Marquette Feminist Group: Don’t Call the Cops If You Are in Trouble

Marquette Empowerment, which posted this on their Facebook timeline, is the same group that vandalized an anti-abortion display on campus back in 2016.

In 2017, they demanded that conservative speaker Ben Shapiro be banned from campus.

They are, to be blunt, a rather nasty, intolerant bunch.

How Silly

But do they even begin to understand how silly this post is? Probably not. The meme claims “calling the police often leads to unnecessary escalation and may lead to the brutalizing and even killing of the victims themselves.”

So if somebody is trying to break into your house, the LGBTQ+ Resource Center are just the people to do something about it.

If you hear shots in your neighborhood, the Suicide Prevention Hotline absolutely needs to come out immediately.

Why Demonize the Police?

Which bring up the larger question: why does the left demonize the police?

They know perfectly well that crime is absurdly high in inner-city black neighborhoods. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Homicide Tracker tells the story:

Click on image to enlarge
Source: https://projects.jsonline.com/apps/Milwaukee-Homicide-Database/

So they are on the horns of a dilemma. Either they admit to a massive amount of dysfunction in the black community, or they pretend that the problem is all those racist cops.

Since they cannot and will not admit the former, they have to claim the cops are the problem.

Which means the real problems will not be addressed. Which they don’t particularly mind, since they care more about posing as social justice warriors than about black lives.

The Politically Incorrect Truth About Race and Policing

From Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal

The Full Truth About Race and Policing

Chicago has long been one of the nation’s most dangerous big cities, and it seems determined to keep that distinction.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that 18 people were killed on one Sunday, May 31, “making it the single most violent day in Chicago in six decades.” Over the full weekend, “25 people were killed in the city, with another 85 wounded by gunfire.” None of these deaths or shootings involved police, so there will be no massive protests over them, no tearful commentary on cable news and social media, no white politicians wrapped in Kente cloth taking a knee for photographers.

Sadly, the only thing remarkable about the episode is that it occurred in the middle of a national discussion about policing. The political left, with a great deal of assistance from the mainstream media, has convinced many Americans that George Floyd’s death in police custody is an everyday occurrence for black people in this country, and that racism permeates law enforcement. The reality is that the carnage we witness in Chicago is what’s typical, law enforcement has next to nothing to do with black homicides, and the number of interactions between police and low-income blacks is driven by crime rates, not bias. According to the Sun-Times, there were 492 homicides in Chicago last year, and only three of them involved police.

So long as blacks are committing more than half of all murders and robberies while making up only 13% of the population, and so long as almost all of their victims are their neighbors, these communities will draw the lion’s share of police attention. Defunding the police, or making it easier to prosecute officers, will only result in more lives lost in those neighborhoods that most need protecting.

There’s nothing wrong with having a debate about better policing strategies, how to root out bad cops, the role of police unions and so forth. But that conversation needs perspective and context, and the press rarely provides it. People are protesting because the public has been led to believe that racist cops are gunning for blacks, yet the available evidence shows that police use of deadly force has plunged in recent decades, including in big cities with large populations of low-income minorities. In the early 1970s, New York City police officers shot more than 300 people a year. By 2019 that number had fallen to 34.

Part of the confusion stems from attempts to equate any racial disparities with racism, which is as mistaken as equating age and gender disparities with systemic discrimination. Young people are incarcerated at higher rates than older people, and men draw more police attention than women. Is something fishy going on here, or do such outcomes simply reflect the fact that young men are behind most violent crimes? When journalists break down police behavior by race but don’t do the same for criminal behavior, you’re not getting the whole story.

A recent New York Times report, for example, tells us that the racial makeup of Minneapolis is 20% black and 60% white, and that police there “used force against black people at a rate at least seven times that of white people during the past five years.” Left out of the story are the rates at which blacks and whites in Minneapolis commit crime in general and violent crime in particular. Nor are we told whether there is any evidence that white and black suspects of similar offenses are treated differently. Minneapolis may in fact have issues with police bias, but drawing conclusions about the extent of the problem or even whether one exists would be premature based on the information provided.

