The Cultural And Political Forces Driving Violence In The Black Community
America has a problem: a subculture of black crime. Every race has criminals, but when 6% of the population, black males, are responsible for over 50% of the murders and violent crimes, one must ask why. The answer lies in the irony that blacks inherited the worst of old-time, white Scots-Irish culture, over which leftists placed racial grievance politics. The former created bad behavior; the latter leaves blacks unprepared or unwilling to address that behavior.
California Reparations Could Top $800 Billion, Economists for State Panel Say
California owes up to $800 billion and counting to its black residents, according to economists advising the state panel in charge of a race reparations plan.
The figure, presented to California's reparations task force ahead of its Wednesday meeting in Sacramento, is nearly triple the state's $300 billion annual budget and comes as leaders grapple with a $25 billion budget deficit. It also accounts for only a portion of the "harms" against black people that the task force wants to try to fix with cash, including housing discrimination, over-policing, and mass incarceration. The panel says the state should also pay reparations for devaluation of black businesses and eminent domain property seizures.
The sky-high proposal appears to make cash reparations more unlikely and infeasible, even as state Democrats tout their effort as a first-in-the-nation push that could serve as a model for national reparations. The debate over reparations payouts comes as San Francisco's own reparations task force has also proposed exorbitant payments. After the task force received criticism for recommending the city pay $5 million to each black resident, one panel member suggested $500 million individual payments would be reasonable.
Members of the state task force are already signaling that the enormous reparations figures recommended on paper are unlikely to become reality. Sympathetic media outlets have cautioned that "reparations" means more than cash payments and could involve new government programs.
Democratic assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who represents the State Assembly on the reparations panel, told Cal Matters that "the actual meat" of the reparations plan isn't cash payments but rather the policy recommendations to prevent discrimination from perpetuating.
And Amos Brown, a minister and the leader of San Francisco's NAACP who sits on both the state task force and the separate San Francisco panel, this month criticized the plan that he ostensibly helped write. He told NBC Bay Area that city lawmakers gave black San Franciscans false hope by voicing support for the proposal without giving any details on how they will fund it.
The state task force must present a final plan to the California legislature by this summer. Lawmakers will then have to adopt the proposals and find a way to pay for them, or come up with an alternative.
$5 Million in Reparations to Every Black Person is “Nothing”, Activists Protest
"$5 million is nothing, and I'll tell you why."
They have a point. Why settle for $5 billion and all the free Ben and Jerry’s you can eat? It should be $10 billion a person and no grocery bills for life. Or $100 trillion. At the rate our inflation is going, it’s all the same.
The California Reparations Task Force had proposed $5 million in reparations for the historic slavery experienced by residents of the southern state that played a key role in the Confederacy. Meeting in Sacramento, the former seat of office for Jefferson Davis, the reparations task force demanded tearing down statues of key confederate leaders like George Moscone, Harvey Milk and Jerry Brown.
More seriously (or perhaps less so), there’s an $800 billion bill for California.
An advisory committee in San Francisco has recommended $5 million payouts, as well as guaranteed income of at least $97,000 and personal debt forgiveness for qualifying individuals.
It could cost California more than $800 billion to compensate black residents for generations of over-policing, disproportionate incarceration and housing discrimination, economists have told a state panel considering reparations.
The preliminary estimate is more than 2.5 times California’s $300 billion annual budget, and does not include a recommended $1 million per older black resident for health disparities that have shortened their average life span.
And the obvious response, it’s not enough!
Activists on Wednesday demanded that the state of California pay millions of dollars to each Black resident in reparations as a way to make amends for slavery and subsequent discrimination, dismissing the idea of payments of $5 million per person as “nothing” and “too little.”
$5 million? Come on! Let’s try $5 billion. Or $5 trillion and everyone has to watch Black Panther 2 and then answer a quiz about key plot elements.
