On Saturday, September 2, 2023, I woke from sleep at four a.m. and looked out my window in search of the waning moon. Media had described the second full moon of August as a “blue moon” and a “super moon” and I hadn’t yet seen it.
I saw some black men partying on the sidewalk around Costello Park. Lately the park has become a site of all-night parties. Men gather on the sidewalk after sunset and remain till near dawn. I’d estimate about fifteen partiers. They sit on milk crates and metal chairs that Paterson, as part of a renovation, using taxpayer dollars from wealthier towns, placed in Costello Park. The metal chairs have been dragged out of the park onto the sidewalk for the all-night parties. Eventually these chairs, one by one, are disappearing entirely.
Car stereos blast rap music. There are kids in this building, black kids, Hispanic kids, poor kids. I grew up poorer than these kids, but I never had to struggle for sleep against intrusive noise pollution. I never had to sleep through classes in school because there was so much noise in the street the night before. Loud street parties were just not done. In my hometown, fathers left for work before we left for school. They worked hard all day. They arrived home in worn blue uniforms stained with dirt and grease. They ate dinner, they watched TV for a short while, and then they snored in comfortable chairs till wives or kids gently roused them and ushered them to bed. These hard-working men needed sleep, and the town was quiet at night.
I mentioned the noise in a Facebook post. I met Merlin when I was a grad student at UC Berkeley. Merlin is handsome, witty, and charismatic. He’s a PhD, polyamorist, international bon vivant, and Burning Man veteran. He lived on Grizzly Peak, 1,400 feet up in the Berkeley Hills, where even small homes cost over a million dollars. As night follows day, Merlin said that my mentioning Paterson’s noise was racist. Only a white supremacist would gripe about loud and obscene rap from car stereos all night long.
“Noise pollution loudest in black neighborhoods” announced a 2017 headline . “This is yet another study that shows that communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of pollution … [noise pollution] makes things worse for everybody,” UC Berkeley researchers reported. What does it do to children’s little bodies to emerge into a world of car stereos, police sirens, screams, crashes? Noise pollution damages children’s minds and bodies in all the ways described here . And the all-night partiers don’t just pollute with noise. They leave trash like paper plates and plastic bottles scattered on the sidewalk around the park.
I didn’t see the moon on September 2. I had been at the window for less than a minute. I returned to bed. I heard a crash. My nerves burst into flames; my muscles stiffened; my breath became rapid and shallow; my stomach clenched and poured out acid. I have become very familiar with this bodily response to stressful stimuli. I’m an adult and can try to quell this response with practiced prayer and meditation. I know that Paterson’s majority minority children are too young to master these skills and, as a teacher, I know that they suffer in ways that I don’t.
I investigated the apartment. I couldn’t find the source of the crashing sound. I went back to bed and tried to sleep. I had to get up early the next morning to work. Sleep eluded me. Again, at work, all day, I’d be fighting to stay alert, to rein in my dyslexia and spell words correctly.
In the morning light I saw the broken glass and the shattered pane. Someone had thrown a rock at my window, just after I had looked out that window in search of the moon.
I phoned the police. “I’ll make a report,” an officer said. There was no visit. The blasé response was nothing new. A few years back, very close to this spot, it was my head, not the window, that was hit with a large rock. On that occasion, I had unwittingly stumbled between two gangs fighting. I regained consciousness, pushed myself off the sidewalk, and stumbled home through scattering black youths, eager to remove themselves as rapidly as possible from the scene of a downed white woman. I phoned the police. A police officer arrived hours later, spent five minutes in my apartment, and told me with a sneer that I should not be living here. So much for the leftist fantasy that white women assaulted by black men exercise magical power over police.
I wrote to Passaic County Sheriff Richard H. Berdnik about the rock and the window. Debra Wahba, his representative, wrote back “Sheriff Berdnik wanted you to know he has directed our Patrol Officers to give this area extra attention.” There are good reasons, beyond my broken window, to “give this area extra attention.” The block bordering Costello Park is about a tenth of a mile long. In recent years, in this small area, there has been a fatal stabbing, a storeowner shot to death in his shop, a fatal shooting, and an elderly woman raped on the sidewalk. I have, though, seen no enhanced police presence around Costello Park, and the all-night parties continue and have, in recent days, grown louder.
The Lou Costello Memorial Park has been featured in The Sopranos and the 2016 Adam Driver film Paterson. It was created in 1992. The New Jersey Community Development Corporation renovated the park in 2022. The NJCDC spins a sanitized narrative of the park on its webpage . The park, this narrative runs, “fell into disrepair … it became a park that not many people felt comfortable visiting.” The NJCDC saved the park, it wants people to know, by razing a gazebo. Gazebos apparently ruin parks. The NJCDC then took taxpayer money from wealthier towns and erected a playground designed for autistic children. The NJCDC and Paterson’s mayor slapped themselves on the back. They had “improved” this corner of Paterson.
The NJCDC’s narrative is a fantasy. The park did not “fall into disrepair.” The gazebo wasn’t doing anything bad to anyone. It was an attractive, antique structure. Addicts and vagrants slept in the gazebo. Police could have removed them. Crippled by leftist ideology, they did not. So the attractive structure needed to be removed. Wealthier, better-run towns, with conservative local governments, do have gazebos. Rockaway, New Jersey’s gazebo hosts a summer concert series.
A few years back, I was trying to prepare a lesson. My concentration was interrupted by the sound of a man screaming and blows being struck. Without even realizing what I was doing, I didn’t consciously register the sounds and I pushed myself to focus on my lesson plan. Then I stopped myself. “What the hell has happened to me, that I try to ignore the sound of someone screaming and the sound of fists hitting a human body?”
I left my lesson planning. I discovered a disheveled black man in Costello Park. He was screaming and punching himself. I began the interior dialogue I have conducted many times. “Do I call the police? Are police the best solution? Am I invading this man’s space? Maybe he doesn’t want police. What he’s doing looks pretty self-destructive to me, but maybe this is how he wants to spend an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. Don’t the police have more important matters to attend to? Maybe this behavior will stop momentarily.”
I asked myself these same questions many times: when I saw a teenage boy beat a teenage girl and tear off her shirt and bra, in the middle of the street, leaving her naked to the waist. Both seemed equally aggressive. Did either really want police? When I saw a barefoot woman wobbling in the middle of an active commuter road at rush hour. The many times I passed a man standing, staring into space, and I asked, “Are you okay? Do you want me to call someone? Do you need help?” and the man couldn’t answer. All of the people in the above encounters have been black. Would a white police officer make these vulnerable people tense and would things spiral downward?
One of my students, a leftist, once went on a rant about the vagrants in Costello Park. “Doesn’t anyone see them? Doesn’t anyone care? Our society is so callous!” Surrounding listeners applauded her for her “compassion.”
I had no patience for her tired charade. “Open your eyes,” I said, no doubt sounding harsh. “Don’t you see the Salvation Army across the street from Costello Park? Don’t you see Eva’s Village , founded by a Catholic priest? Don’t you see the visitors from the mostly white, suburban evangelical church who visit the park regularly, offering food and aid, the government aid agencies dispensing taxpayer funded food, housing, health care? It’s not, quote, society, unquote, that doesn’t care about these men. It’s these men who don’t care about themselves or about you or me. If they cared about themselves or about us would they refuse the aid offered them? Would they be leaving discarded needles and emptied liquor bottles on the very sidewalks kids walk to get to Paterson school number two?”
The emptied liquor bottles from the all-night parties really get me. Multiple trash cans are conveniently placed in and around the park. An empty Courvoisier bottle can’t weigh that much. The partiers can carry a full Courvoisier bottle to a public park, but they can’t carry an empty bottle twenty feet to a trash can. And, no, they don’t just toss the bottles. They place them, upright and empty, on the sidewalk, sidewalks that they know will service dozens of pedestrians. It’s like they want normal people to know, “While you and your kids slept soundly, trying to follow the rules that create a normal, healthy, happy life, I was a hundred feet away, making sure that no matter how much you try to make this neighborhood better, you’ll always live in a slum.” I want to say to these men, “You are so poor, you have to stop drivers in traffic alongside Costello Park to beg for change, you have to urinate and defecate a hundred feet from autistic kids in their special new playground, but you can afford Courvoisier?”
The New Jersey Community Development Corporation lies continue. Costello Park “became a park that not many people felt comfortable visiting.” In fact, before the expensive renovation, there were always “many people” in Costello Park. A cute, petite housewife and mother who takes great joy in decorating her apartment and the surrounding hallway for every holiday was in that park every morning. She had a little fluffball of a dog. Every time I saw that pooch I’d bend down to pet her and she’d flood my face with kisses. On hot summer nights, folks who can’t afford air conditioning would sit around waiting for the temperature to dip one degree. Don Kommit , our Beat-Era-veteran poet, walked past the park to the bodega for his canned soup. Urban kids’ only experience of leaves changing color in fall took place in that park. Thank you to whomever planted the park’s Washington hawthorns.
If the NJCDC really wanted to improve the park, the solution would be right-wing – changing the behavior of antisocial people. But the NJCDC, it goes without saying, did not take that controversial route of addressing antisocial behavior. Rather, it opted for the left-wing solution – an infusion of taxpayer dollars. Taxpayer dollars generated by hardworking people who don’t party all night and who live in wealthier towns; see here .
As part of its renovation, the NJCDC installed a Little Free Library. A Little Free Library is a wooden box placed on a wooden post. There is a glass window. Inside are books, free to anyone who wants them. A Little Free Library can cost about four hundred dollars . Little Free Libraries pride themselves on distributing “books that provide perspectives on racism and social justice; celebrate BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized voices; and incorporate experiences from all identities for all readers.” The Little Free Library in Costello Park was immediately attacked as if it were an invading enemy. Someone smashed the glass, ripped up the free books, and tossed the pages all around the park. Someone smashed the wooden structure to bits, reducing it to nothing but a stump in the ground. See here .
Some naïve soul installed a second Little Free Library in Costello Park. The new Little Free Library was artistically painted. Whoever painted it wanted to make clear that the Little Free Library was meant to help children access free, attractive reading material, like picture books. Dr. Seuss and other beloved children’s book characters were painted on the Little Free Library exterior.
The destroyer wrecked the new, improved Little Free Library almost immediately after it was installed. Again, the glass was smashed, the wood was pried apart, and the books were ripped up and the scattered pages remained in the park for days, no one bothering to discard them in a convenient garbage can. The expensive, newly installed playground for autistic children was littered with pages from Little Free Library books. Taxpayer dollars sucked into Paterson from wealthier towns “renovated” the park, and within days it looked like a garbage dump.
Someone could have installed a cheap surveillance camera in the park, and discovered who was destroying the Little Free Library. That would not be done, of course, for the same reason the vagrants and addicts sleeping in the park would never be removed by police. Antisocial behavior cannot be punished. It can’t even be mentioned. If you mention antisocial behavior, you are a white supremacist, as Merlin will remind you.
The fate of the Little Free Libraries speaks loudly. You can pour all the money you want into dangerous and decaying cities like Paterson. That money, that comes from taxpayers who do follow civilizational guidelines, is stolen and squandered. Until you change the culture of the antisocial residents in cities like Paterson, no amount of money will improve the lives lived in Paterson.
In the nineteen sixties, America, following leftist ideology, decided that there are no standards, and no behavior can be judged as right or wrong. Identities, rather than behavior, were to be judged. Whites bad blacks good. America decided that illegal drug use is glamorous and funny, and those who condemn drug use are reactionary fascists. Now you cannot speak of “addicts;” you must use the Woke term “person with substance abuse disorder,” thus erasing any personal choice or responsibility. America decided that schools should not discipline any kids and especially not black males. Only racists discipline black male students . America decided that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, “love makes a family,” “Tango makes three,” and Heather will not suffer for not having a dad. America decided that “all cops are bastards,” and that Michael Brown was a “gentle giant” who said “Hands up don’t shoot.” A rich white woman living in a comfortable suburb can believe all these delusional, toxic, leftist lies and not suffer. This leftist ideology kills people where I live, and where millions of other Americans live. Leftist ideology doesn’t just kill individuals. Leftist ideology kills entire cities.
The other day I was talking to a Paterson old timer. His parents were impoverished immigrants. They had been mistreated and malnourished. They were not savvy. They came to Paterson, America’s first planned industrial city, a textile hub and manufacturing center, in the hopes of economic advancement. When they first arrived, their neighborhood was like them. It was poor, but it was safe, and clean, and people looked out for each other.
And then, this old timer told me the other day, everything changed. “It wasn’t slow. It was fast. It was like watching a time lapse film of a rose decaying.”
“Tell me,” I said, “what happened.”
“Well, white people got beat up in the streets. You were a white kid walking home from school and they’d just jump you and beat you up. They’d spray paint their neighbors houses. Break windows. Suddenly the streets were full of garbage. Cars stolen or just vandalized. Tires slashed. We knew we had to move. When I look at Paterson today,” his voice was full of emotion, “it breaks my heart. It was poor, but it was nice. If you had garbage on the street in front of your store, the cop would ticket you.”
I’ve heard similar stories many times. The power narrative is that “white flight” was all about white supremacy. After whites left, neighborhoods went downhill slowly but surely, only because of white neglect: no investment, no services, no repairmen. This old timer, and others like him, tell a different story. They didn’t leave because they didn’t like black newcomers. Many were immigrants and had minimal previous contact with black people. They had not inherited a culture of white supremacy. Rather, black newcomers hated white neighbors as their archetypal enemy, the white man, and targeted them for violent crime. Neighborhoods didn’t go downhill after years of neglect. They went downhill rapidly. The neighborhood’s decline was a reflection of culture. A gazebo didn’t suddenly render a park unsafe. Human behavior, fashioned by culture, rendered a park unsafe.
