I think there’s a palpable desire to avoid confronting the truth reflected in this article at Huffington Post about the skyrocketing homicide rates in some American cities:
A new report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law says Americans are “safer today than they have been at almost any time†in the past quarter-century, but projected an 8 percent increase in the nationwide murder rate.
The report’s authors calculated the estimates based on preliminary FBI data from the first half of 2016. When the FBI releases its full set of 2016 crime statistics later this year, the Brennan Center predicts, the national murder rate will be at 5.3 murders per 100,000 people, about the same as it was in 2008. The national murder rate peaked at 9.8 murders per 100,000 people in 1991, nearly double the estimated 2016 murder rate.
The Brennan Center’s report also projects that the overall crime rate will increase less than 1 percent from 2015 and that the national violent crime rate will increase by about 6.3 percent.
The report finds that just a few U.S. cities played an outsized role in the nationwide uptick in the murder rate in recent years and had a distorting effect on the overall murder rate. Three cities ― Baltimore, Chicago and Houston ― “account for around half of the increase in murder in major cities between 2014 and 2016,†the report says.
The reality is that there is a problem but it’s not a crime wave. Consider the following:
| City | Percent black population |
| Chicago | 32% |
| Baltimore | 63% |
| Houston | 25% |
| New York | 16% |
| Los Angeles | 10% |
It practically leaps out of the table at you.
Cities with a large percentage of black population are having a problem. It isn’t just Chicago, Baltimore, and Houston. Detroit, St. Louis, and Philadelphia have homicide rates that are a multiple of the national average, too. I think it’s a combination of gangs and that police forces in those cities have lost the confidence of their black communities. Confidence once lost is a darned hard thing to restore.
I don’t know that it helps, but, in 1972, in Lincoln, Ne., I spoke to a Black male classmate about this very thing. He informed me, “all the brothers carry guns”. To my way of thinking, that’s the problem. No fistfights, directly to to the gat, if u don’t the other brother will.
Stay out of those parts of town, best you can do.
I think urban black populations are being sacrificed for political expediency. It’s pretty obvious, to me at least, that neither party establishment cares much about urban violence – or they only care in terms of advancing partisan interests.