“I believe that 5 million in reparations is too little for the work that foundational Black Americans have done for this country and as well for other countries,” one speaker said. “I believe that 7.6 million [dollars] is a number that can be used very wisely in our foundational Black American communities.”
$7.6 million? That’s nothing! What about $16 quintillion and everyone has to pretend that Ta-Nehisi Coates is a great writer.
He also called for various other reparations measures, such as giving 40 acres and a tractor and colleges agreeing not raise tuition prices for foundational black American families.
And free umbrellas!
“To try to keep holding foundational Black Americans back from what is due for us is just another form of slavery,” he concluded. “It is preposterous and totally absurd.”
Preposterous and totally absurd. Giving out only $5 million is the new Jim Crow! It’s just like slavery. Except with millions of dollars.
Another activist identified as Reverend Tony Pierce similarly said current reparations proposals aren’t enough.
“Where’s the money? Where’s the cash? Where’s the check?” Pierce asked emphatically. “$5 million, San Francisco’s already made a move. $5 million is nothing, and I’ll tell you why.”
Pierce argued that $5 million spread over 50 years would only amount to $100,000 year, and then with taxes, “you’ll be lucky if you end up with $40,000 a year.”
$!00,000 a year? It’s nothing! What about infinite amounts of money every year and everyone has to kiss Oprah’s feet?
It’s unclear how California would afford to pay more than $5 million to Black residents. Newsom announced in January that the state faces a projected budget deficit of $22.5 billion for the coming fiscal year.
It’s easy. You just pass a law.
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Had he (BARACK OBAMA) been a Thomas Sowell, an Allen West, or Ben Carson, or even the liberal Colin Powell, a patriot who loved his country and recognized the significance of a Black man winning the American Presidency. But, no, that man was not a patriot. He was instead a community organizing, race-baiting, anti-American, cult-Marxist agitator. He was Barack Hussein Obama, who presided over the greatest lost opportunity in American history.
Gavin Newsom is cornered by the reparations clown show he unleashed
California’s Governor Gavin Newsom finds himself in such an awkward position that he is refusing comment on a gathering storm that will not go away, and which has the possibility of turning his presidential ambitions to ashes.
Newsom is known to many as “Governor Brylcreem” for the large amount of greasy pomade he favors for his coiffure. He will need all the lubricant he can come up with to slip through the trap he has constructed for himself.
Aaron Kliegman reports for Fox News:
The California Reparations Task Force, which was created by state legislation signed by Newsom in 2020, is considering a proposal to give just under $360,000 per person to approximately 1.8 million Black Californians who had an ancestor enslaved in the U.S., putting the total cost of the program at about $640 billion.
The task force's final recommendations for reparations will be submitted to the California Legislature, which will then decide whether to implement the measures and send them to Newsom's desk to be signed into law.
Democrats totally control both houses of the legislature, and who among them would vote against reparations? Blacks’ share of California’s population is well below the national average, but in a state utterly dominated by the left, it would take courage – and leadership from the governor – to go against the fad (and left wing obsession) of reparations.
No race or ethnic group constitutes a majority of California’s population: 39% of Californians are Latino, 35% are white, 15% are Asian American or Pacific Islander, 5% are Black, 4% are multiracial, and fewer than 1% are Native American or Alaska Natives, according to the 2020 Census.
Still, I am pretty sure most Hispanics and Asian-Americans, and not a few whites, would not fancy paying higher taxes in order to hand out substantial personal wealth to African Americans who were never slaves. And higher taxes, or radical service cuts (or both), would be necessary:
The task force had initially proposed $220,000 per person for Black Californians last year but recently increased the figure by more than 60% to $360,000 as one of many ideas being mulled to give out reparations.
Economists and scholars consulting with the task force came to the latest proposal by using a model that evaluated California's racial wealth gap, calculating damages related to injustices such as housing discrimination, mass incarceration and health harms.