Leftists demonize anyone who says these things, and professional and personal punishment follow. White supremacists read accounts like this and insist that their sick, evil ideology is correct. And most people, who are neither leftists nor white supremacists, don’t care. Paterson’s bullets don’t penetrate their walls. They don’t have to enter into a conversation in which no matter what you say, you risk personal damage.
The leftists and the white supremacists are both wrong. Antisocial behavior is not an expression of genes. It’s an expression of culture. Yes, the individual black people who choose to deal drugs or steal cars are doing something wrong. Everyone, including white people, does bad things. I’ve certainly done bad things. When I did bad things as a child, nuns beat the stuffing out of me, mercilessly, even, sometimes, when I didn’t do anything bad. My parents supported the nuns. I got the message: you do a bad thing, and everyone will descend upon you with punishment, including God himself. There were no excuses for me. My behavior changed.
An individual black kid committing an act of vandalism, like throwing a rock through my window, meets with a different societal response, one that shapes his behavior just as my behavior was shaped when I did bad things. There are larger forces at work, and those larger forces are largely made up of powerful white leftists who insist it is racist to require black people to live up to the same standards as white people.
Behind the young men making sleep impossible with their loud car stereos blaring violent, sadistic, and misogynist lyrics, beyond the man screaming and beating himself in the park, above the wannabe gangstas shooting black kids dead in the street, I see armies of white leftists pushing each behavior.
I see LBJ, wanting to monopolize the “n-word ” vote “for two hundred years,” enacting policies that damaged black families, but did ensure that blacks would vote for Democrats. I see smug Stephen Colbert, on his popular late night show, winking and nudging about how cool drug use is. I see teachers’ unions turning American public education into an oxymoron. I see Upper West Side voters choosing candidates who undermine police and refuse to prosecute violent criminals. I see Hollywood and music company executives who want black people to act out their own antisocial fantasies that they would never act out themselves. These entertainment executives profit from peddling images of black men as gangstas and black women as hos. I see the Smithsonian Institution using taxpayer dollars to demonize the very qualities that would rescue my neighbors from wretched lives. Being on time, being polite, believing in God, practicing the scientific method, working hard, are all “white” see the Smithsonian chart here . I see Pagans using my law-abiding, but poor neighbors as human sacrifices for their twisted religious rituals.
I see social media contacts, Merlin, Judy, Jean, Susan, Amanda, Ellen, none of whom live in black neighborhoods, none of whom read black conservatives, attacking anyone who voices any of these truths. When I invited Merlin to watch a video by black conservative Larry Elder, Merlin refused to do so, insisting that he would never expose himself to any ideas promoted by Dennis Prager.
Watch a statistics-dense Prager University presentation by Larry Elder, here . Read an excerpt from the superb book False Black Power by black conservative Jason L. Riley, here . These two black conservatives and other black conservatives like them agree: policies initiated and supported by leftist whites hurt black people.
I don’t just see rich white leftists building an ideological fence around antisocial behavior and rendering it immune to corrective consequences. I also see very good people, productive people who are white and black and brown and trapped in hell because they are poor and leftists have decided that poor, majority minority communities, unlike rich, white communities, will not have any standards or police or law.
Yes, I see black men partying on the street day and night. I also see black women in nurse’s aide uniforms leaving for work before dawn. I see black women dressed up for church on Sunday morning. I see black women driving Paterson’s buses. I saw my own black, female students working hard to do well in college classrooms. Black women aren’t just more likely to be in college; in one study , black females actually responded to perceived racism by improving their eating and exercise habits, while black males did not. I don’t know if anyone has the definitive answer to why there is a shift of “wealth and power” from black males to black females , but we need to look at this and apply whatever women are doing right to men.
One of my neighbors is an Hispanic immigrant. He has a landscaping business. He also has a workshop in a garage where he tinkers after hours. He also has cultivated “waste” ground along Route 80. One day he stopped me and made me take zucchini, celery, and a large bag of tomatoes. He doesn’t even know my name; he just sees me walking past his garden and wanted to do something kind.
Another one of my neighbors is a black woman. She’s a jazz singer. She’s been well-reviewed in the New York Times and the New York Post. She has been invited to sing internationally. She does volunteer work to improve her community. One day she saw me walking and offered me a ride in her very old but serviceable car.
A few of my neighbors are adjunct professors. They teach future generations. Adjuncts make less than minimum wage for the hours that they work. They live in low-rent neighborhoods.
If parents, teachers, and police enforced civilizational guidelines in Paterson, my neighbors who, yes, are poor, but, again, who work hard and play by the rules, would have better lives. The refusal, by those in power, to address antisocial behavior from a minority of the population, or the refusal by those in power who insist on misrepresenting antisocial behavior as something glamorous or revolutionary, betray the Hispanic immigrant who works like a dog, the talented black jazz singer who is well-reviewed and has appeared on Broadway but who can’t earn enough from her art to live in Rockaway, the adjunct professors who work in Wayne but live in Paterson, the housewife with the fluffy dog who loves to decorate, and the innocent kids who couldn’t help being born here and who are just starting out in life.
Sunday, October 1, I really needed to get away. The rock through the window was just one of a series of mini disasters. I’d recently gotten bad news about my health, and stress has been eating me up. I walked to Garret Mountain and saw a fire in the woods. I phoned Paterson police. An operator said that Paterson police would not respond. I needed to be transferred to state police. She put me on hold and eventually hung up on me. I phoned state police. An operator told me that state police would not respond; Paterson police would. She said she’d transfer me. I gave up. I told myself that I can’t fix Paterson police. I told myself that maybe someone else would see and report the fire.
I got home and tried to relax. I began watching a Bollywood romantic comedy; perfect escape fare. And then I heard an all too familiar sound: pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. It’s like fireworks, except there is no shower sound at the end. Someone was just shot, I realized.
“You can’t fix it,” I told myself. “Just ignore it.” And I did. I’m still thinking about that. That I just wanted to ignore someone getting shot to death less than a hundred feet from me.
My ability to ignore the drive-by shooting that took place outside my window was limited. I eventually gave up on retreating into the Bollywood rom-com and joined my neighbors in the street. We saw what you see after a shooting. Yellow tape, many police officers, one of whom was placing white markers near where bullets were found. Mary Taylor was a 22-year-old woman. Accounts say that she was an “innocent bystander.” This strikes me as an odd way to put it. Gunning people down in the street does not strike me as an appropriate way to end any human life. Of course she was an innocent bystander. The gunman, according to reports, was wearing a ski mask and driving a stolen car. As of this writing, he is still at large.
It would be another night when it would be difficult to sleep.
In 2022, after honor student and Paterson resident Robert Cuadra was shot to death while helping his grandmother carry groceries into her home, I wished I could write an essay about Robert that would make people care about him. That would make his name as famous as that of George Floyd. That would rouse America into addressing the factors that contributed to his death.
I now wish I could say anything worthy about Mary Taylor, whose death I heard as I was trying to escape into a romantic comedy. She was my neighbor. No doubt we crossed paths many times, but I didn’t know her. All I can tell you is her name, her age, how it sounded when she was shot to death, and what the pavement looked like after her body was carried away.
I wish black celebrities with powerhouse resources, I’m thinking Beyonce, Christian Cooper, Denzel Washington, Lebron James, and Barack Obama, read about the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment , and other research like it. I wish they would mount a project that would have an equal and opposite impact as LBJ had on the black family. Children who grow up with a biological father in the home are less likely to end up in jail. Period. End of sentence. You’ve got that information; now apply it in the real world. The late, great black conservative, Walter E. Williams, stressed the inescapable issue of the black family again and again. See here , here , and here .
Second wish: broken windows policing. Read more about broken windows policing here . Given previous criminal activity, major and minor, Mayor Andre Sayegh and police had every reason to know that this one-tenth-mile stretch of Paterson, NJ, would soon be the site of another drive-by shooting. If they had practiced broken windows policing, one 22 year old woman might still be alive.
Mayor Sayegh’s approach is different. “I am bringing taxpayer money into Paterson,” Mayor Sayegh boasts. “So what?” many Patersonians ask. “So what if you siphon money from richer towns into this poor city? The streets are still full of garbage. Crime is still rampant. Schools are still failing students.” “Paterson NJ Public Schools Are Falling Apart Despite $500 Million from State ,” and “Paterson NJ High School Graduation Scores Fall Short ,” are a couple of recent headlines. “Almost 90% of the city’s students failed math … while more than 60% flunked language arts,” Reported the Bergen Record in August, 2023. Because Paterson students do so poorly, a leftist solution was attempted: standards were lowered to make it easier for Paterson students to graduate. In spite of this leftist lowering of standards, “the academic performance gap between Paterson students and their counterparts from the rest of New Jersey grew larger in the past year.”
On his Facebook page, Mayor Sayegh, who seems to be a very nice guy and dedicated to his job, boasted of yet another project bringing money into Paterson. Romeo Habibi, who self-identifies as a dishwasher, commented , “You can change the city look but you can’t change the people mentality what’s the point of building and we can’t walk safe with our kids or smelling drugs” [sic].
Mary Taylor was murdered a third of a mile from the Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park. As North Jersey dot com put it, “Mayor Andre Sayegh hopes to make” the Paterson Falls Park “the centerpiece of Paterson’s revival.” The money poured into the Falls Park is like the money poured into Costello Park. Until someone in power addresses the culture, there will be no “revival” of Paterson. The press reports that the murder of Mary Taylor “was across the street from Costello Park, where the mayor held about a half dozen press conference in recent years to highlight a $1 million recreation renovation project,” and also near other investment sites that the mayor boosted. “David Soo, head of the tenants association of an apartment building across the street from where the woman was shot … took issue w
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binocul
Criminals, even in Paterson, are the minority. The rest of us are poor, but we are normal. We are a housewife and mother who loves to decorate for the holidays. We are poets and adjunct professors. We are honor students looking forward to benefitting from a scholarship. We are 22-year-old women just starting out in life. We obey the law; we don’t take drugs; we yearn for normalcy. A normalcy we could only experience in a world where kids are brought up by both biological parents, where the state does not undermine the family, where teachers are allowed to set and enforce standards, where cops are, as they always will be, imperfect, but respected for the necessary work they do.
Mary Taylor, 22 years old, was one of us. Though I certainly passed Mary many times, I know nothing about her except this: she was a human being. Her life mattered. Her death matters. She deserved better. And here I am, saying her name.ars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
Oh, the charmers who are turning up on the payrolls of blue-city governments.
Such as this guy, a man who works around kids:
Here's what he did:
In his day job, he's a public school employee, reportedly at Public School 20 Clinton Hill School in Queens, working with kids:
His family reportedly told the press that he was "mentally unstable." Whether or not he had a previous criminal record is unknown, and probably irrelevant given the absence of charges for crimes these days, let's just say he seemed pretty confident he knew what he was doing, probably from practice.
Who the heck chose to hire him?
There also was this pair:
They had day jobs, too, reportedly working for the City of San Francisco in its Department of Public Works.
They would do carjacking on the side, as their side-hustle, as the city paychecks flowed.
San Francisco has something called the "Fair Chance Ordinance ," enacted in 2018, its version of "ban the box" which made these thugs' prior records not an obstacle to their hiring by the city. It seems likely that this pair were its beneficiaries, given their history of doing time in "the system."
New York, too, has its "Fair Chance Act " law, enacted in 2015, and as a double whammy, a "Raise the Age " law of 2018 that means youthful thugs who have commited crimes cannot be charged until the age of 18, with anyone younger than that going through the juvenile court system which in some cases permits sealable records:
It has been reported that Dowling didn't have a criminal record, but who knows what he had given the Raise the Age law, which was capable of covering up any past run-ins with the law.
That's your blue city government in action, where a mere do-nothing civil service job for a bloated paycheck and scads of bennies isn't enough -- the employees are also committing crimes.
And this isn't one anomaly - policy holds that thugs can be hired -- and in the short span of a couple of weeks, we have seen two cases of thugging out while on the city payroll. And we only know about them because they got caught.
You'd think there are honest city employees who don't want these charmers setting the "image" for these blue-city departments, but don't hold your breath. The preponderance of these cases tells us blue city governments are veritable sewage dispensaries of society's worse elements. They set the tone, they set the pace, and with them on the city payrolls, you can bet the citizens are ill-served across a far wider spectrum than these two names might suggest. There must be all kinds of nefarious activity going on with this bunch, given their low hiring standards.
That raises the case for blue-city governments to be told by Congress to hose themselves out or no federal funding for them.
Image: Twitter screen shot
Victims of black crime matter, too By Daniel Davies
Two black teenagers brutally attacked an Asian mother of three, causing severe physical damage
Every year in America, some 500 whites are murdered by black assailants, more than twice as many as blacks killed by whites. The media need to report all of these cases fairly and without bias so as to counter the false reporting and misplaced emphasis in the national press. All victims, of whatever race, deserve justice because all human life is precious. The reporting of violence should not be based on race — it should be proportionate to the crime, without regard to the race of the perpetrator or the victim. Jeffrey Folks
D.C. CRIME
More than 90% of homicide victims and homicide suspects in 2019 and 2020 were male, and about 96% were Black. Nearly half were formerly incarcerated, and about 86% of them were known to the criminal justice system in some way. And, the study found, victims in homicides and suspects in these cases were “remarkably similar” when it came to prior arrests. Most had been arrested for property crimes, drug crimes, and unarmed violent offenses prior to the shooting or homicide, and had on average been arrested approximately 11 times.