Reports about race and policing that omit relevant facts to push a predetermined narrative are not only misleading but harmful, especially to blacks. We know from decades of experience that when police pull back, criminals gain the advantage and black communities suffer, both physically and economically. A common assumption among liberals is that the movement of inner-city jobs to the suburbs in the late 1960s is what led to the higher rates of crime, violence and other social pathologies associated with ghetto life. But this gets the order wrong. The business flight took place after the rioting, not before. Will history repeat itself?

The Walmart and Target stores in Chicago that were looted last week are two of the city’s largest retailers. They employ a disproportionate number of low-skilled workers, and they haven’t decided whether to reopen. If they don’t, it could mean fewer jobs and higher prices for underserved minorities. Before we divert resources away from policing, maybe we should consider the effect it would have on the willingness and ability of businesses to operate in places where they’re most needed.

All of this is just more evidence that people on the left fundamentally don’t care about the welfare of black people. They simply view them as a client group that serves their political purposes.

Oh, they have convinced themselves they care. But when push comes to shove, they side with (mostly white) teacher’s unions rather than black families that would benefit from school choice. When riots are tearing up neighborhoods, they side with the rioters, seeming not to have noticed that it’s mostly black neighborhoods being torn up.

On issues of policing, they see cops in black neighborhoods as an “occupying army” and call for “defunding the police,” implicitly, but clearly, siding with black criminals rather than law-abiding black citizens.

Hillary, Crime, Race and Policing

From Heather MacDonald at City Journal, written the day after the presidential debate: a fine grained debunking of the standard liberal cant on crime, race and policing. Some selected points (but read the whole thing):

Hillary Clinton repeated her incessant lie last night that the criminal justice system is infected with “systemic racism.” Race “determines” how people are “treated in the criminal justice system,” she said. Blacks are “more likely [than whites] to be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated” for “doing the same thing.” Such a dangerous falsehood, should Clinton act on it as president, would result not just in misguided policies but in the continued delegitimation of the criminal justice system. That delegitimation, with its attendant hostility and aggression toward police officers, has already produced the largest one-year surge in homicides in urban areas in nearly a half-century.

Criminologists have tried for decades to prove that the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is due to criminal-justice racism. They have always come up short. They have been forced to the same conclusion as Michael Tonry in his book, Malign Neglect: “Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,” Tonry wrote. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They found overwhelming evidence establishing that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms.

To say, as Clinton did last night, that blacks are more likely to be incarcerated for doing the same thing as whites ignores the relevance of a defendant’s criminal history in determining his sentence, among other crucial sentencing factors. Just last week, an analysis of Delaware’s prison population presented to the Delaware Access to Justice Commission’s Committee on Fairness in the Criminal Justice System revealed that when juvenile and adult criminal records are taken into account, along with arrest charges and age, racial disparities in sentencing decisions are negligible to nonexistent.

Clinton claimed that “stop-and-frisk was found to be unconstitutional.” No federal judge would have the power to declare pedestrian stops unconstitutional, because the Supreme Court put its constitutional imprimatur on the practice in 1965. Stop-and-frisk remains a lawful and essential police tactic. Criminologist David Weisburd examined the practice in New York City and found that it reduced crime in shooting hot spots. Federal district court judge Shira Scheindlin did rule that the New York Police Department’s practice of stops was racially biased, but her ruling applied only to the New York Police Department. That ruling was wholly unjustified and would likely have been reversed on appeal, had newly elected New York City mayor Bill de Blasio not dropped the appeal. Judge Scheindlin used a population benchmark for measuring the lawfulness of police actions: if police stops didn’t match population ratios, they were unconstitutional, in Scheindlin’s view. Such a methodology ignores the massive disparities in criminal offending in New York City. Blacks commit over three-quarters of all shootings, though they are 23 percent of the city’s population. Add Hispanic shootings to black shootings and you account for 98 percent of all shootings in New York City. Whites are 34 percent of the city’s population; they commit less than 2 percent of all shootings. Such disparities in gun violence mean that virtually every time the police are called out on a gun run—meaning that someone has been shot—they are called to minority neighborhoods on behalf of minority victims, and, if any witness or victim is cooperating with the police, being given a description of a minority suspect. The reality of crime, not phantom police racism, determines the incidence of police activity, including pedestrian stops.