It's unclear how California would pay for large-scale reparations. Newsom announced in January that the state faces a projected budget deficit of $22.5 billion for the coming fiscal year. Then weeks later, the California Legislative Analyst's Office, a government agency that analyzes the budget for the state legislature, estimated in a subsequent report that Newsom's forecast undershot the mark by about $7 billion.
A nearly $30 billion looming deficit before any payments to Blacks leaves a big fiscal challenge. If California were to hand out the $360,000 to every one of California’s 2.252 million Black residents, the total cost would be over $810 billion dollars, more than three times Newsom’s 2022-3 budget.
Simply put, reparations are a stupid idea, but one that has caught the imagination of many on the far left. Reparations that would triple the state budget simply cannot realistically be paid. There is no room to triple California’s taxes, or even increase them by 30% in order to fund a massive bond issue that would be necessary. California already is hemorrhaging affluent residents, who pay most of the state’s income tax revenues. And how many Blacks from other states wold rush to Caifornia to acquire more liquid resources than most American families can dream of? Imagine the turmoil if they are told to buzz off.
So, Newsom is caught. Either he takes on the entire reparations movement, which is the darling of the left wing of the Democrats, in which case he earns many enemies, the kind that take to the streets, or else he presides over an unprecedented financial disaster.
Unless, that is, the state legislature refuses to pass the bill. But how likely are state legislators to do so without Newsom leading the charge? Unless they have some cover, who would want angry demonstrators back home in their district? A mobilized angry minority can torpedo their primary contests for renomination to their seats.
Then, there is the even more ridiculous San Francisco reparations gold rush, about which Newsom has said nothing:
Last week, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors expressed "unanimous" support for a draft plan of more than 100 reparations recommendations for the city, including a proposal to dole out $5 million each to qualifying Black residents. The proposal of $5 million lump-sum payments would cost non-Black families in the city at least $600,000, according to Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
The city board also expressed interest in other forms of reparations for San Francisco's roughly 50,000 Black residents, such as a guaranteed annual income of at least $97,000 for 250 years and a home in the area for just $1 a family.
Another idea under consideration is a "comprehensive debt forgiveness" program that would clear all personal, educational and credit card debt of low-income Black households.
Like California, San Francisco is also facing a massive deficit, estimated at $728 million, making it unclear how the city would pay for such a reparations plan.
Plans that spend impossible amounts of money, taxing people wholly innocent of any guilt to bestow fabulous wealth on others to compensate for wrongs that none of them suffered: this is California Democrat policies at their zenith. No wonder that the dummy Newsom is dummying up.
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore CC BY-SA 3.0 license
Obama, Trayvon, and Race in America
The rhetoric and uproar over the beating death of Trye Nichols by five Black police officers in Memphis, Tennessee, demonstrates how badly the “conversation” over race has deteriorated. One would think that a crime involving Blacks killing another Black would lack a racial angle to exploit. Alas, in today’s race-obsessed universe that is never the case. Unable to help themselves, our nation’s top racialists, beginning with President Joe Biden, weighed in on the controversy hurling the standard epithets of “systemic racism” and “White supremacy.” The media, and others, were happy to join in.
With the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ending “separate but equal,” the Civil Rights legislation of the sixties, affirmative action, and “Great Society,” with its trillions of dollars of wealth transfers to Blacks, one might have considered that, nearly sixty years later, the nation would mend and race relations improve.
Indeed, the emergence of Barack Obama and his ascension to the Presidency in 2008 suggested that that moment had arrived. The event should have been an inflection point in America’s racial history. Many thought it was. How else to explain a White majority nation electing a Black President, other than that America had turned the corner? Alas, Obama was not one to placate the nation. Rather than use the opportunity of his rise to the White House as the crowning achievement of a long treacherous journey to racial reconciliation, he chose instead to agitate and polarize the nation further. His presidency should have represented the fulfillment of the great dream of Lincoln, King, and of our Declaration of Independence, but became instead the basis of an ever-widening racial gap that may never be bridged.