WATCH: Karine Jean-Pierre Tries To Blame DC Crime Spike on Republicans VIDEO
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre this week attempted to blame Republicans for rising crime in Washington, D.C.
"The president—unlike Republicans—has actually put forth billions of dollars," Jean-Pierre said during a Tuesday press conference when asked about the carjacking of Democratic representative Henry Cuellar (Texas). "Let's not forget, there were billions of dollars in his American Rescue Plan so that local communities and the state and federal police as well—law enforcement—were able to make sure that they had the funding so that they can hire more law enforcement."
She added that "Republicans have not helped."
When Fox News reporter Peter Doocy pushed back, noting that D.C. is "run by a bunch of Democrats," Jean-Pierre deflected and said she is "going to speak to what the president has done."
Cuellar was carjacked Monday in the Navy Yard neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
"As Congressman Cuellar was parking his car this evening, 3 armed assailants approached the congressman and stole his vehicle," Jacob Hochberg, Cuellar's chief of staff, said in a statement. "Luckily, he was not harmed and is working with local law enforcement. Thank you to Metro PD and Capitol Police for their swift action and for recovering the congressman’s vehicle."
In D.C., according to the city's former police chief, "the average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times prior to them committing a homicide."
Published under: Crime Karine Jean-Pierre
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A Majority Of D.C.’s Gun Violence Is Driven By Small Number Of People, Says A New Study
"Their violence is predictable and therefore it is preventable," it says.
Jenny Gathright
A Stop the Violence poster sits on a table at a Guns Down Friday pop-up event at Cedar Gardens.
Every year, about 500 identifiable people in D.C.
drive as much as 70% of the city’s gun
violence, according to a new report
commissioned by the city.
The study was authored by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, which has been working with the District to come up with a strategic plan for reducing gun violence. It found that a relatively small group of people — likely as little as 200 people at any one point in time — are driving a majority of homicides and shootings in the city. And the study echoes an argument that community leaders in the neighborhoods most affected by violence have long put forward: If the government and community groups can come together to reach those high-risk people, invest in them, and make intensive intervention efforts, the city can reduce homicides and help save lives.
“In Washington, D.C., most gun violence is very
tightly concentrated on a small number of very
high risk young Black male adults that have a
shared set of common risk factors,” says David
Muhammad, the executive director of the National
Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. “This very
small number of high risk individuals are
identifiable. Their violence is predictable and
therefore it is preventable.”
Using interviews and data from the Metropolitan Police Department and other law enforcement and supervision agencies, researchers examined 341 homicides in 2019 and 2020, as well as nonfatal shootings that injured people in 2020. The study excluded police shootings, accidental self-inflictions, and “cases of justified self-defense.” Its goal was to establish a “common understanding of the local violence problem,” with the idea that once people can agree on why the shootings and killings are happening, leaders can tailor their solutions to the problem.
According to the study, there is significant overlap between victims of homicides and the suspects who commit them, in terms of life circumstances and risk factors. Many are involved in groups, which the study defined as a neighborhood crew, clique, or gang with varying levels of organization. Many have history with the criminal justice system, and a significant number have previously been the victim of a shooting or connected in some way to a recent shooting.
The study found that the vast majority – 85% – of homicides in 2019 and 2020 involved guns. And in at least 46% of the cases, the shooting had some connection to a group, whether through the victim, the suspect, or both. (The study noted that in another 26% of the homicides, group affiliation was unknown, meaning the number of group-connected shootings could be higher.)
More than 90% of homicide victims and homicide suspects in 2019 and 2020 were male, and about 96% were Black. Nearly half were formerly incarcerated, and about 86% of them were known to the criminal justice system in some way. And, the study found, victims in homicides and suspects in these cases were “remarkably similar” when it came to prior arrests. Most had been arrested for property crimes, drug crimes, and unarmed violent offenses prior to the shooting or homicide, and had on average been arrested approximately 11 times.
And a significant percentage of homicide victims and suspects had previously been victims of a violent incident. About 13% had previously been shot or stabbed, according to MPD police reports — but, the researchers add, that percentage is likely significantly higher, because that number does not include violent incidents that happened in another jurisdiction, or violent incidents that were not reported to the police.
The average age of homicide victims in 2019 and 2020 was 31, and the average age of a homicide suspect in those years was 27. Muhammad said this finding was unsurprising to him — but it might be surprising to some D.C. residents.
“I do think it’ll be quite surprising for the average D.C. resident to understand that the vast majority of shootings and homicides in the District are committed by adults, that there’s actually few shootings and homicides committed by juveniles,” said Muhammad, who has worked on juvenile justice issues, including as a top official at D.C.’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services.
By far, the most frequent known cause of homicides in recent years were personal disputes. According to the study, more than 20% of homicides in 2019 and 2020 came about because of a personal dispute — some kind of interpersonal conflict.
“What most of this is is a dispute of about two guys fighting over a young woman,” says Muhammad. “That is, I would say, the leading cause of violence in the country, to be honest.”
But one piece that’s important to understand, Muhammad says, is that nearly half of those personal disputes involved people who were connected to a group. It’s not “what most people conjure gang-on-gang warfare,” he says. “It might be, ‘We’re fighting over a young woman. You’re now dating my ex-girlfriend and I’m upset about it. That’s what we’re fighting over, but a risk factor — as well as something that exacerbates the conflict — is that we’re also both in crews.’”
The other leading circumstances in D.C. homicides were group-related conflicts, “instant disputes” or arguments that quickly escalate into violence, and drug-related disputes.
A chart of the circumstances of homicides in D.C. identified by researchers, using case summaries and detective interviews.
NICJR
The insights from the study make a case for how to reduce gun violence: Identify the people most at risk, and focus resources and attention on them.
Muhammad adds that age is worth noting — because it has implications for how D.C. can tackle the gun violence problem happening in this current moment. While many point to programs for youth as a solution to violence, Muhammad says the city also needs to be extremely focused on reaching older young adults.
“It’s extremely difficult engaging a 25-year-old who has seven previous adult arrests, who is an avowed member of his neighborhood clique, who’s not currently interested in services, but that is the individual we have to serve. That’s the individual we have to pour resources into,” he says.
And pouring resources into the highest-risk people will take more coordination among the District’s various violence prevention agencies and programs, says Muhammad, who was part of a team that at one point reduced homicides in Oakland by half. He says successful violence prevention involves regular meetings where leaders of various agencies and programs get specific about certain individuals they’re worried about — and then assign that person a life coach who can check in with them every single day and connect them with the resources and interventions they need.
This is what violence interrupters and credible messengers are already doing with individuals in some neighborhoods, but Muhammad says a better coordinated and better focused city-wide strategy could make that work even more effective.
“When you do that with enough of the people who rise that level of highest risk, which we’re saying in the course of a year, is about 500 people in D.C. – in one sense, that’s a large number in terms of services. In another sense, it’s extremely small,” says Muhammad. “And so to say we’re going to focus intensely on 500 of them is very doable, and if we did it right, could really drive down shootings and homicides.”
The findings of the study also make the case, perhaps, for an approach to gun violence prevention that takes gender into account. While domestic violence — the type of violence most often viewed through a gendered lens — comprises a relatively small portion of homicides, Muhammad said that in Oakland his team found that there was overlap between people at high-risk for being involved in gun violence and people who had been involved in some sort of domestic violence incident — even if the incident did not involve physical violence. Women are also significantly affected by the trauma of gun violence. And, as researchers found in D.C., the conflicts that lead to murders can often involve them.
“The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of shooting and homicide victims and suspects are males, and that leads many people, sometimes myself, to say you should focus intervention efforts on males,” says Muhammad. “But even if you think this woman’s not going to be the shooter, there’s many women at the center of shooting who could use intervention efforts.”
VIDEO: Suspected Serial Attacker in Custody After Laundromat Beating https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2023/03/25/video-suspected-serial-attacker-custody-after-laundromat-beating/
The Black Lives Matter movement has only focused on how law enforcement treats blacks. The movement has taken no responsibility for the victims of black criminals, and this is despite the fact that the vast majority of victims at the hands of black criminals are black. Yet the BLM movement never uses the billions of dollars donated by corporations to care for the victims of black criminals. Not a word, not an apology, not a regret, not a dollar.
Victims of black crime matter, too By Daniel Davies
Two black teenagers brutally attacked an Asian mother of three, causing severe physical damage
Nhung Truong, 44, mother of three, has had a tough go in the United States. Seven years ago, she lost her husband to liver cancer. She accepted the responsibility of raising her three children and caring for her mother, too, as the sole wage earner. On February 13th, 2023, she stopped at a Bank of America ATM in Houston, Texas, withdrawing $4,300 she intended to use to pay for a trip to visit Vietnam with her family. Then she drove to a shopping mall 24 miles away.
Unknown to her, a young black man and woman had been watching her at the ATM. They followed her for 24 miles to China Town, where the young man, Joseph Harrell, 17, brutally attacked her . He body slammed the small Asian woman so violently that she is now partially paralyzed with spinal cord damage, unable to move her left leg. Harrell made his getaway in a car driven by Zy’Nika Ayesha Woods, 19. They have just recently been arrested . After a month in the hospital, Nhung was released to home care. She will be under care for two years. A GoFundMe campaign has already raised $300,000 for her care.
Image: The attack on Nhung Truong . YouTube screen grab.
The attack only gained attention after Andy Ngo, working with other Asians, brought the crime to public attention about a week ago. The local media had not given the crime attention until the New York Post ran an article.
The Black Lives Matter movement has only focused on how law enforcement treats blacks. The movement has taken no responsibility for the victims of black criminals, and this is despite the fact that the vast majority of victims at the hands of black criminals are black. Yet the BLM movement never uses the billions of dollars donated by corporations to care for the victims of black criminals. Not a word, not an apology, not a regret, not a dollar.
I prayed about this situation at my peaceful and beautiful prayer place in rural Texas. I could not shake my sadness about Nhung Truong’s brutal assault and horrific injuries, and the desperate financial situation her family finds themselves in. Nor could I forget the desperate plight in which many black Americans find themselves trapped, their voices unheard, their sufferings unnoted, their murders ignored. In Chicago, 71 black victims have been shot and killed since January 1, 2023. Since these 71 people were victims of black criminals, BLM has not a tear to shed or dollar to give them.
I asked God why do you permit this to happen? And I realized that God is in anguish over the situation his children find themselves in. He could change the situation in a second, yet that is not the way He works. Since the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, He has depended upon us to do our part to solve the problems that we face in the world. For him to stand back and permit these atrocities by evil persons is the most exasperating challenge he faces. Yet only that way can we, His beloved children, fulfill our responsibility and fully become the Children of God.
So what can we do to deal with the terrible situations that Nhung Trung and many others like her face? The billions donated to Black Lives Matter need to be shifted from defending criminals (or buying houses) to black philanthropic organizations run by churches, which are closest to members of black communities. This is not a partisan issue but a grand humanitarian endeavor. The vast majority of funds would go to black families who have suffered from black-on-black crime. People could model these initiatives on George H. W. Bush’s idea of a thousand points of light , which inspired an organization dedicated to volunteerism .
Who could head up such a grand endeavor? A few suggestions include Dr. Bernice A. King, Martin Luther King’s daughter; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard professor; Dr. Ben Carson, a brain surgeon; or Hak Ja Han (Moon), the wife of the founder of the Washington Times.
It’s time to remember that, among the lives that matter in America are those who find themselves victimized by the people who Black Lives Matter funds. We have a moral obligation to help them.
WATCH: Soros-Backed Philadelphia DA Reassures 'Fundamentally Law-Abiding' Looters VIDEO
Soft-on-crime Philadelphia district attorney Larry Krasner (D.), who is overseeing a murder wave in the city, said he will find out whether violent looters who were caught on video are "fundamentally law-abiding people."
"We'll look carefully to see whether this is a one-off situation and they're fundamentally law-abiding people, hold them accountable one way," Krasner told Fox 29 late last month, "or whether they are criminals."
Looters in late September hit stores throughout Philadelphia, which "stretched the resources of the Philadelphia Police Department" to the limit, according to Fox 29 . The lootings came as Philadelphia faces an unprecedented crime spike under Krasner.
The D.A., who in 2017 received millions of dollars from left-wing megadonor George Soros, campaigned as a progressive prosecutor who would overhaul Philadelphia's criminal justice system. During the 2020 George Floyd riots, he called for "policing" to be "defunded in favor of things that work better." Since then, murders throughout the city have skyrocketed to their highest numbers in decades, with more than 500 Philadelphians killed last year, the Washington Free Beacon reported .
The Pennsylvania legislature last year moved to impeach Krasner, saying he "failed to prosecute violent offenders, withheld relevant facts in cases, and violated victims' rights," the Free Beacon reported. The move failed after a Democratic judge intervened to halt proceedings.
While Krasner this month said he would "very, very vigorously" prosecute a motorcyclist whom cameras caught stomping in the back window of a car, he has not abandoned his "criminal justice reform" priorities.
"We're going to prosecute people in an even-handed way," Krasner said last month, bemoaning "any judge" who "thinks there is a caste system and some people get better treatment than others."
Published under: Crime Criminal Justice Reform George Soros Larry Krasner Pennsylvania Philadelphia
Black Lives Matter Co-Founder Patrisse Cullors Called for the End of Israel at Harvard: ‘Our Generation’s South Africa’ Michael Tullberg/Getty Images 3:32
Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors once called for the end of Israel at a public talk in 2015, resurfaced video shows.
