Young blacks killing and being killed more
And a federal program that removes blacks from “failing neighborhoods”

While murders have leveled off nationwide, there has been a big increase since 2000 in the number of young blacks who are killing and being killed in shootings. According to a study by criminologists at Northeastern University reported by the AP, 426 black males between the ages of 14 and 17 were killed last year in gun crimes, a 40 percent increase from 2000.

Similarly, an estimated 964 in the same age group committed fatal shootings in 2007—a 38% increase from seven years earlier. The number of offenders is estimated because not all crimes are reported, said Northeastern criminologist James Alan Fox, who co-authored the study….

The FBI reported 10,067 arrests in murder and non-negligent manslaughter cases in 2007. Half of the people arrested—5,078—were black. Almost 10 percent of black people arrested for murder were under age 18, the FBI data show.

Hmm. 964, the estimated number of black gun killers of ages 14-17, is almost 20 percent of 5,078, not ten percent.

Be that as it may, Fox adds:

Although the overall rate of homicide in the United States remains relatively low, the landscape is quite different for countless Americans living, and some dying, in violence-infested neighborhoods.

Note how Fox phrases it. The killing is taking place “in violence infested neighborhoods,” as though the violence infestation existed prior to and separate from the murders, rather than the violence infestation consisting of the murders.

Since Fox has adopted the logic of the No Child Left Behind Act, perhaps there should be a federal law that designates these violence-infested neighborhoods as Failing Neighborhoods and declares that if the homicide rate in each such neighborhood does not, in a certain number of years, decline to a rate equal to the national average of all neighborhoods, the neighborhood will be closed down and all the residents moved to new, non-failing, non-violence infested neighborhoods.

In the real world, of course, the problem is not with the neighborhood as a physical location separate from the people living there; the problem is with the people living there, just as the problem with “failing schools” is the pupils who attend them.

- end of initial entry -

Mike Berman writes:

You wrote:

In the real world, of course, the problem is not with the neighborhood as a physical location separate from the people living there; the problem is with the people living there, just as the problem with “failing schools” is the pupils who attend them.

Here is an article from yesterday which perfectly demonstrates your point:

Note that “black renters” in the article’s title refer to Section 8 housing recipients.

Influx of black renters raises tension in Bay Area
By PAUL ELIAS

(AP) Karen Coleman and her husband, Thomas Coleman, section 8 housing voucher recipients, look out the…
Full Image

ANTIOCH, Calif. (AP)—As more and more black renters began moving into this mostly white San Francisco Bay Area suburb a few years ago, neighbors started complaining about loud parties, mean pit bulls, blaring car radios, prostitution, drug dealing and muggings of schoolchildren.

In 2006, as the influx reached its peak, the police department formed a special crime-fighting unit to deal with the complaints, and authorities began cracking down on tenants in federally subsidized housing.

Now that police unit is the focus of lawsuits by black families who allege the city of 100,000 is orchestrating a campaign to drive them out.

“A lot of people are moving out here looking for a better place to live,” said Karen Coleman, a mother of three who came here five years ago from a blighted neighborhood in nearby Pittsburg. “We are trying to raise our kids like everyone else. But they don’t want us here.”

City officials deny the allegations in the lawsuits, which were filed last spring and seek unspecified damages.

Across the country, similar tensions have simmered when federally subsidized renters escaped run-down housing projects and violent neighborhoods by moving to nicer communities in suburban Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles.

But the friction in Antioch is “hotter than elsewhere,” said U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman Larry Bush.

An increasing number of poor families receiving federal rental assistance have been moving here in recent years, partly because of the housing crisis.

A growing number of landlords were seeking a guaranteed source of revenue in a city hard-hit by foreclosures. They began offering their Antioch homes to low-income tenants in the HUD Section 8 housing program, which pays about two-thirds of every tenant’s rent.

Between 2000 and 2007, Antioch’s black population nearly doubled from 8,824 to 16,316. And the number of Antioch renters receiving federal subsidies climbed almost 50 percent between 2003 and 2007 to 1,582, the majority of them black.

Longtime homeowners complained that the new arrivals brought crime and other troubles. In 2006, violent crime in Antioch shot up about 19 percent from the year before, while property crime went down slightly.

“In some neighborhoods, it was complete madness,” said longtime resident David Gilbert, a black retiree who organized the United Citizens of Better Neighborhoods watch group. “They were under siege.”

So the Antioch police in mid-2006 created the Community Action Team, which focused on complaints of trouble at low-income renters’ homes.

Police sent 315 complaints about subsidized tenants to the Contra Costa Housing Authority, which manages the federal program in the city, and urged the agency to evict many of them for lease violations such as drug use or gun possession. Lawyers for the tenants said 70 percent of the eviction recommendations were aimed at black renters. The housing authority turned down most of the requests.

Coleman said the police, after a complaint from a neighbor, showed up at her house one morning in 2007 to check on her husband, who was on parole for drunken driving. She said they searched the house and returned twice more that summer to try to find out whether the couple had violated any terms of their lease that could lead to eviction.

The Colemans were also slapped with a restraining order after a neighbor accused them of “continually harassing and threatening their family,” according to court papers. The Colemans said a judge later rescinded the order.

Coleman and four other families are suing Antioch, accusing police of engaging in racial discrimination and conducting illegal searches without warrants. They have asked a federal judge to make their suit a class-action on behalf of hundreds of other black renters. Another family has filed a lawsuit accusing the city’s leaders of waging a campaign of harassment to drive them out.

Police referred questions to the city attorney’s office.

City Attorney Lynn Tracy Nerland denied any discrimination on the part of police and said officers were responding to crime reports in troubled neighborhoods when they discovered that a large number of the troublemakers were receiving federal subsidies.

“They are responding to real problems,” Nerland said.

Joseph Villarreal, the housing authority chief, said the problems in Antioch mirror tensions seen nationally when poor renters move into neighborhoods they can afford only with government help.

“One of the goals of the programs is to de-concentrate poverty,” Villarreal said. “There are just some people who don’t want to spend public money that way.”

Tensions like those afflicting Antioch have drawn scholars and law enforcement officials to debate whether crime follows subsidized renters out of the tenements to the suburbs.

Susan Popkin, a researcher at the nonprofit Urban Institute, said she does not believe that is the case. But the tensions, she said, are real.

“That can be a recipe for anxiety,” she said. “It can really change the demographics of a neighborhood.”

LA replies to Mike Berman:

See, I’m a prophet. I said it as a horrible joke, and it turns out to be already true.

Mark Jaws writes:

Of course your analysis of the spin by the liberal Mr. Fox is spot on, but notice the absence of Hispanic data in this analysis. That is because when it comes to perpetrating crime, Hispanics – even the brownest skin, full blooded Aztec from Mexico, is counted as “white” by the FBI. I don’t know if this is a legacy from the early 20th century days when most Hispanic immigrants and residents in the US were white or mostly white mestizos, or if it is an insidious attempt by PC forces to inflate the crime rate of whites, and thereby make the black crime rate seem less threatening.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 31, 2008 08:08 AM | Send