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.
@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.
mekka okereke 
Douglas Kilpatrick