“Palestine is our generation’s South Africa. If we don’t step up boldly and courageously to end the imperialist project that’s called Israel, we’re doomed,” Cullors claimed during a panel at the Harvard Law School.
Fox News reports:
The Human Rights Program at Harvard law hosted Cullors and several other activists in April of 2015 for a panel titled, “Globalizing Ferguson: Racialized Policing and International Resistance.” During the panel, Cullors shared her experience in visiting the West Bank and Gaza in 2015 as part of a delegation with other far-left activists. She claims she witnessed “violence” and the “terror” against Palestinians which was caused by Israelis and “Zionists.”
She told the audience one way for Americans to fight back was to join the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to pressure Israel to change its policies toward Palestinians.
Cullors resigned in May 2021 over the controversy regarding her personal wealth, though the far-left activist and the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation (BLMGNF) denied that money was behind the decision.
Patrisse Cullors during a performance at The Broad on March 18, 2023 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Ryan Miller/Getty Images for The Broad)
As Breitbart New s reported:
Real estate website Dirt.com reported that the “37-year-old social justice visionary” noted that Cullors (also known by her married, hyphenated surname, Khan-Cullors) had bought a $1.4 million compound in the Los Angeles enclave of Topanga. The New York Post reported that the Topanga home was one of four Cullors owned, which included a Georgia ranch with an airplane hangar. (Cullors, like many other prominent Black Lives Matter leaders, is a “trained Marxist .”)
The revelations prompted more protest from activists, and spurred `calls for an independent investigation of the movement’s finances.
Earlier this week, the Black Lives Matter Grassroots organization issued a statement excusing the actions of Hamas — the Palestinian terror organization that launched an attack on Israel this week, killing at least 1,200 people and wounding 2,700 more.
Black Lives Matter Grassroots, which represents 26 local chapters of the organization, said it stands “in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
“As the world is faced with deep questions about self-determination, as well all desire and pray for a world of peace, we must stand unwaveringly on the side of the oppressed,” the statement read. “When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”
Black Lives Matter Grassroots also called on the U.S. government to cease sending aid to Israel.
“For lasting peace to come, the entire apartheid system must be dismantled,” the group added. “The war on the Palestinian people must cease. We call on the United States government to immediately stop funding war and redirect the $4 billion in annual spending to repair the damage caused by U.S.-backed wars, military air strikes, coups, and destabilizing interventions against oppressed people around the world.”
HARDLY SURPRISING GIVEN BLM IS THE FRONT FOR BLACK VIOLENCE, HATE AND RACISM IN AMERICA.
Black Lives Matter Grassroots organization showed support for the Palestinian militant group Hamas on Tuesday as the terrorist group launched the deadliest attack on Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Black Lives Matter Grassroots, which represents 26 local BLM chapters across the country, issued a lengthy statement “in solidarity with the Palestinian people.”
Hamas launched a terror attack on Israel from Gaza over the weekend on the Jewish holiday of Shemini Atzeret, the final day of the annual High Holy Day cycle. The attack has resulted in over 900 deaths and at least 2,500 wounded, according to the latest reports. At least 11 Americans were also killed during the violent terror attacks.
Firefighters douse a car blaze in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon after a rocket attack from Gaza on October 9, 2023. Stunned by the unprecedented assault on its territory, a grieving Israel has counted over 700 dead and launched a withering barrage of strikes on Gaza that have raised the death toll there to 493 according to Palestinian officials
The statement references the violent attacks on Israel as an understandable “desperate act of self-defense.”
“As the world is faced with deep questions about self-determination, as well all desire and pray for a world of peace, we must stand unwaveringly on the side of the oppressed,” the statement read . “When a people have been subject to decades of apartheid and unimaginable violence, their resistance must not be condemned, but understood as a desperate act of self-defense.”
The statement continued:
Black Lives Matter Grassroots stands in solidarity with our Palestinian family who are currently resisting 57 years of settler colonialism and apartheid. As Black people continue the fight to end militarism and mass incarcerations in our own communities, let us understand the resistance in Palestine as an attempt to tear down the gates of the world’s biggest open air prison.
The organization also recognized what it claims are “clear parallels between Black and Palestinian people.”
The statement also seemed to call on the United States to stop funding Israel.
“For lasting peace to come, the entire apartheid system must be dismantled,” BLM Grassroots said. “The war on the Palestinian people must cease. We call on the United States government to immediately stop funding war and redirect the $4 billion in annual spending to repair the damage caused by U.S.-backed wars, military air strikes, coups, and destabilizing interventions against oppressed people around the world.”
The Chicago chapter of Black Lives Matter also showed support for the Palestinian cause, posting a photo that reads, “I stand with Palestine.” The photo also featured a paraglider with the Palestinian flag, which is notable because Hamas gunmen paraglided into a music festival in Israel and attacked the attendees.
Black Lives Matter activists have a lengthy history of supporting Palestinian causes during times when Hamas has waged violent attacks on Israel.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter .
CNN’s Tapper: Last Few Days Really Eye-Opening to ‘Antisemitism on the Left’ 1:59
CNN anchor Jake Tapper said Tuesday on his show “The Lead” that after the Hamas terror attacks in Israel, the last few days have been a real eye-opening period “in terms of antisemitism on the left.”
Tapper said, “So you have a Democratic colleague from Michigan, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American to serve in Congress, and she released a statement. ‘I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost. The path to peace must include lifting the blockade and, ending the occupation and dismantling the apartheid system that creates the suffocating, dehumanizing conditions that could lead to resistance. As longs our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.’ What was your reaction when you heard Congresswoman Tlaib’s statement?”
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said, “To me, I think the hardest part, not just about that statement but a number of statements that have come out from organizations and individuals, I don’t question whether someone has the right to be angry at the Israeli government, I question their inability to condemn grievous, grievous violence and that is what has been difficult.”
Tapper said, “There does seem to be, look, we spent a lot of time during the Trump years looking at antisemitism on the right. This does. These last few days have been a real eye-opening period for a lot of people, a lot of Democrats and a lot progressives in terms of antisemitism on the left. A lot of people who seemed more shocks at dehumanizing language to describe Hamas than what Hamas actually perpetrated on Saturday.”
Slotkin said, “Yeah, I mean, look, antisemitism should be stamped out wherever it is on the right, or on the left.”
Follow Pam Key on Twitter @pamkeyNEN
[Order David Horowitz’s book: The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement is Destroying America .]
Editor’s note: Because of Hamas’ current barbaric terror attack inside Israel, it is vital to stress how the Biden administration has empowered the terror group in Gaza – and helped spawn its current destruction inside the Jewish state. Frontpage Editors have therefore deemed it urgent to run an article by David Horowitz and John Perazzo that originally appeared in PJMedia.com in its April 13, 2021 issue: Biden’s Team of Racists and Anti-Semites: An Anti-American Coalition in the Heart of the White House .
Don’t miss it!
Formally introducing his cabinet to the public, Joe Biden proudly declared: “This is the first [time] in American history that the Cabinet looks like America.” Looking at the actual appointments and not just the gender, skin color and ethnic origins of the Biden team, it is a team that may look like America but doesn’t think like America. In fact, it is a team whose outlook is anti -American.
Take Biden’s Vice Presidential choice, Kamala Harris , whose antipathy for America oozes from her every pore. At a February 2019 presidential campaign stop, for example she said Columbus Day should be replaced with “Indigenous People’s Day” because “we are the scene of a crime when it comes to what we did with slavery and Jim Crow and institutionalized racism in this country.” This is an accurate summary of the way the Biden White House views its native land, and it is a view encapsulating three big lies.
What America did with the slave system it inherited from the British was end it. America’s abolition campaign began with its revolutionary proclamation that all men are created equal and have a God given right to liberty. America began implementing this right in 1787, the first year of its existence, with the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance, outlawing slavery in a territory the size of the original 13 colonies. Within twenty years slavery was abolished in all the northern states. As for the “original sin” of enslaving the black Africans brought to this country that properly is the achievement of the Africans themselves who then sold their brothers and sisters to Europeans at slave auctions in Ghana and Benin.
All forms of institutional and systemic racism including Jim Crow were outlawed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In one of his first statements as president Biden claimed that “systemic racism” has been built into every aspect of our system.” This is a bald-faced lie. The opposite is the truth. Under the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, systemic racism is outlawed in America. With the exception of affirmative action policies sanctioned by the Supreme Court, there is no systemic racism in America,. If there were systemic racism, there would be a tsunami of legal suits to punish those who practiced it. There is no such tsunami because the claim is a baseless lie.
When 220 U.S. cities were attacked by criminal Black Lives Matter mobs last summer Kamala Harris called them “a coalition of conscience,” and supported the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which made bail payments on behalf of people who were arrested for criminal acts. At the time, Harris claimed that “the life of a Black person in America … has never been treated as fully human….” Tell that to the white majorities who elected Barack Obama the 43rd president of the United States twice. “America,” she claimed “has never fully addressed the systemic racism that has existed in our country.” Chinese communist propagandists couldn’t have framed this malicious indictment better. Not surprisingly Harris has praised racial arsonist and anti-Semite Al Sharpton as a “friend [who] has spent his life fighting for what’s right.”
Picking a cabinet and White House team by skin color and gender, is, of course, racist and “sexist” in their pure forms. Biden’s transgender Assistant Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, picked to celebrate transgenderism is, in her actual political life, a criminal cohort of Andrew Cuomo, removing her own mother from a nursing home, as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, while committing COVID-19 patients to nursing homes where they killed thousands of not so well-connected elderly residents.
Biden’s Assistant Attorney General in charge of Civil Rights, Kristen Clarke , is the first black woman to be appointed to the position. She is also a racist, praising Farrakhan disciple Tamika Mallory and holding the Farrakhanite view that melanin which is responsible for rich black skin color “endows blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities” than white people. Clarke has long embraced the doctrines of critical race theory , a crackpot racism which maintains that America is permanently racist to its core, and that consequently the nation’s various institutions and traditions are, by definition, invalid. In 2020, Clarke denounced the “systemic racism that pervades every aspect of our lives, especially when it comes to policing and the operation of the criminal justice system of our country.” For reasons already mentioned this is a racist invention. If police departments were systemically racist how explain all the black police chiefs running those departments in major American cities, or the absence of major lawsuits invoking the Civil Rights Act which outlaws such practices?
In November 2020, Clarke said that collegiate policies permitting black students to be admitted under far lower academic standards than Asian students are “critical for promoting diversity … in an increasingly multi-ethnic society.” This is the statement of a racist who puts skin color first and meritocracy at the end of the line.
Linda Thomas-Greenfield is the second black U.S. Ambassador to the UN. For those not addicted to the new racism in fashion in the Democrat Party, her maiden address to the UN General Assembly praising the malicious and historically illiterate 1619 Project , is cause for alarm. The project conceived by a black racist frames America as a nation defined by slavery and racism, and denies that white America played any role in liberating blacks or creating a society which has made them the richest, freest, most privileged blacks anywhere in the world, including black Africa and the Caribbean. Naturally she has praised the Marxist Black Lives Matter organization as a noble movement for “racial justice.”
Late in his presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order establishing The 1776 Commission, an advisory committee designed to encourage American schools to provide students with a “patriotic education,” and to counter the America-hating narrative of critical race theory and the 1619 Project. Biden revoked Trump’s executive order — on grounds that the “systemic racism that has plagued our nation for far, far too long couldn’t be ignored any longer.” Susan Rice , his newly appointed Director of the United States Domestic Policy Council, warns Americans about “how serious a problem we face from nationalists and white supremacists who have demonstrated a willingness to resort to violence in some instances.” On January 26, 2021, Rice said that “for too many American families, systemic racism and inequality in our economy, laws, and institutions still put[s] the American dream far out of reach. She didn’t explain – if what she says is true – why the Biden administration isn’t suing all those nationalists and white supremacists for practicing institutional and systemic racism which was outlawed over fifty years ago by the Civil Rights Act.
When it comes to Biden’s Middle-East policy, the president has diligently deployed skin-color racism to put a team of anti-Semites and supporters of the terrorist regimes in Teheran, the West Bank and Gaza in charge. Chief among them, of course is Susan Rice. In 2015, Rice publicly lauded the Iran nuclear deal as the “most comprehensive and effective” anti-nuclear agreement ever devised. She has continued to support the deal ever since. When President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018, for instance, Rice falsely stated that “Iran has fully complied with its obligations, ” and that the inspections authorized by the deal were “the most intrusive international inspection and monitoring regime in history. ”
Biden’s new Administrator of USAID, Samantha Power , is a dedicated opponent of Israel. During a 2002 interview Power said that even if it meant “alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import” (i.e., Jewish Americans), the United States should stop investing “billions of dollars” in “servicing Israel’s military,” and should invest that money instead “in the new state of Palestine” – a regime (not a state) that annually invests hundreds of millions of dollars in terrorism against men, women and children in the Jewish state. During a February 2016 UN Security Council debate on the Middle East, Power – then U.S. Ambassador to the UN equated Palestinian Arab acts of terrorism targeting Jews, with virtually non-existent “settler violence” by Jews in the West Bank. She also falsely portrayed the Palestinian Authority (PA) as an entity that was “pressing for calm,” when, in fact, the PA not only “pays Arabs huge sums of money to murder Jews,” but also “incites violence against innocent Jews in the PA’s speeches, official newspapers, social media, textbooks, schools, clubs, government-controlled mosques, government-controlled television specials, and government ceremonies honoring terrorists.”