Of his many racial stunts, perhaps the worst moment occurred during the Trayvon Martin affair. After the shooting death of the young Black, Obama famously stated that “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.” The statement was provocative. Rather than pacify the nation, he inflamed it. He seemed to dismiss his White mother and the White grandparents who raised him. He, thus, injected his own biases into the controversy. As in so many other instances, rather than seek a peaceful resolution, he roiled the nation further.
The Trayvon Martin episode (like so many others) had, indeed, unleashed the furies emanating from the dark underside of racial politics and grievance in America; and it was not a pretty sight. It revolved around a simple narrative that had become the essence of a vast and elaborate racial industry that had grown and metastasized through the decades.
The narrative was as plain as it was destructive: it was that America was racist to the core, institutionally and categorically, and no matter what progress the nation made, no matter the multitude of unparalleled triumphs Blacks enjoyed, the stain and moral culpability would never be erased.
It did not matter that Blacks occupied the highest echelons of American wealth, power, and influence in the country, even the Presidency, the attorney general's office, the halls of Congress, governors' mansions, city halls, in the media, the academy, Hollywood, the music and entertainment world, sports, business, fashion, medicine, and law.
Nor did it matter that a vast complex of diversity programs, appointments, set asides, quotas, contracts, gerrymandered districts, anti-discrimination laws, voting rights, and wealth transfers have been instituted on behalf of Blacks, or that extensive bureaucracies and organizations have been brought into existence to protect and cater to the needs of Blacks.
Nor did it matter that Blacks, Black achievement, and Black culture were embraced, that Blacks received extensive preferential treatment and subsidies, or that a substantial political/media broadside was triggered for virtually any perceived racial slight or slur to defend Black sensitivities.
Nor did it matter that the United States was bar none the single greatest place in the world for a young Black to live and grow.
The narrative would not go away, for Obama and the race industry would not allow it; they had too much to lose, too much lucre and power to forfeit; it existed to ensure that the race catechism was never forgotten, and brandished as a sharp sword at a moment's notice.
George Zimmerman was only the latest foil at the time (and many since). The episodes of prior racial industry clampdowns were well known. Bernie Goetz, Crown Heights, Tawana Brawley, Jena 6, Henry Louis Gates, Duke-Lacrosse, and then Zimmerman, all saw the race industry in full attack mode, unleashing the power of its divisions, the integrated machinery of media, politicians, unions, activists, hucksters, protesters, administrators, academicians, lawyers, civil rights groups, bureaucracies and organizations unwinding themselves on the national stage, targeting victims, wrecking lives, and reinforcing the crucial race narrative upon which their careers and livelihoods depended.
The guilt or innocence of the protagonists hardly mattered. No one knew if Zimmerman committed a crime. But that was immaterial. Zimmerman’s offense was not legal but political.
If the man who pulled the trigger had been named Sanchez or had been a Black, it would have been a non-story, having failed the race template, no different than the thousands of Blacks killed every year by other Blacks that go unreported.
That he was Hispanic disturbed the tidy narrative of White racism and placed dueling liberal pieties at odds; and so a new ethnicity was discovered: the “White Hispanic.”
But the Hispanic dimension is troubling for the race crowd. It needs to look hard into the future for the demographics are not favorable. Hispanic Americans, when their numbers are great enough, will discard the temporary alliance they may have with Blacks and will not be patient with Black demands and Black victimhood. Having had nothing to do with slavery and being members of an “oppressed minority” themselves, there will be no pool of White guilt from which to extract wealth transfers or preferential treatment of any kind.
