If you want to know if you are talking to a Democrat, don’t ask. Look at the registration. If you want to know if they voted in 4 of the last 5 elections, don’t ask. Look.
A recent study found people even lie about how often they go to church. They actually followed them and found that people said they went to church twice as often as they really did.
The ministers knew their churches would be full if everyone were as devout as they said. But their churches were empty.
I heard that on NPR and read it in Slate so I know it’s true.[399]
Cops know about drug abuse the same way. Find one and ask about different rates of drug use among different racial groups. Like the ministers, they know the difference between what people say at home and what they see in the pews on Sunday.
And now the Washington Post, New York Times, John Conyers, the Attorney General and every other Rachel Maddow-wannabee want us to accept self-reported drug use as gospel?
You have to wonder what they have been smoking.
Racial Jury Nullification
We are just getting started on Black Privilege: Scott, Conyers, the AG and others forgot to mention about how the biggest racial disparities in court rooms often redound to the benefit of black people. At least the ones who are accused of a crime.
Call it racial jury nullification. Even David Simon, the Hollywood uber-liberal and creator of NPR’s favorite cop show of all time, The Wire, talked about it in his 2013 book.
You remember Simon: He’s the guy who was angry when the jury refused to convict George Zimmerman for the slaying of Trayvon Martin. “The season on African-Americans now runs year round,” he declared in his blog. “If I were a person of color in Florida, I would pick up a brick and start walking toward that courthouse in Sanford.”[400]
(Does that include Asian people? What’s up with them anyway? Why don’t they commit some crimes, especially the new immigrants, so we can reinforce this “discrimination and deprivation made me do it” theory? I know why: They are too busy working.)
Back to Simon.
Before he was a big time Hollywood guy, Simon covered crime for 13 years for the Baltimore Sun. Here’s what he saw. If you ignore the excuses, the rest is interesting:
As with every other part of the criminal justice machine, racial issues permeate the jury system in Baltimore. Given that the vast majority of urban violence is black-on-black crime, and given that the pool of possible jurors is 60 to 70 percent black, Baltimore prosecutors take almost every case into court with the knowledge that the crime will be seen through the lens of the black community’s historical suspicion of a white-controlled police department and court system.
The effect of race on the judicial system is freely acknowledged by prosecutors and defense attorneys-black and white alike-although the issue is rarely raised directly in court.
Race is instead a tacit presence that accompanies almost every panel of twelve into a Baltimore jury room. Once, in a rare display, a black defense attorney actually pointed to her own forearm while giving closing arguments to an all-black panel:“Brothers and sisters,” she said, as two white detectives went out of their minds in the back row of the gallery,“I think we all know what this case is about.”
Here is what he is talking about: In Baltimore, the Abell Foundation found that black juries were reluctant to convict black people of crimes, compared to other counties in Maryland.[401]
The study found “the probability of convicting an offender of the most serious offense in Baltimore City is .02, in the comparison jurisdictions it is .63.”
In layman’s language, that is a 2 percent conviction rate versus a 63 percent conviction rate. And it is not just Baltimore. In New York, the racial jury nullification is so common it even has a name: Bronx jury.
In Brooklyn, defense attorneys and black defendants are gnashing their teeth because too many white people are moving in: They are polluting the jury pool and actually looking at evidence and actually convicting people.
They call it the Williamsburg effect: “When Brooklyn juries gentrify, defendants lose,” said the New York Post in June 2014.[402]
“The grand jury used to have an anti-police sentiment. When I was a prosecutor 22 years ago, a jury would be 80 percent people of color,” said high-profile lawyer Arthur Aidala. (Now a regular on Fox News.) “Now, the grand juries have more law-and-order types in there.”
Says one Brooklyn resident:
“I had to laugh at the‘Bronx Jury’ line,” he said.“That's where I live and I've been summoned to Jury Duty eight times. I've never been on a case, never gotten past the Voir Dire selection process. The Lawyers know whom they want on the Jury.
There was one occasion during the selection process where the judge announced that anyone that had either been the victim of a crime or had a close friend or relative that had been the victim of a crime was to line up in the center aisle for questioning about the circumstances. The entire jury pool lined up. That judge must have been new, or from out of town.”
For the benefit of people who have trouble with numbers, here is a reminder: That is Reason Number Two why black crime is underreported.
It’s magic: No report: No crime.
More and more often, the crimes are not getting into court. They are not being reported. In White Girl Bleed a Lot, I documented and linked to stories in New York[403], Baltimore, Seattle[404], Atlanta[405], Milwaukee[406], Chicago and other places about how the cops are cooking the books.
Not just in the streets, but in the schools too.
Lots happened since White Girl Bleed a Lot hit the shelves.
Another report came out about how a major city cooks the books on crime. This time Los Angeles: “LAPD MISCLASSIFIED NEARLY 1,200 VIOLENT CRIMES AS MINOR OFFENSES,” says the headline. All during a one year period ending September 2013. “Including hundreds of stabbings, beatings and robberies, a Times investigation found.”