Biden’s new Undersecretary of Defense, Colin Kahl , co-drafted the language that attempted – ultimately without success – to omit from the 2012 Democratic Party platform any reference to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. In an August 2012 op-ed in Foreign Policy magazine, Kahl praised President Obama’s call to push Israel’s borders back to the 1949 Armistice lines, which would reward 70 years of Arab aggression and deprive Israel of defensible borders; to accept the creation of a Palestinian state governed by the terrorist organizations PLO and Hamas; and to reject the notion of Jerusalem as Israel’s undisputed capital. In the same article, Kahl blamed the poor living conditions of Palestinians on the “economically debilitating effects of Israeli occupation” – rather than on the Palestinian leaders’ massive corruption and ongoing terrorist aggression.
Biden’s new Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, Uzra Zeya , is a former staffer at the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs , a notoriously anti-Israel publication, where she compiled research for a book claiming that “the Israel lobby” had established a secret network of PACs that bribed and extorted congressional candidates into adopting positions favorable to Israel, thereby “subvert[ing] the American political process to take control of U.S. Middle East policy.”
Wendy Sherman, Biden’s Deputy Secretary of State nominee, has referred to the late PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the world’s most prolific Jew-killer since Hitler, as “the leader of a resistance movement ,” while minimizing the moral horrors of Palestinian suicide bombings against innocent Israeli civilians as “nagging disruptions from the Palestinian side .”
In her 2018 book, Not for the Faint of Heart, ” Sherman claimed that the Iran nuclear deal , which she helped to negotiate on behalf of the U.S., “was anchored” by: (a) “a common wish to make peace, ” and (b) additional “higher principles ” that would help facilitate a “reimagining of the world ” whereby Americans might “see our adversaries not as eternal enemies, or dispensable ones, but as virtual partners .” Moreover, Sherman falsely claimed that the Iran deal would allow for “intrusive” and “scrupulous” inspections of Iranian nuclear sites.
Symone Sanders is the Senior Advisor and Chief Spokesperson to Vice President, Kamala Harris. Sanders was one of the 2020 Biden presidential campaign’s three senior advisers who apologized to radical Islamic organizations after Biden staffer Andrew Bates had tried to distance Biden from Linda Sarsour , a notorious Jew-hater who, despite supporting the Hamas-inspired Boycott, Divestment & Sanctions (BDS) movement and having ties to numerous Islamic terrorist organizations, was a featured speaker at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. In addition to her apology, Sanders also retweeted a tweet by Emgage, a radical Islamist group, saying that Sarsour “has dedicated her career to fighting for justice.”
Biden’s new Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is opposed to designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a foreign terrorist organization and imposing sanctions on it, even though The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran established the IRGC explicitly to “strike terror into [the hearts of] the enemies of Allah” — meaning most prominently the U.S. and Israel — and to “expan[d] the sovereignty” of Islam across the globe. The IRGC’s “terror involvements” have included: “planning 9-11,” “murdering hundreds of American troops in Iraq,” promoting “Iranian nuclear proliferation and weapons delivery systems development,” and “providing weapons, training, funding, and logistical support to Iranian terrorist proxies.”
Biden’s new Director of National Intelligence, Avril Haines, is a signatory to a J Street letter arguing that the Democratic Party platform should incorporate additional criticism of Israel. The letter also draws a moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorists and their victims, Israeli Jews, by employing the phrase “violence, terrorism, and incitement from ALL sides.” Further, the letter rejects the notion of Israeli and Jewish sovereign rights in the historically Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria, and accuses Israel of perpetrating an “occupation” of Palestinian land. This is the lie genocidal Palestinian terrorists use to justify their unprovoked aggressions against the Jewish state, which was created – like Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq – on land that belonged to the Turks for 400 years previously. Turks are not Palestinians or Arabs.
Biden’s new Deputy Director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs is Reema Dodin . In her student days at UC Berkeley, Dodin was a campus radical who organized a number of anti-Israel rallies. Among other things, she was a leader of the Muslim Students Association, a Muslim Brotherhood front. The Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamic supremacist organization whose credo proclaims that “death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.” Dodin described the 9/11 attacks as an understandable Islamic response to U.S. support for Israel, which was “angering ” Muslims worldwide. Drawing a parallel between the 9/11 hijackers and Palestinian jihadists, she said: “[N]ow you have three generations of Palestinians born under occupation. Maybe if you start to look at Palestinians as human beings, you will stop the suicide bombers.” In a 2002 speech in California, Dodin justified suicide bombing as “the last resort of a desperate people.”
At a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing in 2010, Biden’s new Special U.S. Envoy for Iran, Robert Malley , called for the U.S. “to unveil a set of parameters” that included the creation of a Palestinian state along the “1967 borders,” which would have rewarded the Arab aggressors in the Six Day War and been suicidal for Israel. He also advocated: (a) the deployment of third-party armed forces in Judea-Samaria; (b) the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of Jews from their homes in that region; and (c) Israel’s relinquishment of control of the Golan Heights to Syria, on the premise that Syria was “unlikely to sponsor militant groups … [or] destabilize the region … once an agreement has been reached.”
Biden’s new Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council is Maher Bitar . As a student at Georgetown University, Bitar was an executive board member of Students for Justice in Palestine, an organization that supports the Hamas terrorists and the BDS movement. A 2006 photo from that time period shows Bitar wearing a keffiyah – a terrorist emblem – while dancing in front of a banner reading, “Divest from Israel Apartheid.” At a Palestine Solidarity Movement conference at Georgetown in 2006, Bitar moderated a session that taught attendees how to demonize Israel as a nation guilty of “colonization,” “occupation,” and “oppression.”
Biden’s new Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Israel and Palestinian Affairs is Hady Amr . In January 2002, Amr wrote : “I was inspired by the Palestinian Intifada.” Amr warned that Arabs “will never, never forget what the Israeli people, the Israeli military and Israeli democracy have done to Palestinian children. And there will be thousands who will seek to avenge these brutal murders of innocents.” He also accused Israel engaging in the “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing of Jews is of course the overt goal of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, whereas more than a million Palestinians are Israeli citizens with more rights than the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza.
In sum, while the Biden White House may “look like” America, once one gets past skin color and gender, it is a team of racists and anti-Semites. “Diversity” is exposed as a racist rationale for assembling an anti-American coalition in the heart of the White House itself.
David Horowitz is the founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of the newly published book, The Enemy Within: How a Totalitarian Movement Is Destroying America .
John Perazzo is the editor of DiscoverTheNetworks.org —an encyclopedic guide to the political Left and a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of Black Lives Matter: Marxist Hate Dressed Up As Racial Justice .
HOW MUCH OF AMERICA'S CRIME TIDAL WAVE IN THIS COUNTRY IS BLACK?
At Least 44 Shot During Weekend in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Chicago AP Photo/Evan Vucci 2:19
At least 44 people were shot, two of them fatally, during the weekend in Mayor Brandon Johnson’s (D) Chicago.
Breitbart News reported at least 19 were shot Friday into Saturday night alone, with two fatalities.
By Monday morning, ABC 7 / Chicago Sun-Times noted the total number of weekend shooting victims had reached at least 44.
Eight people were injured in one shooting that occurred around 8:30 a.m. Sunday, near Blum Restaurant and Bar.
ABC 7 pointed out the shooting occurred “only hours before the Chicago Marathon was set to begin.”
The wounded consisted of men and women and four of the shooting victims were critical. No one has been arrested in connection with the incident.
Chicago Alderman Brendan Reilly is pushing to have Blum Restaurant and Bar closed. He believes the establishment draws in people likely to be involved in shootings.
He said, “These late hour nightclubs are a blight on River North, many catering to gangbangers, drug dealers and gun toting patrons….How many more people need to get shot before the city steps up to the plate and starts shutting down these bad operators?”
The Sun-Times observed that 455 people were killed in Chicago January 1, 2023, through October 8, 2023.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins , a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins . You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange . Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com .
Fourteen-Year-Old Boy Charged with Stabbing Schoolmate to Death on New York City Bus Family of Syles Ular 1:37
A fourteen-year-old boy has been arrested and charged in the stabbing death of a schoolmate that took place on a New York city bus Friday.
Officials believe the killing, which occurred in the town of Eltingville on Staten Island, was possibly gang related.
The New York Police Department has charged the boy with murder, manslaughter, and criminal possession of a weapon in connection to the heinous act, according to multiple reports . The boy’s identity has not been released by authorities.
Police have identified the victim as Syles Ular, 13.
At a press conference, NYPD officials reportedly said a person on the bus witnessed an argument take place between two male teens, the 13-year-old victim and the 14-year-old suspect, who attended the same middle school.
Police said a knife was taken out and gang signs were exchanged between the victim and suspect. The victim was then stabbed in the chest, with some witnesses saying he was stabbed as many as five times.
It remains unclear what the nature of the dispute was.
Police said the victim made it to the front of the bus and collapsed near the bus operator, who immediately called for help, according to reports.
Ular was later pronounced dead at a local hospital.
The victim’s aunt told reporters that he was a “nice, kind, smart kid. Quiet. Into sports. Loveable.”
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg . Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com
The number of physical attacks on women in New York City has increased, and those targeted are deeply concerned.
The number of such instances has surged 41 percent in the past four years, the New York Post reported Saturday, citing NYPD data.
“Through Oct. 1 this year, 2,830 women have been the victims of felony assault, excluding domestic violence, compared to 2,006 just four years ago,” the article reads.
The attacks have increased 5 percent from the same time frame in 2022, when 2,699 women became victims of felony assault.
In May 2022, a woman was assaulted on a New York City subway while bystanders tried to avoid the situation. Later, in September 2022, a Queens woman was targeted and brutally beaten by a homeless ex-convict.
Reports said at the time the woman was in danger of losing the sight in one of her eyes as a result.
The victim, identified as Elizabeth Gomes, later said, “And it’s just so sad that even though we try to avoid it, these things still happen to us. I still can’t put that day together. I don’t even know.”
According to the recent Post article, one woman who three weeks ago was sucker-punched by a stranger in the West 4th Street subway station said it felt like men hated them.
The report continued, “She ripped ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio and his comrades for pushing to empty the city’s jails during the pandemic and lashed out at city pols for passing legislation to cut down on the number of people in custody as part of its goal to close Rikers Island.”
Some of those targeted laid blame at the feet of city and state politicians for failing to offer sufficient help to people addicted to drugs and the mentally ill, a move that might lower the chances of those individuals behaving violently and hurting others.
The news regarding felony assaults comes as more of New York City’s police officers are heading for the exit as crime ravages the area.
Social media users commented on the Post ‘s story, one individual writing , “End No Cash Bail and fire all Soro’s funded DA’s and Mayors and give the police all the money and tools they need!”
“Not surprised. It’s getting to Mad Max proportions out here. Despicable,” someone else said, while another commented , “Keep voting Democrat though.”
RELATED–WATCH: AWR Hawkins: “Semiautomatics Allow Women to Level the Playing Field”
At Least 19 Shot Friday into Saturday Night in Mayor Johnson’s Chicago Getty Images 2:05
At least 19 people were shot, two of them fatally, Friday into Saturday night across Mayor Brandon Johnson’s (D) Chicago.
ABC 7 / Chicago Sun-Times reported the weekend’s first fatal shooting occurred about 6:30 p.m. Friday in an alley “in the 10200 block of South Carpenter Street.” A 43-year-old man was in the alley when someone approached him and opened fire, shooting the man in the chest and head. He died at the scene.
The weekend’s second fatal shooting occurred Saturday around 10:45 a.m. “in the 1500 block of East 74th Street.” A 23-year-old woman and a 24-year-old man were outside when a group of people opened fire on them. The couple was able to self-transport to a hospital, where the woman died.
The man was wounded but his wound was not life-threatening and he refused medical treatment.
A database maintained by the Sun-Times shows that 455 people were killed in Chicago January 1, 2023, through October 7, 2023.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins , a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and a Turning Point USA Ambassador. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal in 2010, a speaker at the 2023 Western Conservative Summit, and he holds a Ph.D. in Military History, with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. Follow him on Instagram: @awr_hawkins . You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange . Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=557STzaRJVk
Every year in America, some 500 whites are murdered by black assailants, more than twice as many as blacks killed by whites. The media need to report all of these cases fairly and without bias so as to counter the false reporting and misplaced emphasis in the national press. All victims, of whatever race, deserve justice because all human life is precious. The reporting of violence should not be based on race — it should be proportionate to the crime, without regard to the race of the perpetrator or the victim. Jeffrey Folks
D.C. CRIME
More than 90% of homicide victims and homicide suspects in 2019 and 2020 were male, and about 96% were Black. Nearly half were formerly incarcerated, and about 86% of them were known to the criminal justice system in some way. And, the study found, victims in homicides and suspects in these cases were “remarkably similar” when it came to prior arrests. Most had been arrested for property crimes, drug crimes, and unarmed violent offenses prior to the shooting or homicide, and had on average been arrested approximately 11 times.
“In Washington, D.C., most gun violence is very
tightly concentrated on a small number of very
high risk young Black male adults that have a
shared set of common risk factors,” says David
Muhammad, the executive director of the National
Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. “This very
small number of high risk individuals are
identifiable. Their violence is predictable and
therefore it is preventable.”
Washington, DC, Homicides Soar 38 Percent as Carjackings More Than Double Kevin Dietsch/Getty 2:36
Washington, DC, is seeing a sharp surge in murders in 2023, with homicides up 38 percent so far this year compared to the same point last year, according to Metropolitan Police. The nation’s capital has also seen carjackings skyrocket 110 percent, with total violent crime up 38 percent.
