Happy #BlackHistoryMonth !
Not ready to talk about Black History. Still talking about white US history.
Q: Why are Black neighborhoods so often high crime neighborhoods? Must be a lawless people! Violent! Thieves! Predators!
A: There is no such thing as a "high crime neighborhood." The whole concept is entirely made up based on our notion of what we consider a crime.
You may be thinking:🤔 Wait... What?! Not true! A high crime neighborhood has more drug use and sales, theft, and even murder!
1/N
But let's dig into that and unpack the racism a little.
Drugs are easiest to understand. At this point everyone should know that white Americans do more drugs than Black Americans. They also do more hard drugs. We don't consider Drs. offices to be high crime, and yet, opioids.
Black neighborhoods only seem like they have more drug use, because of how we've decided to define crimes around drug use, and how we choose to enforce.
If I tell you that Mexican drug cartels are criminal organizations that illegally sell drugs and cause tens of thousands of deaths, you agree.
But if I tell you that the Sacklers criminally sold enough opioids that their actions killed *more US citizens than Mexican cartel wars killed Mexican citizens* you will have to run and fact check that, even though you know someone that dealt with opioid addiction.
Enough people overdosed that the *life expectancy of US citizens dropped*. No jail time!🤷🏿♂️
The war on drugs allows micro-dosing and dispensaries, but criminalizes possession for poor Black folk.
Pretty much any test you can do shows that drug use by white folk is about the same, or in some cohorts, many times more, than Black folk. Yes, even crack cocaine in the 80s. White folk did more crack than Black folk.
There's a false narrative that white folk did powder cocaine and Black folk did crack, and that's why more Black folk are in jail for drugs. It's not true. Poor folk did crack.
But what about theft? If you park your car in a high crime area, you're likely to get your windows smashed!
But, most theft in this country, is wage theft. Mostly rich white business owners, stealing wages from poor Black and brown service workers. Between $8B and $15B a year. Yes I said "billion!" Yes I said "a year!"
But we don't define wage theft by employers as a crime the same way as we define an employee stealing from the cash register, or a homeless person smashing a window. You don't go to jail for wage theft.
Again, this is an arbitrary decision around how we choose to define crime.
We could very easily decide that intentionally stealing more than $1000 from an employee is now a felony! Just like intentionally stealing $1000 from an employer is a felony. But you know that we won't.
Civil asset forfeiture is cops taking cash and other property from folk who are too poor to mount a defense against the theft. Most victims are never charged with a crime. Victims of this theft are disproportionately Black. ~$2B in 2016.
Civil asset forfeiture is not a crime. It's literally done by the cops! 😀
If I say I was driving back from Tijuana Mexico, and Mexican police pulled me over and took $1,000 from me, you will say "Mexican police are corrupt!" and maybe follow up with some racist statements.
But if a Black US driver is driving in Florida, police can just take $10,000 from her in broad daylight, without even bothering to accuse her of a crime.
It's very risky for poor Black folk to do any cash based transaction in the US. Not because they might get robbed by criminals, but by the cops.
I'm not kidding. If you sell your Honda Civic hatchback on Craigslist for cash, cops can take that. If you cash your paycheck, cops can take that. You would need a lawyer that you can't afford, just to get your own money back. Cops stole more stuff from citizens in 2015, than all burglaries in the US combined.
So the 2 forms of theft with mostly Black victims, that make up the vast majority of theft, are not even considered crimes.
Our definition of theft is arbitrary.
OK, but what about murder? Clearly there are more murders committed in "high crime" areas?
Again, it depends on our definition of murder and even our definition of location. If I stand on block A, and shoot someone across the street on block B, where did the crime occur? A or B?
Do we define murder as where the body fell? Or where the shooter pulled the trigger? Victim focused? Or killer focused?
This distinction becomes important once we explore how we have arbitrarily decided to define murder.
Shooting folk? Murder!
Operating unsafe factory? Maybe?
Lying about public health data during a pandemic? Not murder!
Grifting supplies needed by FEMA? Not murder!
Cops shooting unarmed folk in the back? Not murder!
So the forms of victimization disproportionately suffered by poor Black folk, don't even register as murder. 🙂🙃
Even in the highest gun crime cities in the US, there are a *very* small number of shooters doing most of the killing. Typically fewer than 50 killers in a city of millions.
But we consider entire cities "high crime" because of them, because they rack up *astronomical* bodycounts.