Indeed, the window for Blacks is closing quickly and the future is grim. Instead of seeking liberty, accomplishment, and full integration into American society, they have followed the admonitions of the race industry into a ghetto of cultural breakdown, unemployment, criminality, and poverty, to their own deepening detriment. They have accepted liberalism's nostrums for Black dysfunction, embraced liberalism's assumptions of their inability to compete and requirement for ever-expanding government largesse; they have been mined by the race industry for votes and money; furthermore, they have learned to resent bitterly their country, the “White patriarchy,” and to believe that the cards were stacked against them. They have been led into a house of poverty and despair.
One would be hard pressed to devise a more disabling ideology than this.
And the man who did more to perpetuate and exacerbate their dysfunction and misery while deepening the division of the nation, was none other than the one who could have actually ended it -- had the first Black President been a different man. Had he been a Thomas Sowell, an Allen West, or Ben Carson, or even the liberal Colin Powell, a patriot who loved his country and recognized the significance of a Black man winning the American Presidency. But, no, that man was not a patriot. He was instead a community organizing, race-baiting, anti-American, cult-Marxist agitator. He was Barack Hussein Obama, who presided over the greatest lost opportunity in American history.
Dr. Moss is a practicing Ear Nose and Throat Surgeon, candidate for Congress in 2016 and 2018, author, columnist, local investor, and small businessman, residing in Jasper, IN. He has written A Surgeon’s Odyssey and Matilda’s Triumph, available on amazon.com. Find more of his essays at richardmossmd.com. Visit Richard Moss, M.D. on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, Gettr, GAB, TruthSocial, and Instagram.
Image: Ryan Vaarsi
BLOG EDITOR: IT WAS BEN CARSON, M.D., WHO CHARACTERIZED THE OBOMB AS A SOCIOPATH. NO ONE DOUBTS IT NO MATTER WHO SAID IT!
Had he been a Thomas Sowell, an Allen West, or Ben Carson, or even the liberal Colin Powell, a patriot who loved his country and recognized the significance of a Black man winning the American Presidency. But, no, that man was not a patriot. He was instead a community organizing, race-baiting, anti-American, cult-Marxist agitator. He was Barack Hussein Obama, who presided over the greatest lost opportunity in American history.
Dr. Moss is a practicing Ear Nose and Throat Surgeon, candidate for Congress in 2016 and 2018, author, columnist, local investor, and small businessman, residing in Jasper, IN. He has written A Surgeon’s Odyssey and Matilda’s Triumph, available on amazon.com. Find more of his essays at richardmossmd.com. Visit Richard Moss, M.D. on Facebook, Twitter, Parler, Gettr, GAB, TruthSocial, and Instagram.
IN AMERICA CRIME IS BLACK.
Overall crime has soared across the district by 22 percent since 2022, D.C. crime statistics from Wednesday show. Sex abuse is up 110 percent. Homicides are up 19 percent. Property crime is up 27 percent, and motor vehicle theft has soared 108 percent.
America has a problem: a subculture of black crime. Every race has criminals, but when 6% of the population, black males, are responsible for over 50% of the murders and violent crimes, one must ask why.
The Cultural And Political Forces Driving Violence In The Black Community
America has a problem: a subculture of black crime. Every race has criminals, but when 6% of the population, black males, are responsible for over 50% of the murders and violent crimes, one must ask why. The answer lies in the irony that blacks inherited the worst of old-time, white Scots-Irish culture, over which leftists placed racial grievance politics. The former created bad behavior; the latter leaves blacks unprepared or unwilling to address that behavior.
Thomas Sowell’s fascinating Conquests and Cultures discusses how different societies evolved. The primary takeaway is that, in the last 500 years, the Europeans have far surpassed the rest of the planet while Africans have lagged farthest behind. This isn’t race-based. It’s because of water and geography.
Europe has numerous easily navigable rivers and deep-water harbors. Additionally, almost every spot on the continent is within 500 miles of the sea, allowing most Europeans to trade within Europe and around the world. That ability to easily trade foods, manufactured goods, people and, most of all, ideas with one another allowed Europeans to incorporate everything from gunpowder from China to numbers from India, crafting a civilization that far surpassed anything found anywhere else. The inventiveness, efficiencies, freedoms, and prosperity Europeans developed allowed them to dominate the world for centuries.
