 Happy #BlackHistoryMonth ! Not ready to talk about Black History. Still talking about white US history. Q: Why are Black neighborhoods so often high crime neighborhoods? Must be a lawless people! Violent! Thieves! Predators! A: There is no such thing as a "high crime neighborhood." The whole concept is entirely made up based on our notion of what we consider a crime. You may be thinking:π€ Wait... What?! Not true! A high crime neighborhood has more drug use and sales, theft, and even murder! 20 comments
The war on drugs allows micro-dosing and dispensaries, but criminalizes possession for poor Black folk. Pretty much any test you can do shows that drug use by white folk is about the same, or in some cohorts, many times more, than Black folk. Yes, even crack cocaine in the 80s. White folk did more crack than Black folk. There's a false narrative that white folk did powder cocaine and Black folk did crack, and that's why more Black folk are in jail for drugs. It's not true. Poor folk did crack. But what about theft? If you park your car in a high crime area, you're likely to get your windows smashed! But, most theft in this country, is wage theft. Mostly rich white business owners, stealing wages from poor Black and brown service workers. Between $8B and $15B a year. Yes I said "billion!" Yes I said "a year!" But we don't define wage theft by employers as a crime the same way as we define an employee stealing from the cash register, or a homeless person smashing a window. You don't go to jail for wage theft. Again, this is an arbitrary decision around how we choose to define crime. We could very easily decide that intentionally stealing more than $1000 from an employee is now a felony! Just like intentionally stealing $1000 from an employer is a felony. But you know that we won't. Civil asset forfeiture is cops taking cash and other property from folk who are too poor to mount a defense against the theft. Most victims are never charged with a crime. Victims of this theft are disproportionately Black. ~$2B in 2016. Civil asset forfeiture is not a crime. It's literally done by the cops! π If I say I was driving back from Tijuana Mexico, and Mexican police pulled me over and took $1,000 from me, you will say "Mexican police are corrupt!" and maybe follow up with some racist statements. But if a Black US driver is driving in Florida, police can just take $10,000 from her in broad daylight, without even bothering to accuse her of a crime. It's very risky for poor Black folk to do any cash based transaction in the US. Not because they might get robbed by criminals, but by the cops. OK, but what about murder? Clearly there are more murders committed in "high crime" areas? Again, it depends on our definition of murder and even our definition of location. If I stand on block A, and shoot someone across the street on block B, where did the crime occur? A or B? Do we define murder as where the body fell? Or where the shooter pulled the trigger? Victim focused? Or killer focused? This distinction becomes important once we explore how we have arbitrarily decided to define murder. Shooting folk? Murder! Lying about public health data during a pandemic? Not murder! Grifting supplies needed by FEMA? Not murder! Cops shooting unarmed folk in the back? Not murder! So the forms of victimization disproportionately suffered by poor Black folk, don't even register as murder. ππ Even in the highest gun crime cities in the US, there are a *very* small number of shooters doing most of the killing. Typically fewer than 50 killers in a city of millions. But we consider entire cities "high crime" because of them, because they rack up *astronomical* bodycounts. π€But... By astronomical we mean 500 to 1000 murders a year, 80% of which will likely be committed by this pod of killers, most of the victims young, Black, male. But we don't consider *intentional* negligence leading to 10K or 100K deaths, as creating a high crime neighborhood. Of all the things that police do with their billions of dollars of budget, the one thing they don't do well at all, and the one thing that some residents of supposedly high crime communities (AKA, Black communities) would actually want them to do, is stop these pods. But they won't. Dallas PD has a budget of ~$500 MM, and has 3,000 officers and around 500 civilian workers. They only have ~15 homicide detectives. The other 2,985 officers do a lot of policing of "high crime" neighborhoods. Arresting lots of poor Black folk for drugs and other minor crimes. I'm not going into assault, other than to say: If in 2023 your definition of assault is "Men beating up men that they don't know," then I don't know what to tell you. If you know that most assault is "Men harming women that they do know," then no explanation needed. @mekkaokereke @taatm @mekkaokereke @mekkaokereke this. Also, violence is not always physical. Manipulation and coercive control ARE ABUSE and even if he has never hit you, yes, IT DOES COUNT. π Same goes for sexual assault within relationships. You still have the right to say "no." You always have the right to say "no." Walk away when you see the early signs, if you can, before your life is in danger. The red flags don't lie. π, someone who trusted the wrong person instead of her gut @mekkaokereke This is not true just for women, it is true for everyone my guy. Ask your local gay where they feel safest. There is only a subset of the population of men that most visibly marginalized groups feel safe around. I know plenty of straight men that are not even comfortable around the lowest common denominator of men. @mekkaokereke Violence is always where men areβ¦sadly and not all men. I celebrate kind people no matter their gender. Women are just more nurturing, while both can be violent itβs not normally in a womenβs nature. Gun violence in America is mostly by men, not sure of the statistics since many of the studies leave out the gender part but when you look at the break down closer it is in the 95% for mass shootings. |
Gregory's Server
But let's dig into that and unpack the racism a little.
Drugs are easiest to understand. At this point everyone should know that white Americans do more drugs than Black Americans. They also do more hard drugs. We don't consider Drs. offices to be high crime, and yet, opioids.
Black neighborhoods only seem like they have more drug use, because of how we've decided to define crimes around drug use, and how we choose to enforce.