🤔But... By astronomical we mean 500 to 1000 murders a year, 80% of which will likely be committed by this pod of killers, most of the victims young, Black, male.
But we don't consider *intentional* negligence leading to 10K or 100K deaths, as creating a high crime neighborhood.
Of all the things that police do with their billions of dollars of budget, the one thing they don't do well at all, and the one thing that some residents of supposedly high crime communities (AKA, Black communities) would actually want them to do, is stop these pods.
But they won't.
Dallas PD has a budget of ~$500 MM, and has 3,000 officers and around 500 civilian workers. They only have ~15 homicide detectives.
The other 2,985 officers do a lot of policing of "high crime" neighborhoods. Arresting lots of poor Black folk for drugs and other minor crimes.
I'm not going into assault, other than to say: If in 2023 your definition of assault is "Men beating up men that they don't know," then I don't know what to tell you.
If you know that most assault is "Men harming women that they do know," then no explanation needed.
There's a list of 34 things women do to keep safe.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-women-have-to-do-to-be-careful_n_7072080
Great list! But nothing on this list will protect women from the vast majority of assaults. It's missing the 35th and most important tip: It will be a man that you know and trust, not a Black stranger. His gun isn't for burglars, it's for you. Do not allow yourself to trust men with unaddressed misogyny and fantasies of violence.
For violence against women, the high crime neighborhood, is wherever men are.
@mekkaokereke This is not true just for women, it is true for everyone my guy.
Ask your local gay where they feel safest. There is only a subset of the population of men that most visibly marginalized groups feel safe around.
I know plenty of straight men that are not even comfortable around the lowest common denominator of men.
Objectives. To estimate US nonlethal violent victimization rates for lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) males and females aged 16 years and older and to compare disparities among LGB and straight males and females, controlling for other correlates of victimization.Methods. ...
Something that weirds people out in the US once they start seeing it. Yes, even in California.
1) What percentage of white US men have a concealed carry permit?
2) What percentage of those men carry every day?
3) How many people are in a grocery store at any given time?
4) Can you spot the telltale bulge of a concealed weapon? (A gun imprint, AKA "printing")?
Statistically, grocery shopping in the USA involves being in a building with very few exits, with an armed white man.🤷🏿♂️
Right now, all the US folk reading this are divided into two camps:
A) Um... Yeah? That's not some kind of big revelation. Everyone already knows how many concealed carry permits there are, and who has them. And like, what are they supposed to do? Leave the gun in the car? Not leave the house with it? That's the whole point of the permit. My friend takes his gun to the store every week. No big deal. I learned nothing new.
B) THERE ARE GUNS IN TRADER JOE'S?!?! I go there every week!
I have freaked out people I know from countries with actual effective gun laws by explaining why my first aid kit contains wound-packing gauze and a tourniquet.
(And, per the rest of your thread; I am aware of how much less likely it is that anyone shoots me, a white guy.)
Or the 3rd type
C) Yes, I know. But if I think about it, I will lose my fucking mind. But there's a reason I feel safer working remote in Mexico than I do at home in Atlanta Georgia. Because statistically, I AM safer https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings.jsp Atlanta vs. Cancun (I'm actually much safer as Cancun is a city and we're staying on Isla Mujeres, a little fishing village/day trip a ferry boat away).
@mekkaokereke Yes. And once you realize and see, you cannot unrealize or unsee.
Spouse and I moved to Oklahoma in 2007. At some point a few years after we'd been attending the same church for a few years, he listed for me all the men he knew of in the congregation who were packing every Sunday morning.
It was a long list.
And every last one of them was white.
Chilled me to the core.
(We don't go there anymore.)
@mekkaokereke @courtcan As a Canadian, this is mind boggling to me. I remember visiting my aunt & uncle in North Carolina. I asked my uncle if there were any guns in the house, and he said "hell, pick a room" so I asked about the dining room we were sitting in, and he went over to the china cabinet and took out a Luger.
For the rest of the visit I made sure to go the bathroom before bed so I wouldn't have to pee in the night, lest a sleepy relative briefly forget they had house guests.
@dragonfrog @mekkaokereke @courtcan
Thirty years ago, my father and grandmother had to go settle my great uncle Ray's estate after he passed. He lived outside of San Francisco. While there he was talking to Ray's neighbour. After a bit, Dad had to go into the city to meet with the lawyer. The neighbour asked if Dad had a gun on him, Dad said no.