The troubling statistics come as Democrat-controlled D.C. continues to be inundated with illegal aliens, pushing the city’s already strained resources to a catastrophic breaking point.
Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar (TX) was carjacked at gunpoint in the nation’s capital on Monday evening in the Navy Yard area. The incident took place outside of Cuellar’s apartment building where he and many other members of Congress live.
Mayor Muriel Bowser (D), who supported violent Black Lives Matter rioters in 2020, is scrambling to react to the wave of deadly mayhem that has city residents feeling frightened and helpless.
“We’re focused on how to drive that [violent crime] down and hold the people accountable who are doing it,” she recently told journalists, according to a Fox 5 report.
D.C. residents aren’t buying it.
Many people who live in areas most impacted by violent crime don’t feel the work the city has done so far is helping, according to a WTOP report .
When asked if she’s seen improvement, Trace Cobb, who lives in the crime-ridden Anacostia neighborhood, told the radio station, “Absolutely not.”
She pointed out the spot where a recent shooting occurred and said she has feared for her life several times. “There have been several times I’ve had to dive on the ground,” she said.
Another D.C. resident told the radio station: “I don’t want to say there’s no hope but, man, it’s so hard.”
Due to the city’s sanctuary status, frightened citizens are being pushed aside in favor of illegal aliens, who are receiving shelter, food, healthcare, and other taxpayer-funded benefits.
Mayor Bowser spent years touting the city’s sanctuary status as something that would lift the quality of life for all residents. Instead, the nation’s capital is drowning in murder and illegal immigration.
D.C. voters overwhelmingly reelected Bowser to a third term in 2022.
Follow David Ng on Twitter @HeyItsDavidNg . Have a tip? Contact me at dng@breitbart.com
On Saturday, September 2, 2023, I woke from sleep at four a.m. and looked out my window in search of the waning moon. Media had described the second full moon of August as a “blue moon” and a “super moon” and I hadn’t yet seen it.
I saw some black men partying on the sidewalk around Costello Park. Lately the park has become a site of all-night parties. Men gather on the sidewalk after sunset and remain till near dawn. I’d estimate about fifteen partiers. They sit on milk crates and metal chairs that Paterson, as part of a renovation, using taxpayer dollars from wealthier towns, placed in Costello Park. The metal chairs have been dragged out of the park onto the sidewalk for the all-night parties. Eventually these chairs, one by one, are disappearing entirely.
Car stereos blast rap music. There are kids in this building, black kids, Hispanic kids, poor kids. I grew up poorer than these kids, but I never had to struggle for sleep against intrusive noise pollution. I never had to sleep through classes in school because there was so much noise in the street the night before. Loud street parties were just not done. In my hometown, fathers left for work before we left for school. They worked hard all day. They arrived home in worn blue uniforms stained with dirt and grease. They ate dinner, they watched TV for a short while, and then they snored in comfortable chairs till wives or kids gently roused them and ushered them to bed. These hard-working men needed sleep, and the town was quiet at night.
I mentioned the noise in a Facebook post. I met Merlin when I was a grad student at UC Berkeley. Merlin is handsome, witty, and charismatic. He’s a PhD, polyamorist, international bon vivant, and Burning Man veteran. He lived on Grizzly Peak, 1,400 feet up in the Berkeley Hills, where even small homes cost over a million dollars. As night follows day, Merlin said that my mentioning Paterson’s noise was racist. Only a white supremacist would gripe about loud and obscene rap from car stereos all night long.
“Noise pollution loudest in black neighborhoods” announced a 2017 headline . “This is yet another study that shows that communities of color bear a disproportionate burden of pollution … [noise pollution] makes things worse for everybody,” UC Berkeley researchers reported. What does it do to children’s little bodies to emerge into a world of car stereos, police sirens, screams, crashes? Noise pollution damages children’s minds and bodies in all the ways described here . And the all-night partiers don’t just pollute with noise. They leave trash like paper plates and plastic bottles scattered on the sidewalk around the park.
I didn’t see the moon on September 2. I had been at the window for less than a minute. I returned to bed. I heard a crash. My nerves burst into flames; my muscles stiffened; my breath became rapid and shallow; my stomach clenched and poured out acid. I have become very familiar with this bodily response to stressful stimuli. I’m an adult and can try to quell this response with practiced prayer and meditation. I know that Paterson’s majority minority children are too young to master these skills and, as a teacher, I know that they suffer in ways that I don’t.
I investigated the apartment. I couldn’t find the source of the crashing sound. I went back to bed and tried to sleep. I had to get up early the next morning to work. Sleep eluded me. Again, at work, all day, I’d be fighting to stay alert, to rein in my dyslexia and spell words correctly.
In the morning light I saw the broken glass and the shattered pane. Someone had thrown a rock at my window, just after I had looked out that window in search of the moon.
I phoned the police. “I’ll make a report,” an officer said. There was no visit. The blasé response was nothing new. A few years back, very close to this spot, it was my head, not the window, that was hit with a large rock. On that occasion, I had unwittingly stumbled between two gangs fighting. I regained consciousness, pushed myself off the sidewalk, and stumbled home through scattering black youths, eager to remove themselves as rapidly as possible from the scene of a downed white woman. I phoned the police. A police officer arrived hours later, spent five minutes in my apartment, and told me with a sneer that I should not be living here. So much for the leftist fantasy that white women assaulted by black men exercise magical power over police.
I wrote to Passaic County Sheriff Richard H. Berdnik about the rock and the window. Debra Wahba, his representative, wrote back “Sheriff Berdnik wanted you to know he has directed our Patrol Officers to give this area extra attention.” There are good reasons, beyond my broken window, to “give this area extra attention.” The block bordering Costello Park is about a tenth of a mile long. In recent years, in this small area, there has been a fatal stabbing, a storeowner shot to death in his shop, a fatal shooting, and an elderly woman raped on the sidewalk. I have, though, seen no enhanced police presence around Costello Park, and the all-night parties continue and have, in recent days, grown louder.
The Lou Costello Memorial Park has been featured in The Sopranos and the 2016 Adam Driver film Paterson. It was created in 1992. The New Jersey Community Development Corporation renovated the park in 2022. The NJCDC spins a sanitized narrative of the park on its webpage . The park, this narrative runs, “fell into disrepair … it became a park that not many people felt comfortable visiting.” The NJCDC saved the park, it wants people to know, by razing a gazebo. Gazebos apparently ruin parks. The NJCDC then took taxpayer money from wealthier towns and erected a playground designed for autistic children. The NJCDC and Paterson’s mayor slapped themselves on the back. They had “improved” this corner of Paterson.
The NJCDC’s narrative is a fantasy. The park did not “fall into disrepair.” The gazebo wasn’t doing anything bad to anyone. It was an attractive, antique structure. Addicts and vagrants slept in the gazebo. Police could have removed them. Crippled by leftist ideology, they did not. So the attractive structure needed to be removed. Wealthier, better-run towns, with conservative local governments, do have gazebos. Rockaway, New Jersey’s gazebo hosts a summer concert series.
A few years back, I was trying to prepare a lesson. My concentration was interrupted by the sound of a man screaming and blows being struck. Without even realizing what I was doing, I didn’t consciously register the sounds and I pushed myself to focus on my lesson plan. Then I stopped myself. “What the hell has happened to me, that I try to ignore the sound of someone screaming and the sound of fists hitting a human body?”
I left my lesson planning. I discovered a disheveled black man in Costello Park. He was screaming and punching himself. I began the interior dialogue I have conducted many times. “Do I call the police? Are police the best solution? Am I invading this man’s space? Maybe he doesn’t want police. What he’s doing looks pretty self-destructive to me, but maybe this is how he wants to spend an otherwise quiet Sunday morning. Don’t the police have more important matters to attend to? Maybe this behavior will stop momentarily.”
I asked myself these same questions many times: when I saw a teenage boy beat a teenage girl and tear off her shirt and bra, in the middle of the street, leaving her naked to the waist. Both seemed equally aggressive. Did either really want police? When I saw a barefoot woman wobbling in the middle of an active commuter road at rush hour. The many times I passed a man standing, staring into space, and I asked, “Are you okay? Do you want me to call someone? Do you need help?” and the man couldn’t answer. All of the people in the above encounters have been black. Would a white police officer make these vulnerable people tense and would things spiral downward?
One of my students, a leftist, once went on a rant about the vagrants in Costello Park. “Doesn’t anyone see them? Doesn’t anyone care? Our society is so callous!” Surrounding listeners applauded her for her “compassion.”
I had no patience for her tired charade. “Open your eyes,” I said, no doubt sounding harsh. “Don’t you see the Salvation Army across the street from Costello Park? Don’t you see Eva’s Village , founded by a Catholic priest? Don’t you see the visitors from the mostly white, suburban evangelical church who visit the park regularly, offering food and aid, the government aid agencies dispensing taxpayer funded food, housing, health care? It’s not, quote, society, unquote, that doesn’t care about these men. It’s these men who don’t care about themselves or about you or me. If they cared about themselves or about us would they refuse the aid offered them? Would they be leaving discarded needles and emptied liquor bottles on the very sidewalks kids walk to get to Paterson school number two?”
The emptied liquor bottles from the all-night parties really get me. Multiple trash cans are conveniently placed in and around the park. An empty Courvoisier bottle can’t weigh that much. The partiers can carry a full Courvoisier bottle to a public park, but they can’t carry an empty bottle twenty feet to a trash can. And, no, they don’t just toss the bottles. They place them, upright and empty, on the sidewalk, sidewalks that they know will service dozens of pedestrians. It’s like they want normal people to know, “While you and your kids slept soundly, trying to follow the rules that create a normal, healthy, happy life, I was a hundred feet away, making sure that no matter how much you try to make this neighborhood better, you’ll always live in a slum.” I want to say to these men, “You are so poor, you have to stop drivers in traffic alongside Costello Park to beg for change, you have to urinate and defecate a hundred feet from autistic kids in their special new playground, but you can afford Courvoisier?”
The New Jersey Community Development Corporation lies continue. Costello Park “became a park that not many people felt comfortable visiting.” In fact, before the expensive renovation, there were always “many people” in Costello Park. A cute, petite housewife and mother who takes great joy in decorating her apartment and the surrounding hallway for every holiday was in that park every morning. She had a little fluffball of a dog. Every time I saw that pooch I’d bend down to pet her and she’d flood my face with kisses. On hot summer nights, folks who can’t afford air conditioning would sit around waiting for the temperature to dip one degree. Don Kommit , our Beat-Era-veteran poet, walked past the park to the bodega for his canned soup. Urban kids’ only experience of leaves changing color in fall took place in that park. Thank you to whomever planted the park’s Washington hawthorns.
If the NJCDC really wanted to improve the park, the solution would be right-wing – changing the behavior of antisocial people. But the NJCDC, it goes without saying, did not take that controversial route of addressing antisocial behavior. Rather, it opted for the left-wing solution – an infusion of taxpayer dollars. Taxpayer dollars generated by hardworking people who don’t party all night and who live in wealthier towns; see here .
As part of its renovation, the NJCDC installed a Little Free Library. A Little Free Library is a wooden box placed on a wooden post. There is a glass window. Inside are books, free to anyone who wants them. A Little Free Library can cost about four hundred dollars . Little Free Libraries pride themselves on distributing “books that provide perspectives on racism and social justice; celebrate BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized voices; and incorporate experiences from all identities for all readers.” The Little Free Library in Costello Park was immediately attacked as if it were an invading enemy. Someone smashed the glass, ripped up the free books, and tossed the pages all around the park. Someone smashed the wooden structure to bits, reducing it to nothing but a stump in the ground. See here .
Some naïve soul installed a second Little Free Library in Costello Park. The new Little Free Library was artistically painted. Whoever painted it wanted to make clear that the Little Free Library was meant to help children access free, attractive reading material, like picture books. Dr. Seuss and other beloved children’s book characters were painted on the Little Free Library exterior.
The destroyer wrecked the new, improved Little Free Library almost immediately after it was installed. Again, the glass was smashed, the wood was pried apart, and the books were ripped up and the scattered pages remained in the park for days, no one bothering to discard them in a convenient garbage can. The expensive, newly installed playground for autistic children was littered with pages from Little Free Library books. Taxpayer dollars sucked into Paterson from wealthier towns “renovated” the park, and within days it looked like a garbage dump.
Someone could have installed a cheap surveillance camera in the park, and discovered who was destroying the Little Free Library. That would not be done, of course, for the same reason the vagrants and addicts sleeping in the park would never be removed by police. Antisocial behavior cannot be punished. It can’t even be mentioned. If you mention antisocial behavior, you are a white supremacist, as Merlin will remind you.
The fate of the Little Free Libraries speaks loudly. You can pour all the money you want into dangerous and decaying cities like Paterson. That money, that comes from taxpayers who do follow civilizational guidelines, is stolen and squandered. Until you change the culture of the antisocial residents in cities like Paterson, no amount of money will improve the lives lived in Paterson.
In the nineteen sixties, America, following leftist ideology, decided that there are no standards, and no behavior can be judged as right or wrong. Identities, rather than behavior, were to be judged. Whites bad blacks good. America decided that illegal drug use is glamorous and funny, and those who condemn drug use are reactionary fascists. Now you cannot speak of “addicts;” you must use the Woke term “person with substance abuse disorder,” thus erasing any personal choice or responsibility. America decided that schools should not discipline any kids and especially not black males. Only racists discipline black male students . America decided that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, “love makes a family,” “Tango makes three,” and Heather will not suffer for not having a dad. America decided that “all cops are bastards,” and that Michael Brown was a “gentle giant” who said “Hands up don’t shoot.” A rich white woman living in a comfortable suburb can believe all these delusional, toxic, leftist lies and not suffer. This leftist ideology kills people where I live, and where millions of other Americans live. Leftist ideology doesn’t just kill individuals. Leftist ideology kills entire cities.
