing feature of the violence, but witnesses and victims on the business end of a 911 call are not. Here are excerpts from a few 911 calls. You can hear them for yourself if you want.[17]

  “I am on the Big Four Walking Bridge right now,” said one caller to the emergency operator, “and there was a bunch of black kids that walked by and hit an older white guy. He was actually on the ground. There’s a whole group of them. They are all cheering. They are all excited about it.”

  And another: “We’re here for a cheerleading convention, and right across from the hotel at the bus stop, there’s a big bunch of black guys. And there are several cheerleaders walking from the hotel to the convention center and we’ve witnessed three times that these black boys are yelling and screaming and snatching at their butts. Earlier they went to grab the girls’ butts and the girls ran from them and they chased after them. Now they are back.”

  And one more, of dozens: “We were just walking and some dudes just went up to my boyfriend and punched him in the face. They stole his wallet and his phone. When I went over there to get them off of him, they punched me in the face and kicked me as well.”

  “Were they white, black, Hispanic?” asked the operator.

  “Black,” said the victim. Jeffrey Gordon told WDRB the mob beat him and his partner the night before.[18]

  "It was essentially a sucker punch, and I've seen people be knocked out that way," Gordon said. He says it happened while he and his partner walked down S. Preston Street at around 9:00 p.m. Saturday night. "Noticed a group behind us, on a corner, about 25 to 30 people," Gordon said.

  “He went on to say about 10 teens split off fro
m the larger group, coming toward them, then one teen punched the back of his partner's head. Police were called, but Gordon says no report was filed.”

  If you are wondering why this anti-gay attack was not reported as other anti-gay violence is, give yourself extra points for paying attention.

  City officials stuck to the denial playbook:

  "This was an extraordinarily unusual incident. Nothing like this has happened in decades so hopefully that will stay that way," Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer said.[19]

  No one believed that. Not even his police administrators, who a few days after the violence were wondering who leaked this memo to the press:[20]

  “Over the past few months, violence has been an issue that has left numerous law abiding citizens victimized, some with moderate to serious injuries,” said deputy police chief Yvette Gentry.

  “The kids we are finding involved are as young as 11 years old out without purpose or supervision. Some groups involve upwards of 30 kids that otherwise may be decent but take on the personality and mentality of the leaders that have every intention of taking part in criminal activity.”

  After the email was released, several members of the city council questioned why the city’s crime map showed Waterfront Park was the safest part of town, not the most dangerous.

  Oops, our bad, said the mayor’s office: “The city's crime map previously accepted only physical addresses and crimes committed in parks and were displayed in a parking lot at 5th and Liberty Streets.” [21] Thus, there was no crime there.

  Thus Louisville joined the likes of New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Seattle, Atlanta, Detroit, Rochester, Los Angeles and lots of other major cities that got caught cooking their crime books.[22]

  “If the police don't file reports on incidents then it looks like crime goes down,” said Vick Patrick. Bruce Miller agreed. And he should know: He used to be the County Attorney.[23]All this was not in the news stories, but the readers’ comments.

  Some of the violence took place in and around the parking lot of the major daily newspaper in Louisville, the Courier Journal. The black mob vandalized several cars there. It is not clear if anyone was working at the Courier Journal then, because few details of the violence appeared in initial reports.[24]

  Or if the editors knew, they did not say.

  Former Louisville police detective Dale Rhodes has a hunch which it is. He took to Facebook to put the racial violence in perspective after the paper removed his initial comments. Black on white crime is a fact of life in Louisville, he says. As is its denial.[25]

  “Over a period of about 5 weeks (I think in the summer of 1990) there were at least 20 incidents where white people were assaulted by a gang of blacks numbering anywhere from 5 to 15,”Rhodes wrote.“Many of the victims were severely beaten, some left for dead and others left with life-long career ending injuries. All the incidents involved black on white crime, every single one. Yet we were ordered, if asked, to tell reporters and the media there was no evidence to indicate these crimes were racially motivated. I personally witnessed commanding officers being far less than truthful with the media regarding these incidents.”

  Folks in Louisville say the black mob violence and black on white crime never really stopped since then. “The incidents to which I refer are just the tip of the iceberg,” said the former police officer.

  Here are just a few: a black mob beat and robbed Amanda Foster and two of her friends in August 2013 at the Waterfront Park.[26]

  A year before that, it happened again: “The mother says her son was brutally beaten in the head and kicked all over,” said the reporter at WDRB. “All he thought about was to cover his head and pray to God he’d get out of there alive.” [27]

  He did.

  Writing in the Louisville Examiner in 2011, former police department lawyer Thomas McAdam exposed Louisville’s about black mob violence in its downtown showcase: [28]

  “Sadly, this idyllic Urban Oasis is fast devolving into a target-rich environment for roving bands of thugs,” McAdam wrote. “The dirty little secret that City Hall wants to hide from the public is the fact that Waterfront Park is not a very safe place for families, particularly after dark.”