“The incidents were recorded as minor offenses and as a result did not appear in the LAPD's published statistics on serious crime that officials and the public use to judge the department's performance.”[407]
Black people make up 9.6 percent of the city’s population, but 30 percent of the general jail population.[408]
Hispanics make up 45 percent of the city.
The Times does not get into whether black people benefit from this under reporting.
People at cop web sites chimed in this happens a lot: “Cleveland does the same thing, to cover up their short comings, because they wanted to snare the Republican Convention, they did, Watch Out Republicans, there is a lot of crime downtown by the casino.”[409]
In the summer of 2013, black mob violence swept through the downtown Inner Harbor area of Baltimore -- where the tourists go. And they were seeing it and talking about it.
Black mob violence is kind of bad, depending on whom you ask. But when tourists start talking about it? That is an absolute nightmare.
Finally, Governor O’Malley stepped in and suggested to black Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake that she put a few more cops on the street. How about it Steph?
Not on my watch, she said:[410] "Returning to the days of mass arrests for any and every minor offense might be a good talking point but it has been proven to be a far less effective strategy for actually reducing crime," Rawlings-Blake told the Baltimore Sun.
This is for all you statistics junkies out there: If you don’t arrest someone, it is not a crime.
This is the same Sun newspaper that actually figured out the cops were cooking the books after the famous 2012 St. Patrick’s day beat down that went viral. [411]
Sometimes you wonder if reporters are reading their own papers.
City officials even argue about which city is doing the best job in arresting fewer black people. When Bill de Blasio was inaugurated as Mayor of New York in 2014, his big buddy Harry Belafonte blasted former Mayor Bloomberg for creating the “nation’s highest lock-up rate of minorities,” reported the N
ew York Post. [412]
And remember, this is even with the Bronx juries.
That was more than Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson could stand: Darn it, they were not arresting lots of black people there either, no matter what Mr. Banana Boat Song said.
“We reduced incarceration by about a third,” Wolfson pointed out.“We did substantially better than the rest of the nation. We didn’t lock more people up. We substantially locked up fewer people.”
The mantra around the country is the same: Break the cradle to prison pipeline that is putting one in three black people in prison.
Criminals are victims of something that puts them in a pipeline. Not the other way around. Got it?
Got it.
Following the assassination of two police officers in New York, city cops started responding to fewer crimes. Result: arrests down 67 percent. That means crime is down 67 percent. So the city is more dangerous and the people who run it are entitled to say it is safer.
No place is more determined to drop the crime statistics than Chicago. In White Girl Bleed a Lot, a Chicago cop talked about how they did it, especially around President Obama’s Hyde Park home.
“If something happens near Obama’s home, we rarely report,” said a member of the Chicago Police Department who patrols in that area. “We usually just call it vandalism. That is the way they want it.”
By 2014, the crime reporting became so in-credible that DNA Info in Chicago reported that a police captain opened up a community meeting by admitting just that:
You won't hear Lakeview's top cop talk statistics at community meetings anymore— even if numbers suggest that crime is down from the year before in the neighborhood.
Town Hall Police Cmdr. Elias Voulgaris said the biggest way to tell if things were going well was listening to feedback from residents. Besides, many in the community didn't believe police numbers anyway, he said.
"You'll notice I didn't bring up stats," he said at a recent community policing meeting. "No one believes the stats. The biggest barometer is feedback."
It was a rough summer for Voulgaris. At a heated August policing meeting, residents both decried the statistics showing crime was too high— a beat in Lakeview led the city in robberies— and questioned whether the official data could be believed.
Crimes are only documented when the victim files a report, and some neighbors and a well-read neighborhood crime blog, Crime in Wrigleyville and Boystown, frequently point out that not all robberies are documented.
Chicago Magazine did not one, but a two-parter on it: The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates: [413] “The city’s drop in crime has been nothing short of miraculous. Here’s what’s behind the unbelievable numbers.”
Spoiler alert: Bogus numbers.
Thanks to articles like the one from Chicago Magazine, the word is spreading. There is an even a website for it: Crime in Wrigleyville and Boystown, The facts about increasing violent crime in Chicago's popular sports and LGBT entertainment areas.[414]
Fresh questions about the Chicago Police Department's classification of violent crimes are rising to the surface today as prosecutors announce robbery charges against a 17-year-old in connection with cell phone "thefts" at the Wilson Red Line Station.
The Chicago Police Department issued an alert in the case on Friday and the boy, who lives just a couple of blocks from the station, was arrested over the weekend.
But here’s the riddle: If prosecutors have charged the teen with two felony counts of robbery, why are at least two of the cases classified as theft by the police department? (Classification information for the third case is not yet available to the public.)
Thefts, by law, are non-violent crimes like taking someone’s phone off of a restaurant table. But, robbery is a violentcrime—taking something by using physical force or threatening the use of force against a victim.
The Chicago Police Department, under pressure to improve upon impossible-to-believe double-digit crime“reductions,” is keenly interested in having as many robberies reduced to“thefts” as possible.
Chicago magazine’s 2014 report on the department’s crime-fudging methods is a must read for the unfamiliar.