The other day I was talking to a Paterson old timer. His parents were impoverished immigrants. They had been mistreated and malnourished. They were not savvy. They came to Paterson, America’s first planned industrial city, a textile hub and manufacturing center, in the hopes of economic advancement. When they first arrived, their neighborhood was like them. It was poor, but it was safe, and clean, and people looked out for each other.
And then, this old timer told me the other day, everything changed. “It wasn’t slow. It was fast. It was like watching a time lapse film of a rose decaying.”
“Tell me,” I said, “what happened.”
“Well, white people got beat up in the streets. You were a white kid walking home from school and they’d just jump you and beat you up. They’d spray paint their neighbors houses. Break windows. Suddenly the streets were full of garbage. Cars stolen or just vandalized. Tires slashed. We knew we had to move. When I look at Paterson today,” his voice was full of emotion, “it breaks my heart. It was poor, but it was nice. If you had garbage on the street in front of your store, the cop would ticket you.”
I’ve heard similar stories many times. The power narrative is that “white flight” was all about white supremacy. After whites left, neighborhoods went downhill slowly but surely, only because of white neglect: no investment, no services, no repairmen. This old timer, and others like him, tell a different story. They didn’t leave because they didn’t like black newcomers. Many were immigrants and had minimal previous contact with black people. They had not inherited a culture of white supremacy. Rather, black newcomers hated white neighbors as their archetypal enemy, the white man, and targeted them for violent crime. Neighborhoods didn’t go downhill after years of neglect. They went downhill rapidly. The neighborhood’s decline was a reflection of culture. A gazebo didn’t suddenly render a park unsafe. Human behavior, fashioned by culture, rendered a park unsafe.
Leftists demonize anyone who says these things, and professional and personal punishment follow. White supremacists read accounts like this and insist that their sick, evil ideology is correct. And most people, who are neither leftists nor white supremacists, don’t care. Paterson’s bullets don’t penetrate their walls. They don’t have to enter into a conversation in which no matter what you say, you risk personal damage.
The leftists and the white supremacists are both wrong. Antisocial behavior is not an expression of genes. It’s an expression of culture. Yes, the individual black people who choose to deal drugs or steal cars are doing something wrong. Everyone, including white people, does bad things. I’ve certainly done bad things. When I did bad things as a child, nuns beat the stuffing out of me, mercilessly, even, sometimes, when I didn’t do anything bad. My parents supported the nuns. I got the message: you do a bad thing, and everyone will descend upon you with punishment, including God himself. There were no excuses for me. My behavior changed.
An individual black kid committing an act of vandalism, like throwing a rock through my window, meets with a different societal response, one that shapes his behavior just as my behavior was shaped when I did bad things. There are larger forces at work, and those larger forces are largely made up of powerful white leftists who insist it is racist to require black people to live up to the same standards as white people.
Behind the young men making sleep impossible with their loud car stereos blaring violent, sadistic, and misogynist lyrics, beyond the man screaming and beating himself in the park, above the wannabe gangstas shooting black kids dead in the street, I see armies of white leftists pushing each behavior.
I see LBJ, wanting to monopolize the “n-word ” vote “for two hundred years,” enacting policies that damaged black families, but did ensure that blacks would vote for Democrats. I see smug Stephen Colbert, on his popular late night show, winking and nudging about how cool drug use is. I see teachers’ unions turning American public education into an oxymoron. I see Upper West Side voters choosing candidates who undermine police and refuse to prosecute violent criminals. I see Hollywood and music company executives who want black people to act out their own antisocial fantasies that they would never act out themselves. These entertainment executives profit from peddling images of black men as gangstas and black women as hos. I see the Smithsonian Institution using taxpayer dollars to demonize the very qualities that would rescue my neighbors from wretched lives. Being on time, being polite, believing in God, practicing the scientific method, working hard, are all “white” see the Smithsonian chart here . I see Pagans using my law-abiding, but poor neighbors as human sacrifices for their twisted religious rituals.
I see social media contacts, Merlin, Judy, Jean, Susan, Amanda, Ellen, none of whom live in black neighborhoods, none of whom read black conservatives, attacking anyone who voices any of these truths. When I invited Merlin to watch a video by black conservative Larry Elder, Merlin refused to do so, insisting that he would never expose himself to any ideas promoted by Dennis Prager.
Watch a statistics-dense Prager University presentation by Larry Elder, here . Read an excerpt from the superb book False Black Power by black conservative Jason L. Riley, here . These two black conservatives and other black conservatives like them agree: policies initiated and supported by leftist whites hurt black people.
I don’t just see rich white leftists building an ideological fence around antisocial behavior and rendering it immune to corrective consequences. I also see very good people, productive people who are white and black and brown and trapped in hell because they are poor and leftists have decided that poor, majority minority communities, unlike rich, white communities, will not have any standards or police or law.
Yes, I see black men partying on the street day and night. I also see black women in nurse’s aide uniforms leaving for work before dawn. I see black women dressed up for church on Sunday morning. I see black women driving Paterson’s buses. I saw my own black, female students working hard to do well in college classrooms. Black women aren’t just more likely to be in college; in one study , black females actually responded to perceived racism by improving their eating and exercise habits, while black males did not. I don’t know if anyone has the definitive answer to why there is a shift of “wealth and power” from black males to black females , but we need to look at this and apply whatever women are doing right to men.
One of my neighbors is an Hispanic immigrant. He has a landscaping business. He also has a workshop in a garage where he tinkers after hours. He also has cultivated “waste” ground along Route 80. One day he stopped me and made me take zucchini, celery, and a large bag of tomatoes. He doesn’t even know my name; he just sees me walking past his garden and wanted to do something kind.
Another one of my neighbors is a black woman. She’s a jazz singer. She’s been well-reviewed in the New York Times and the New York Post. She has been invited to sing internationally. She does volunteer work to improve her community. One day she saw me walking and offered me a ride in her very old but serviceable car.
A few of my neighbors are adjunct professors. They teach future generations. Adjuncts make less than minimum wage for the hours that they work. They live in low-rent neighborhoods.
If parents, teachers, and police enforced civilizational guidelines in Paterson, my neighbors who, yes, are poor, but, again, who work hard and play by the rules, would have better lives. The refusal, by those in power, to address antisocial behavior from a minority of the population, or the refusal by those in power who insist on misrepresenting antisocial behavior as something glamorous or revolutionary, betray the Hispanic immigrant who works like a dog, the talented black jazz singer who is well-reviewed and has appeared on Broadway but who can’t earn enough from her art to live in Rockaway, the adjunct professors who work in Wayne but live in Paterson, the housewife with the fluffy dog who loves to decorate, and the innocent kids who couldn’t help being born here and who are just starting out in life.
Sunday, October 1, I really needed to get away. The rock through the window was just one of a series of mini disasters. I’d recently gotten bad news about my health, and stress has been eating me up. I walked to Garret Mountain and saw a fire in the woods. I phoned Paterson police. An operator said that Paterson police would not respond. I needed to be transferred to state police. She put me on hold and eventually hung up on me. I phoned state police. An operator told me that state police would not respond; Paterson police would. She said she’d transfer me. I gave up. I told myself that I can’t fix Paterson police. I told myself that maybe someone else would see and report the fire.
I got home and tried to relax. I began watching a Bollywood romantic comedy; perfect escape fare. And then I heard an all too familiar sound: pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. It’s like fireworks, except there is no shower sound at the end. Someone was just shot, I realized.
“You can’t fix it,” I told myself. “Just ignore it.” And I did. I’m still thinking about that. That I just wanted to ignore someone getting shot to death less than a hundred feet from me.
My ability to ignore the drive-by shooting that took place outside my window was limited. I eventually gave up on retreating into the Bollywood rom-com and joined my neighbors in the street. We saw what you see after a shooting. Yellow tape, many police officers, one of whom was placing white markers near where bullets were found. Mary Taylor was a 22-year-old woman. Accounts say that she was an “innocent bystander.” This strikes me as an odd way to put it. Gunning people down in the street does not strike me as an appropriate way to end any human life. Of course she was an innocent bystander. The gunman, according to reports, was wearing a ski mask and driving a stolen car. As of this writing, he is still at large.
It would be another night when it would be difficult to sleep.
In 2022, after honor student and Paterson resident Robert Cuadra was shot to death while helping his grandmother carry groceries into her home, I wished I could write an essay about Robert that would make people care about him. That would make his name as famous as that of George Floyd. That would rouse America into addressing the factors that contributed to his death.
I now wish I could say anything worthy about Mary Taylor, whose death I heard as I was trying to escape into a romantic comedy. She was my neighbor. No doubt we crossed paths many times, but I didn’t know her. All I can tell you is her name, her age, how it sounded when she was shot to death, and what the pavement looked like after her body was carried away.
I wish black celebrities with powerhouse resources, I’m thinking Beyonce, Christian Cooper, Denzel Washington, Lebron James, and Barack Obama, read about the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment , and other research like it. I wish they would mount a project that would have an equal and opposite impact as LBJ had on the black family. Children who grow up with a biological father in the home are less likely to end up in jail. Period. End of sentence. You’ve got that information; now apply it in the real world. The late, great black conservative, Walter E. Williams, stressed the inescapable issue of the black family again and again. See here , here , and here .
Second wish: broken windows policing. Read more about broken windows policing here . Given previous criminal activity, major and minor, Mayor Andre Sayegh and police had every reason to know that this one-tenth-mile stretch of Paterson, NJ, would soon be the site of another drive-by shooting. If they had practiced broken windows policing, one 22 year old woman might still be alive.
Mayor Sayegh’s approach is different. “I am bringing taxpayer money into Paterson,” Mayor Sayegh boasts. “So what?” many Patersonians ask. “So what if you siphon money from richer towns into this poor city? The streets are still full of garbage. Crime is still rampant. Schools are still failing students.” “Paterson NJ Public Schools Are Falling Apart Despite $500 Million from State ,” and “Paterson NJ High School Graduation Scores Fall Short ,” are a couple of recent headlines. “Almost 90% of the city’s students failed math … while more than 60% flunked language arts,” Reported the Bergen Record in August, 2023. Because Paterson students do so poorly, a leftist solution was attempted: standards were lowered to make it easier for Paterson students to graduate. In spite of this leftist lowering of standards, “the academic performance gap between Paterson students and their counterparts from the rest of New Jersey grew larger in the past year.”
On his Facebook page, Mayor Sayegh, who seems to be a very nice guy and dedicated to his job, boasted of yet another project bringing money into Paterson. Romeo Habibi, who self-identifies as a dishwasher, commented , “You can change the city look but you can’t change the people mentality what’s the point of building and we can’t walk safe with our kids or smelling drugs” [sic].
Mary Taylor was murdered a third of a mile from the Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park. As North Jersey dot com put it, “Mayor Andre Sayegh hopes to make” the Paterson Falls Park “the centerpiece of Paterson’s revival.” The money poured into the Falls Park is like the money poured into Costello Park. Until someone in power addresses the culture, there will be no “revival” of Paterson. The press reports that the murder of Mary Taylor “was across the street from Costello Park, where the mayor held about a half dozen press conference in recent years to highlight a $1 million recreation renovation project,” and also near other investment sites that the mayor boosted. “David Soo, head of the tenants association of an apartment building across the street from where the woman was shot … took issue w
Danusha Goska is the author of God Through Binocul
Criminals, even in Paterson, are the minority. The rest of us are poor, but we are normal. We are a housewife and mother who loves to decorate for the holidays. We are poets and adjunct professors. We are honor students looking forward to benefitting from a scholarship. We are 22-year-old women just starting out in life. We obey the law; we don’t take drugs; we yearn for normalcy. A normalcy we could only experience in a world where kids are brought up by both biological parents, where the state does not undermine the family, where teachers are allowed to set and enforce standards, where cops are, as they always will be, imperfect, but respected for the necessary work they do.
Mary Taylor, 22 years old, was one of us. Though I certainly passed Mary many times, I know nothing about her except this: she was a human being. Her life mattered. Her death matters. She deserved better. And here I am, saying her name.ars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery
Anybody notice all the carjackers, thieves and killers larding up blue-city payrolls?
Oh, the charmers who are turning up on the payrolls of blue-city governments.
Such as this guy, a man who works around kids:
Here's what he did:
In his day job, he's a public school employee, reportedly at Public School 20 Clinton Hill School in Queens, working with kids:
His family reportedly told the press that he was "mentally unstable." Whether or not he had a previous criminal record is unknown, and probably irrelevant given the absence of charges for crimes these days, let's just say he seemed pretty confident he knew what he was doing, probably from practice.
Who the heck chose to hire him?
There also was this pair:
They had day jobs, too, reportedly working for the City of San Francisco in its Department of Public Works.
They would do carjacking on the side, as their side-hustle, as the city paychecks flowed.
San Francisco has something called the "Fair Chance Ordinance ," enacted in 2018, its version of "ban the box" which made these thugs' prior records not an obstacle to their hiring by the city. It seems likely that this pair were its beneficiaries, given their history of doing time in "the system."
New York, too, has its "Fair Chance Act " law, enacted in 2015, and as a double whammy, a "Raise the Age " law of 2018 that means youthful thugs who have commited crimes cannot be charged until the age of 18, with anyone younger than that going through the juvenile court system which in some cases permits sealable records:
It has been reported that Dowling didn't have a criminal record, but who knows what he had given the Raise the Age law, which was capable of covering up any past run-ins with the law.