Homicides and shootings in New York City rose 20 percent in the first half of 2015, thanks to the Scheindlin-induced drop in pedestrian stops. Then-police commissioner William Bratton responded with a massive deployment of overtime manpower to high-crime corners; officers used “command presence”—i.e., their mere presence on the street—to deter criminal behavior. This roll-out of manpower resources quelled the shooting spike and New York City ended 2015 with a 6 percent homicide increase. Other departments do not have the personnel available to them to make up for a drop in proactive policing.

Donald Trump is right to warn about depolicing and what I have called the Ferguson Effect. “Right now, our police, in many cases, are afraid to do anything,” he said. The result is a massive loss of black lives in places like Chicago and Baltimore. Law and order are breaking down in inner cities; officers are surrounded by hostile, jeering crowds when they get out of their squad cars to conduct an investigation. Resistance to arrest is up, increasing the chances of an officer’s own use of force. And race riots are returning to American cities. The current mendacious narrative about policing and race has to change or we can expect to see further violent-crime increases and further racial violence. It is clear, however, that Hillary Clinton will continue to enflame racial tensions through a set of lies about the criminal-justice system.

Crime and Racism

Heather MacDonald, writing in National Review, discusses the standard liberal response to the Charleston, South Carolina massacre:

The Roof massacre was also portrayed as part of a pattern of white violence against blacks. Blacks live with the “daily threat of terror,” according to Patricia Williams Lessane, the director of the Avery Institute for Afro-American History and Culture at the College of Charleston. Such “terror,” Lessane wrote in the New York Times, “does not exist within a vacuum. It looms within the growing prison-industrial state, against the backdrop of school-reform debates, our slow movement toward gun reform and the political maneuvers by Republicans to make it increasingly more difficult for poor people and minorities to vote. The reality that our civil rights are under attack is just as heavy as our fear for our lives.” Bryan Stevenson, a black lawyer and activist, told the New York Times that the Charleston bloodbath is just the latest example, however extreme, of the way “black men and boys are treated by the police, by schools, and by the state.”

But the reality of race and crime is radically different. MacDonald provides data on crime, broken down by the race of the victim and the race of the offender, and the story is one of blacks victimizing whites, not whites victimizing blacks.

Click on image to enlarge

Both blacks and whites are mostly victimized by people of their own race, but there are many more black on white crimes than white on black crimes. According to MacDonald:

In fact, white violence against blacks is dwarfed by black on white violence. In 2012, blacks committed 560,600 acts of violence against whites (excluding homicide), and whites committed 99,403 acts of violence (excluding homicide) against blacks, according to data from the National Crime Victimization Survey provided to the author. Blacks, in other words, committed 85 percent of the non-homicide interracial crimes of violence between blacks and whites, even though they are less than 13 percent of the population. Both the absolute number of incidents and the rate of black-on-white violence are therefore magnitudes higher than white-on-black violence. There is no white race war going on.

So blacks commit 5.64 times as many interracial violent crimes as whites, but white population was 4.74 times that of black population in 2013.

Which means that a random black person is about 26.7 times as likely to commit a violent crime against a member of the white race as a random white person is to commit an violent crime against a black person.

One might ask why the above statistics exclude homicide. The answer is simple: this data are based on a victimization survey, and victims of homicide are not around to answer questions about their victimization.

Data on homicide exists, however.

It shows that blacks commit over twice as many homicides against whites as whites commit against blacks (2.23 times as many, to be exact). Since there are 6.01 times as many whites as blacks in the population (we are not classifying Hispanics, who can be any race, separately here, to be consistent with the homicide data), this means that a random black person is over 12 times as likely to murder a white as a random white person is to murder a black.

This is the reality that the politically correct don’t want to talk about. Which is why when a bunch of leftist Marquette students demonstrated and blocked traffic on Wisconsin Avenue, one of their demands was that Marquette’s Public Safety Alerts conceal the race of the suspect.

The Bigger Reality

But there is a bigger reality, shown in these statistics. The vast majority of crimes against white people are committed by other white people, and the vast majority of crimes against black people are committed by black people.

Which means that when the race hustlers who complain about “over policing” in the inner city, they are clearly (if implicitly) siding with the thugs who victimize black people, and not the innocent black victims.