How about Denver: From 2009 to 2012, a computer glitch stopped 12,000 crimes from being posted on the city’s web site where they are used to create a “crime mapper.” You know, the map parents and teachers and real estate agents and everyone else use to see what is safe. And what is not.[415]
Oops, sorry about that chief.
Second City Cop reminds us that someone even wrote a book about it: The Crime Numbers Game: Management by Manipulation: “Two college professors, one of whom is a retired NYPD captain, pretty much destroy any crime-reduction properties of the CompStat model of policing and pin it solely on statistical manipulation and misreporting.”[416]
If Second City Cop likes it, that is good enough for me.
How about Louisville: The downtown Waterfront Park is supposed to be a gleaming example of the revitalization of the riverfront. But as you remember from the first chapter of this book, there was lots of crime going on, but city officials were saying: Just look at the map: nothing there.
Turns out, crime in the park was being posted to an address outside of the park.
Hate it when that happens. [417]
Detroit? More than 11,000 rape kits sat in a warehouse for years. No one touched them until the summer of 2013. [418]
They also don’t do murder that well: “The Detroit Police Department is systematically undercounting homicides, leading to a falsely low murder rate in a city that regularly ranks among the nation's deadliest,” a Detroit News review of police and medical examiner records shows.[419]
The police department incorrectly reclassified 22 of its 368 slayings last year as "justifiable" and did not report them as homicides to the FBI as required by federal guidelines.
So however dangerous you thought Detroit was, it is 11,000 rapes and 22 murders worse.
Insert your favorite expletive of disbelief here.
Down in New Orleans, crime stats were so ridiculously low that the state and a city inspector came in and did an audit. Here’s the money quote from the WWL TV news: [420]
For the second time in three days, a watchdog agency is questioning the New Orleans Police Department's crime statistics.
A report released Wednesday by the city's inspector general shows that some crimes aren't being classified as crimes at all.
The state legislative auditor on Monday questioned why some crime complaints to the NOPD didn't result in investigations. Wednesday, the city's inspector general takes issue with crimes that were investigated but never classified as crimes.
"We found in this case, 177 times in six months, which is a lot, that there was in fact crime that was not reported as such,” said Howard Schwartz, first assistant inspector general.“And they're not doing anything about it.
Same thing in some schools. In Philadelphia, teachers were instructed to stop calling police for what they called minor crimes. No blood, no foul.
The head of the teacher’s union says his members are being pressured to -- stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “hold down the reported numbers. At the same time Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman has been trumpeting a decrease in school violence.”
"My officers are very frustrated out there because they're being told not to report things and that everything must go through the principal," said Michael Lodise, president of the school police union. "If they don't want to report it, it doesn't get reported." [421]
Lots of crimes in black neighborhoods don’t get reported. Like gun fire. The ShotSpotter, an anti-crime technology that features an array of wireless microphones that can pinpoint a gun shot to within forty feet, is the ultimate crime detector.
The system is 96 percent accurate.
Using ShotSpotter, The New York Times reported that neighbors called police only 10 percent of the time that guns were fired in a high-crime area of San Francisco
. In Oakland, 22 percent of gunshots prompted 911 calls.[422]
“Chief Chris Magnus of Richmond, Calif., a community of 120,000 north of Berkeley that routinely ranks among the country’s most violent cities, recalled listening to a ShotSpotter recording of a gun battle in 2010 that involved more than 100 rounds fired from four guns. “It was just mind-boggling,” he said. “This is like 11 at night on a summer night, and nobody even called it in.”[423]
In Orlando in 2012, “With the sheriff's election less than two weeks away, challenger John Tegg is ramping up his accusations against Sheriff Jerry Demings, alleging he falsified crime statistics by reporting more serious burglaries as lesser crimes, particularly in areas with large tourist populations,” sayeth the local paper, the Sentinel.
The Sheriff confessed: 84 burglaries were classified as lesser crimes. He fixed it. Said he was sorry.[424]
In Washington, D.C., local police reported, sheepishly, that hate crimes based on race were up -- and most of the victims were white. Hate crime numbers are the most bogus of all. Even so, let’s go to the Washington Times to find out why more white people are victims.
“The low level of reported race-based hate crimes, including the small number in which minorities were victims, could be a sign that minority victims are reluctant to report crimes, said David C. Friedman, director of the D.C. regional office of the Anti-Defamation League.
“In many African-American communities and other parts of the country, no matter what the demographics of the police department are, there are levels of concern” with coming forward, Mr. Friedman said.[425]
White on black crime is underreported in our nation’s capital? Do tell.
That was Reason Number Three black crime is under reported. Why as bad as it is, it is way, way worse.
Still not satisfied? Didn’t think so.
Don’t Forget Witness Intimidation.
Let’s finish up the chapter on artificially low black crime rates with witness intimidation: Stitches for snitches. Every high-crime police department in America says this is the top reason why they can’t catch more criminals in black neighborhoods: No one will drop a dime.
'Don't Make the Black Kids Angry': The hoax of black victimization and those who enable it. Page 20