That's your blue city government in action, where a mere do-nothing civil service job for a bloated paycheck and scads of bennies isn't enough -- the employees are also committing crimes.
And this isn't one anomaly - policy holds that thugs can be hired -- and in the short span of a couple of weeks, we have seen two cases of thugging out while on the city payroll. And we only know about them because they got caught.
You'd think there are honest city employees who don't want these charmers setting the "image" for these blue-city departments, but don't hold your breath. The preponderance of these cases tells us blue city governments are veritable sewage dispensaries of society's worse elements. They set the tone, they set the pace, and with them on the city payrolls, you can bet the citizens are ill-served across a far wider spectrum than these two names might suggest. There must be all kinds of nefarious activity going on with this bunch, given their low hiring standards.
That raises the case for blue-city governments to be told by Congress to hose themselves out or no federal funding for them.
Image: Twitter screen shot
Victims of black crime matter, too By Daniel Davies
Two black teenagers brutally attacked an Asian mother of three, causing severe physical damage
Every year in America, some 500 whites are murdered by black assailants, more than twice as many as blacks killed by whites. The media need to report all of these cases fairly and without bias so as to counter the false reporting and misplaced emphasis in the national press. All victims, of whatever race, deserve justice because all human life is precious. The reporting of violence should not be based on race — it should be proportionate to the crime, without regard to the race of the perpetrator or the victim. Jeffrey Folks
D.C. CRIME
More than 90% of homicide victims and homicide suspects in 2019 and 2020 were male, and about 96% were Black. Nearly half were formerly incarcerated, and about 86% of them were known to the criminal justice system in some way. And, the study found, victims in homicides and suspects in these cases were “remarkably similar” when it came to prior arrests. Most had been arrested for property crimes, drug crimes, and unarmed violent offenses prior to the shooting or homicide, and had on average been arrested approximately 11 times.
WATCH: Karine Jean-Pierre Tries To Blame DC Crime Spike on Republicans VIDEO
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre this week attempted to blame Republicans for rising crime in Washington, D.C.
"The president—unlike Republicans—has actually put forth billions of dollars," Jean-Pierre said during a Tuesday press conference when asked about the carjacking of Democratic representative Henry Cuellar (Texas). "Let's not forget, there were billions of dollars in his American Rescue Plan so that local communities and the state and federal police as well—law enforcement—were able to make sure that they had the funding so that they can hire more law enforcement."
She added that "Republicans have not helped."
When Fox News reporter Peter Doocy pushed back, noting that D.C. is "run by a bunch of Democrats," Jean-Pierre deflected and said she is "going to speak to what the president has done."
Cuellar was carjacked Monday in the Navy Yard neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
"As Congressman Cuellar was parking his car this evening, 3 armed assailants approached the congressman and stole his vehicle," Jacob Hochberg, Cuellar's chief of staff, said in a statement. "Luckily, he was not harmed and is working with local law enforcement. Thank you to Metro PD and Capitol Police for their swift action and for recovering the congressman’s vehicle."
In D.C., according to the city's former police chief, "the average homicide suspect has been arrested 11 times prior to them committing a homicide."
Published under: Crime Karine Jean-Pierre
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A Majority Of D.C.’s Gun Violence Is Driven By Small Number Of People, Says A New Study
"Their violence is predictable and therefore it is preventable," it says.
Jenny Gathright
A Stop the Violence poster sits on a table at a Guns Down Friday pop-up event at Cedar Gardens.
Every year, about 500 identifiable people in D.C.
drive as much as 70% of the city’s gun
violence, according to a new report
commissioned by the city.
The study was authored by the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform, which has been working with the District to come up with a strategic plan for reducing gun violence. It found that a relatively small group of people — likely as little as 200 people at any one point in time — are driving a majority of homicides and shootings in the city. And the study echoes an argument that community leaders in the neighborhoods most affected by violence have long put forward: If the government and community groups can come together to reach those high-risk people, invest in them, and make intensive intervention efforts, the city can reduce homicides and help save lives.
“In Washington, D.C., most gun violence is very
tightly concentrated on a small number of very
high risk young Black male adults that have a
shared set of common risk factors,” says David
Muhammad, the executive director of the National
Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. “This very
small number of high risk individuals are
identifiable. Their violence is predictable and
therefore it is preventable.”
Using interviews and data from the Metropolitan Police Department and other law enforcement and supervision agencies, researchers examined 341 homicides in 2019 and 2020, as well as nonfatal shootings that injured people in 2020. The study excluded police shootings, accidental self-inflictions, and “cases of justified self-defense.” Its goal was to establish a “common understanding of the local violence problem,” with the idea that once people can agree on why the shootings and killings are happening, leaders can tailor their solutions to the problem.
According to the study, there is significant overlap between victims of homicides and the suspects who commit them, in terms of life circumstances and risk factors. Many are involved in groups, which the study defined as a neighborhood crew, clique, or gang with varying levels of organization. Many have history with the criminal justice system, and a significant number have previously been the victim of a shooting or connected in some way to a recent shooting.
The study found that the vast majority – 85% – of homicides in 2019 and 2020 involved guns. And in at least 46% of the cases, the shooting had some connection to a group, whether through the victim, the suspect, or both. (The study noted that in another 26% of the homicides, group affiliation was unknown, meaning the number of group-connected shootings could be higher.)
More than 90% of homicide victims and homicide suspects in 2019 and 2020 were male, and about 96% were Black. Nearly half were formerly incarcerated, and about 86% of them were known to the criminal justice system in some way. And, the study found, victims in homicides and suspects in these cases were “remarkably similar” when it came to prior arrests. Most had been arrested for property crimes, drug crimes, and unarmed violent offenses prior to the shooting or homicide, and had on average been arrested approximately 11 times.
And a significant percentage of homicide victims and suspects had previously been victims of a violent incident. About 13% had previously been shot or stabbed, according to MPD police reports — but, the researchers add, that percentage is likely significantly higher, because that number does not include violent incidents that happened in another jurisdiction, or violent incidents that were not reported to the police.
The average age of homicide victims in 2019 and 2020 was 31, and the average age of a homicide suspect in those years was 27. Muhammad said this finding was unsurprising to him — but it might be surprising to some D.C. residents.
“I do think it’ll be quite surprising for the average D.C. resident to understand that the vast majority of shootings and homicides in the District are committed by adults, that there’s actually few shootings and homicides committed by juveniles,” said Muhammad, who has worked on juvenile justice issues, including as a top official at D.C.’s Department of Youth Rehabilitation Services.
By far, the most frequent known cause of homicides in recent years were personal disputes. According to the study, more than 20% of homicides in 2019 and 2020 came about because of a personal dispute — some kind of interpersonal conflict.
“What most of this is is a dispute of about two guys fighting over a young woman,” says Muhammad. “That is, I would say, the leading cause of violence in the country, to be honest.”
But one piece that’s important to understand, Muhammad says, is that nearly half of those personal disputes involved people who were connected to a group. It’s not “what most people conjure gang-on-gang warfare,” he says. “It might be, ‘We’re fighting over a young woman. You’re now dating my ex-girlfriend and I’m upset about it. That’s what we’re fighting over, but a risk factor — as well as something that exacerbates the conflict — is that we’re also both in crews.’”
The other leading circumstances in D.C. homicides were group-related conflicts, “instant disputes” or arguments that quickly escalate into violence, and drug-related disputes.
A chart of the circumstances of homicides in D.C. identified by researchers, using case summaries and detective interviews.
NICJR
The insights from the study make a case for how to reduce gun violence: Identify the people most at risk, and focus resources and attention on them.
Muhammad adds that age is worth noting — because it has implications for how D.C. can tackle the gun violence problem happening in this current moment. While many point to programs for youth as a solution to violence, Muhammad says the city also needs to be extremely focused on reaching older young adults.
“It’s extremely difficult engaging a 25-year-old who has seven previous adult arrests, who is an avowed member of his neighborhood clique, who’s not currently interested in services, but that is the individual we have to serve. That’s the individual we have to pour resources into,” he says.
And pouring resources into the highest-risk people will take more coordination among the District’s various violence prevention agencies and programs, says Muhammad, who was part of a team that at one point reduced homicides in Oakland by half. He says successful violence prevention involves regular meetings where leaders of various agencies and programs get specific about certain individuals they’re worried about — and then assign that person a life coach who can check in with them every single day and connect them with the resources and interventions they need.
This is what violence interrupters and credible messengers are already doing with individuals in some neighborhoods, but Muhammad says a better coordinated and better focused city-wide strategy could make that work even more effective.
“When you do that with enough of the people who rise that level of highest risk, which we’re saying in the course of a year, is about 500 people in D.C. – in one sense, that’s a large number in terms of services. In another sense, it’s extremely small,” says Muhammad. “And so to say we’re going to focus intensely on 500 of them is very doable, and if we did it right, could really drive down shootings and homicides.”
The findings of the study also make the case, perhaps, for an approach to gun violence prevention that takes gender into account. While domestic violence — the type of violence most often viewed through a gendered lens — comprises a relatively small portion of homicides, Muhammad said that in Oakland his team found that there was overlap between people at high-risk for being involved in gun violence and people who had been involved in some sort of domestic violence incident — even if the incident did not involve physical violence. Women are also significantly affected by the trauma of gun violence. And, as researchers found in D.C., the conflicts that lead to murders can often involve them.
“The vast, vast, vast, vast majority of shooting and homicide victims and suspects are males, and that leads many people, sometimes myself, to say you should focus intervention efforts on males,” says Muhammad. “But even if you think this woman’s not going to be the shooter, there’s many women at the center of shooting who could use intervention efforts.”
VIDEO: Suspected Serial Attacker in Custody After Laundromat Beating https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2023/03/25/video-suspected-serial-attacker-custody-after-laundromat-beating/
The Black Lives Matter movement has only focused on how law enforcement treats blacks. The movement has taken no responsibility for the victims of black criminals, and this is despite the fact that the vast majority of victims at the hands of black criminals are black. Yet the BLM movement never uses the billions of dollars donated by corporations to care for the victims of black criminals. Not a word, not an apology, not a regret, not a dollar.
Victims of black crime matter, too By Daniel Davies
Two black teenagers brutally attacked an Asian mother of three, causing severe physical damage
Nhung Truong, 44, mother of three, has had a tough go in the United States. Seven years ago, she lost her husband to liver cancer. She accepted the responsibility of raising her three children and caring for her mother, too, as the sole wage earner. On February 13th, 2023, she stopped at a Bank of America ATM in Houston, Texas, withdrawing $4,300 she intended to use to pay for a trip to visit Vietnam with her family. Then she drove to a shopping mall 24 miles away.
Unknown to her, a young black man and woman had been watching her at the ATM. They followed her for 24 miles to China Town, where the young man, Joseph Harrell, 17, brutally attacked her . He body slammed the small Asian woman so violently that she is now partially paralyzed with spinal cord damage, unable to move her left leg. Harrell made his getaway in a car driven by Zy’Nika Ayesha Woods, 19. They have just recently been arrested . After a month in the hospital, Nhung was released to home care. She will be under care for two years. A GoFundMe campaign has already raised $300,000 for her care.
Image: The attack on Nhung Truong . YouTube screen grab.
The attack only gained attention after Andy Ngo, working with other Asians, brought the crime to public attention about a week ago. The local media had not given the crime attention until the New York Post ran an article.
The Black Lives Matter movement has only focused on how law enforcement treats blacks. The movement has taken no responsibility for the victims of black criminals, and this is despite the fact that the vast majority of victims at the hands of black criminals are black. Yet the BLM movement never uses the billions of dollars donated by corporations to care for the victims of black criminals. Not a word, not an apology, not a regret, not a dollar.
I prayed about this situation at my peaceful and beautiful prayer place in rural Texas. I could not shake my sadness about Nhung Truong’s brutal assault and horrific injuries, and the desperate financial situation her family finds themselves in. Nor could I forget the desperate plight in which many black Americans find themselves trapped, their voices unheard, their sufferings unnoted, their murders ignored. In Chicago, 71 black victims have been shot and killed since January 1, 2023. Since these 71 people were victims of black criminals, BLM has not a tear to shed or dollar to give them.
I asked God why do you permit this to happen? And I realized that God is in anguish over the situation his children find themselves in. He could change the situation in a second, yet that is not the way He works. Since the Fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, He has depended upon us to do our part to solve the problems that we face in the world. For him to stand back and permit these atrocities by evil persons is the most exasperating challenge he faces. Yet only that way can we, His beloved children, fulfill our responsibility and fully become the Children of God.
So what can we do to deal with the terrible situations that Nhung Trung and many others like her face? The billions donated to Black Lives Matter need to be shifted from defending criminals (or buying houses) to black philanthropic organizations run by churches, which are closest to members of black communities. This is not a partisan issue but a grand humanitarian endeavor. The vast majority of funds would go to black families who have suffered from black-on-black crime. People could model these initiatives on George H. W. Bush’s idea of a thousand points of light , which inspired an organization dedicated to volunteerism .
Who could head up such a grand endeavor? A few suggestions include Dr. Bernice A. King, Martin Luther King’s daughter; Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a Harvard professor; Dr. Ben Carson, a brain surgeon; or Hak Ja Han (Moon), the wife of the founder of the Washington Times.
It’s time to remember that, among the lives that matter in America are those who find themselves victimized by the people who Black Lives Matter funds. We have a moral obligation to help them.