  McAdam went on to describe an incident where 200 black people beat a disabled person at a bus stop after a minor league baseball game. The man went to the hospital with a fractured skull. “But just how dangerous is it down at Waterfront Park?” McAdam asked three years before the latest mayhem. We may never know because “city officials hide the dangers from the public.”

  Despite all the evidence, some in Louisville are determined to ignore the racial violence. “Black mob violence trend?” snarked James Kemp at the Courier-Journal. “Fox News much?” Others chirped in with accusations of racism for those who noticed the black on white crime.

  The Snark used to work just fine. But that was before YouTube and Internet news sites and comments exposed it for what it is: Desperate attempts to stop people from knowing the nature and extent of the violence in Louisville.

  “I live downtown and the news organizations rarely report the armed robberies and assaults of students that take place just off (the University of Louisville) campus on a regular basis,” said reader Michael Aines. “The mayor wants us to believe the area is very safe.... but it is not after dark.”

  Aines and others have an ally in their quest for more transparency about crime -- at least on or near the University of Louisville campus. And that is a federal law -- the Clery Act -- that requires universities to keep their crime reports publicly available on their web sites.

  You have to hunt and peck a bit for it, but once you find the “news alerts” the school is required to issue, you see why: Of the more than 20 violent crimes of robbery and assault and home invasion in 2013 and half of 2014, every one involved black people -- except one.

  Here’s the latest one as this chapter is written.[29]

  “The Louisville Metro Police Department is investigating a series of robberies in the Old Louisville area, north of the Belknap Campus. These robberies are occurring in the late evening hours. The victim describes the suspects as a group of 3 young black males. All suspects were wearing dark clothing.” And oh yeah: it’s been happening for a long time.

  In 2010, McAdams (again) wrote for Louisville.com “about the recent string of muggings of students on Belknap campus. Despite beefed-up patrols and the installation of 175 security cameras around the campus, the home of the Fighting Cardinals has become a dangerous place; especially after dark.”[30]

  Now that you’ve had your vegetables, you deserve dessert: An answer to what is causing all this racial crime and violence, at least in Louisville. And what the heck, let’s throw in a solution too.

  For that, we turn to the smarter-than-average folks at National Public Radio, who looked at all this racial mayhem and thought highly enough of this explanation to feature these comments in a story: [31]

  We really need to address white people’s bigotry,” says Chris Hartman, director of the Louisville’s Fairness Campaign, adding that decades of disparities have blocked access for the African American community.

  That is white people’s work, it just has got to change.

  Now you know. Louisville wasn’t the biggest or the most dangerous episode of black mob violence. Far from it. But there are a lot of contenders for places that were -- starting with Rochester, New York, Virginia Beach, Virginia and Ferguson, Missouri.

  But let’s take care of one more bit of business in Louisville first.

  Louisville: How it all began.

  That wasn’t true either.

  “As a black person it’s always racial.”

  -- Jamie Foxx[32]

  Let’s take a closer look at the “attack” that Bill O’Reilly and others said touched off the Louisville riot. Which they never called a riot. Which they said had nothing to do with race.

  It happened two weeks before. When news first broke that two “children” were attacked and stabbe
d on a bus, and one died, the local media wasted no time in breaking out the Trayvon playbook: “Me’Quale Offutt played on the flag football team and other youth sports teams,” said black TV reporter Renee Murphy in front of a montage of Trayvon-like Me’Quale photos. “His family hopes one day he’ll be able to do that again.” [33]

  His aunt, Raushanah Daniel, pronounced the person who stabbed Me’Quale a ‘sick person” to stab her nephew For No Reason What So Ever. “He took a baby that was loved,” she said.

  And oh yeah, said Raushanah, it looked like the city was going to owe her family a lot of money. The other “victim” was a 13-year old girl.

  “Witnesses say (the attacker) came on the bus belligerent, and then is accused of attacking the children,” intoned the reporter at WHAS.

  The bad man who caused all this: Anthony Allen. He attacked the 13-year old girl, said the aunt. “Then he started with Me’Quale.” Cut to the memorial “reflection ceremony” in the park a few days later: Lots of people quite unhappy that young black people are “senseless victims” of violent crime.[34]

  “He was an eighth grader who boarded the bus to go home after a visit to his cousin’s house,” said the anchor at WLKY in hushed tones introducing the Me’Quale memorial. Though he never questioned what they were doing out well after midnight. “The latest victim of violence. Tonight, his family gathered to demand that violence end.”

  At the service, reporters dutifully ignored Me’Quale’s friends wearing t-shirts featuring Me’Quale flashing gang signs. They focused instead on how he was a victim. But by now, rumors were starting to spread that maybe Me’Quale was not the innocent angel that his family said he was. Raushanah started singing a slightly different tune:

  “We don’t worry about the details of what happened,” she said. She just wanted violence to end.

  And Anthony Allen? He was the worst person in the world.

  Then came the video. And all of sudden we learned about “the details,” as in who attacked whom. We learned it was not just two “kids” but six. And oh yeah: They attacked him. Not the other way around. The video makes that very clear.[35]