Image: 19th-century drawing showing an Appalachian couple (i.e., Scots-Irish), entitled “The trial’s next Wednesday,” by E.W. Kemble (1861-1933). Public domain
Africa, however, has few deep-water harbors and few functionally navigable rivers, and its rugged topography make the exchange of goods, people, and ideas over large areas difficult at best and almost impossible at worst. In pre-modern times, those barriers saw most civilizations in sub-Saharan Africa remain relatively insular and isolated.
Africans couldn’t benefit from the exchange of ideas and goods, which would have allowed them to coalesce into powerful, advanced societies. This reality has nothing to do with race. Sowell points out that similar geographic hurdles impeded the development of robust trading mechanisms in a number of places in Europe, including the Scottish Highlands, Russia, and much of the Balkans, with similarly retarded cultural development.
Sowell is clear: It’s geography that shapes a society’s culture, not race. The same is true in America. As Sowell shows in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, southern blacks adopted the self-destructive culture of the early Scots-Irish settlers. To this non-African heritage, the left has added a sense of chronic victimhood. The result? Violence and a lack of respect for people and property that so many predominantly black communities display.
What Sowell calls “Cultural capital” must be developed. It involves an ability and willingness to work to achieve desired goals. He contrasts the success of the Germans and Japanese after WWII with that of many of the newly independent states in Africa in the second half of the 20th century. All received massive amounts of money from outside, but the outcomes were far different.
While Germany and Japan became economic juggernauts, most newly independent African nations became economic basket cases where poverty and corruption reigned while freedom and security were almost nonexistent. He points out that while it was engineers and business leaders who took the lead in Germany and Japan after the war, in Africa it was usually members of the western educated intelligentsia, steeped in “social sciences” and largely lacking in knowledge or experience in demonstrably productive endeavors who took the lead.
In the United States, the same leftist intelligentsia (read Democrats…) have led much of black America into similarly dire straits. Democrats have convinced a significant portion of black Americans that they are victims of systemic racism that cannot be overcome.
The catalyst was, of course, slavery. While slavery did exist, as did its Jim Crow progeny, the problems that bedevil many black Americans today have little to do with these racist systems. Slavery has been gone for 170 years, and Jim Crow for more than half a century. Since then, the country has seen government-mandated school integration, decades of affirmative action and government welfare programs and, perhaps most harmfully, programs that made it economically viable for women to have children without the father present, resulting in 70% of black babies being born out of wedlock and raised by single mothers.
Still, leftists claim, America is systemically racist—even though between 1947 and 2021, the median individual income for blacks rose 458% while, for whites, it rose only 297%. But we’re told racism is America’s biggest threat—even though “hate crimes” are so few that there seems to be a cottage industry associated with fakes. However, Blacks, we’re told, can’t succeed in America—even though the $35,000 median household income of the average black American family is higher than the median household income of every other country on the planet except for Luxemburg, Norway, Canada, and Switzerland.
The Democrats’ ability to brainwash a significant number of black Americans into believing they’re victims of white racism leads to the carnage that plays itself out across the country, as viral videos too frequently prove. This violence seems to be different from 20 years ago, both in terms of savagery and frequency.
In 1998 Jessie Jackson said, “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps... then turn around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” Today, the danger Jackson alludes to exists not only when people are walking down the street, but while serving customers in restaurants, working in a drugstore or at the Apple Store, or standing on a subway platform.
People ask how the Nazis could kill so many Jews with so little remorse. It was easy. A media campaign of dehumanization. A firehose pumping out propaganda that Jews were not human unsurprisingly resulted in a significant percentage of the German people believing that Jews were indeed subhuman and, therefore, could be abused and killed to the point of extinction.