The old guy yells to his wife to bring over her purse. The old guy hauls the wife's snub nose .357 and gives it to Dad. Dad said no, I'm fine. Old guy "Oh, you just don't want a girl's gun." Goes into his house and comes back with a .44 magnum. Dad declined again, but the old guy was adamant that he wouldn't be safe going into Frisco unarmed, and was getting agitated about it. So Dad took it.
Now uncle Ray's car was a '67 Cadillac Deville convertible that he'd had since new. So there goes my buttoned down, unassuming, sensible father rolling into San Francisco in a white pimpmobile with a .44 Magnum in the glovebox. Dad said later it was one of the most surreal experiences of his life.
We had long guns growing up, but just for hunting. We were never part of 'gun culture'. The whole concept is still alien to me.
This thread is excellent and @!#$. There are so, so many places where America has laws and policies that supposedly apply to everyone equally — but in actual practice are used to harass, impoverish, and kill Black and Brown people way more often than white people.
Happy #BlackHistoryMonth ! Not ready to talk about Black History. Still talking about white US history. Q: Why are Black neighborhoods so often high crime neighborhoods? Must be a lawless people! Violent! Thieves! Predators! A: There is no such thing as a "high crime neighborhood." The whole concept is entirely made up based on our notion of what we consider a crime. You may be thinking:🤔 Wait... What?! Not true! A high crime neighborhood has more drug use and sales, theft, and even murder! 1/N
I dated a Dallas cop back in the 90's. Every time he even SAW a Black or Brown person, he twitched.
We didn't date very long.
@kilpatds my understanding of crime, violence, why I am mistreated by cops, and the difference between systemic and interpersonal racism changed, when I worked on a criminal justice reform project with Demma Rosa. She gave us a list of books and papers to read. She stopped SWEs from writing code until we'd all done the reading. Brilliant decision.
One of the books was this one by David Kennedy.
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/141803766
Others on her reading list:
Sam Sinyangwe
Phil Goff
Mariam Kaba
Tracy Meares
@mekkaokereke Also:
"when I first started talking to gang members about this in Boston, I didn't get this. And one of my standard questions to Boston gang members was, have you ever been shot at.
And they had a kind of Eskimo's view of snow about this. And they would say to me, 'well, what do you mean exactly? You know, what if I was just with my friends, and their enemies were shooting at them? You know, they weren't really shooting at me, but I was there, and I got grazed. Does that count?'"
@kilpatds
Unfortunately you won't get primary sources on that figure, because if authorities could definitely prove who was doing each murder, then they would charge them. The closest we can get is what cops, Black residents, honest journalists, and gang members say.
The show "The Wire" was written by a former journalist for the Baltimore Sun. He loosely based characters on real people and phenomena. Consider last year's homicides:
Notice that most of the homicide victims in Baltimore were Black men, killed by handgun, concentrated in certain areas.
Season 4 of the Wire is an attempt to illustrate a few things:
* That most of these shootings are done by named groups of individuals.
* That within these groups most are armed
* But the vast majority of them kill zero people, but one or two known shooters kill almost everyone
* Everyone knows who the real shooters are
@kilpatds
* That the motives are not always drug turf related. They're perceived or real sleights or disrespect.
* That even though everyone knows who the one or two shooters are within a group, that no one will talk to the police, for obvious reasons
David's method of reducing homicide rates basically involves separating the vast majority of "armed but not a killer" folk from the one or two real shooters.
It only works because the phenomena is real.
@mekkaokereke /sigh/
Tracy Meares, per recommendation, has a long list of publications ... that I can't find except via cite. (Journals)
mekka okereke 
The Animal and the Machine
RamenCatholic 🐢🌈
secretsloth
legumancer Davy
1st Unoriginal Thot 
Callisto
バツ子（犬育てマニア
*
Court Cantrell does not comply
George Liquor, American
Jennifer
Sablebadger
Sami Juvonen
klausfiend has moved
Ginny Bee (she/her)
Michael Busch
jonathanpeterson
Laura Carter
Kevin
dragonfrog
Sir Osis of Liver 🇨🇦 🇲🇽
Michelle Kry
Nat
evana
This is Hell
Bodhipaksa
Cy
Nate Vack 🍴
TheJen
Douglas Kilpatrick