The campaign the Nazis used is not so different from what the Democrats are using today to convince black Americans that they are indeed victims of white racism. In just one week during the 2020 election campaign, CNN and MSNBC used the term “racist” 4,100 times. The Democrat’s Victim Industrial Complex has been so successful that a recent Rasmussen poll found that 47% of blacks disagreed with or weren’t sure about the statement: “It’s OK to be white.”
But it’s not only the whites we see being punched, kicked, stomped, and shot because of the nihilism inculcated into blacks brainwashed to think the world is their enemy; it’s Asians, Hispanics and, most of all, other blacks. In many black neighborhoods in American cities, crime rates rival those of the deadliest cities in the world.
If there’s any question about this, visit two websites—Bestneighborhood and Neighborhoodscout—and compare the data. The first shows the geographic population data for cities by race, while the second shows precinct-level crime rates. What you’ll discover is that, in almost every big city, there’s a direct correlation between the levels of crime and the percentage of the black population within the area.
The violent dystopian reality that tragically characterizes too much of black America results directly from the Democrat’s Victim Industrial Complex, which discourages black Americans from breaking free from the worst of the Scots-Irish culture they absorbed in the south. Leftists have told too many black people they have no opportunity for success, and that negative outcomes in their lives are due to the racist system they were born into. They’ve taught them that math, coffee, physical fitness, and virtually everything else, are racist. Simultaneously they’ve allowed many to terrorize their communities with impunity because of “equity.”
The Democrat’s Victim Industrial Complex has sadly destroyed Sowell’s “Cultural capital” for much of black America. And that’s a problem for everyone because, as Abraham Lincoln said in 1858, “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.”
You can follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA.
D.C. Official Claims District Crime ‘Is Not’ a Crisis After Rand Paul Staffer Stabbing
Days after Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-KY) staffer was brutally stabbed over the weekend, Washington, DC, Council Chairman Phil Mendelson testified before Congress on Wednesday that the soaring crime rate in the district is not a crisis.
Overall crime has soared across the district by 22 percent since 2022, D.C. crime statistics from Wednesday show. Sex abuse is up 110 percent. Homicides are up 19 percent. Property crime is up 27 percent, and motor vehicle theft has soared 108 percent.
Mendelson dismissed soaring crime statistics by claiming before House Oversight Committee, “There is not a crime crisis in Washington, DC.”
Mendelson previously spearheaded a district law that would have reduced punishment for criminals. That bill was vetoed by the mayor but the council overrode the mayor’s veto with a dominant number of votes. Congressional Republicans ultimately prevented it from becoming law.
Mendelson’s claims were in response to House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer’s (R-KY) statement that crime is soaring in the nation’s capital.
“Carjackings in have increased 105% compared to this time last year — 56% of these carjackings are committed by juveniles. Totally property crime is up 28%. Homicides are up 37% since 2019,” Comer explained.
The local crimes have even caught the nation’s attention. Just on Monday, news reports surfaced that just blocks away from the Capitol Building, Sen Rand Paul’s (R-KY) staffer was randomly attacked on the 1300 block of H Street Northeast.
The suspect, identified as 42-year-old, black district resident Glynn Neal, told law enforcement he launched the attack because “voices” in his head told him to do it, according to NBC4 Washington.
The attack occurred on the same street where Rep. Angie Craig (D-MN) was assaulted in her apartment building on February 9. Months prior on H street, a Washington Football Team player was shot in an attempted carjacking.
The attacks did not appear to faze Mendelson, who took no responsibility for the attack on Paul’s staffer. “This is something that was horrible and yet it’s something of which we have no part,” he of the council.
The crime spike in Washington, DC, comes after Biden-appointed United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, Matthew Graves, has refused to prosecute 67 percent of those arrested who would have been put on trial in the D.C. Superior Court.
Graves admitted to the Washington Post on Wednesday the lack of prosecutions has mostly applied to those arrests for gun possession, drug possession, and burglaries.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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