Racial Double Standards

From Frontpage Magazine:

In the past week, two television reporters in Roanoke, Va. — Alison Parker and Adam Ward — were murdered by a black man who hated whites, and a white police officer in Houston — Darren Goforth — was murdered by a black man. Neither crime has been labeled a hate crime. And no mainstream media reporting of the murders attributes either to race-based hate.

For the mainstream media, the Roanoke murders were committed by “a disgruntled former employee,” and regarding the Houston policeman, the media report that, in the words of The New York Times, “a motive for the shooting remained unclear.”

The disregard of anti-white hatred as the motive for blacks who murder whites even when the murder is obviously racially motivated comes from the same people who denied that the Islamist Nidal Hasan’s murder of 13 fellow soldiers at Fort Hood was religiously motivated. These people — all on the left — have an agenda: to deny black racism and Islamist-based violence whenever possible. Only white police and other white violence against non-whites is clearly racist — even when not.

Thus, President Barack Obama convened a “White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism” rather than a “White House Summit on Countering Islamist Violence.” Though the summit was convened the month following the Islamist massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff in Paris, the words “Islam,” “Muslim” and “Islamist” did not once appear in the White House’s 1,668-word fact sheet on the summit. The Obama administration went so far as to label Hasan’s murders of his fellow soldiers “workplace violence.”

So, too, the mainstream media depicted the black murderer of eight white people at a Connecticut beer warehouse in 2010 as a man who had been angered by white racism, not as the white-hater he was. Under the headline “Troubles Preceded Connecticut Workplace Killing,” a New York Times article reported: “He might also have had cause to be angry: He had complained to his girlfriend of being racially harassed at work, the woman’s mother said, and lamented that his grievances had gone unaddressed.”

And a Washington Post headline read: “Beer warehouse shooter long complained of racism.”

The fact was that the man was fired for stealing beer from his workplace, and there was a video of him doing so.

Back in the heyday of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King proclaimed:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

He was calling for a single standard to apply to blacks and whites, in an era when a double standard often disadvantaged blacks. And decent people accepted the idea, consistent as it was with the individualism of the American political culture.

But soon enough came demands for a double standard, with affirmative action, racial quotas and incessant excuses for bad behavior from the black community.  That continues today, and it poisons the culture and generates fully justified resentment from whites.  That liberals label that resentment “racist” silences some voices, but does nothing to reduce the resentment.  In fact it amplifies it, since whites not only resent the double standard, but also resent being attacked for believing in racial equality rather than the black race privilege that the liberals want.

Blacks who marched with King were not demanding a double standard.  And they did not need a double standard, since their behavior did not need a bevy of excuses made for it.  They were far different from the rioters in Ferguson and Baltimore, and from the black racist killers.

Political Corretness in Europe: Don’t Reveal Ethnicity of Criminals

With a hat tip to a former student out ours: news from Zurich.

Zurich communal authorities have instructed city police to stop releasing the nationality of criminals to the media to avoid stigmatization.

An exception can only be made if the information is “pertinent” to the case, authorities decided on Wednesday, as reported by newspaper 20 Minutes on Friday.

The move was suggested by the political left as a way to prevent the racial prejudice that can arise from releasing the origins of those involved in criminal activity.

But right-wingers counter that releasing such information is a matter of transparency.

Opinions on the issue differ throughout the country.

Police in Neuchâtel and Fribourg only release nationality “if that adds value,” Fribourg police spokesman Gallus Risse told 20 Minutes.

“It’s about using common sense and avoiding stigmatizing a specific nationality,” he said.

However police in the cantons of Geneva and Vaud take the opposite stance.

There, a suspect’s nationality would only be kept secret if it could identify him.

“We wouldn’t say that he’s Chinese if he lives in a small village and he’s the only Chinese person living there,” Pierre-Olivier Gaudard of Vaud police told the paper.

“It’s also a question of transparency,” he added.

You can’t solve any social problem unless you are willing to face the facts, and politically correct people chronically refuse to face facts. And the reason is simple: the facts refute their biases and show that their “solutions” don’t at all address the real problem.

If you believe, for example, that the large number of blacks in prison is the result of racist cops, you’ll do nothing to address crime in the black community.

But the left wants the facts suppressed. Thus a bunch of leftist students at Marquette, back in April, staged a sit-in on Wisconsin Avenue demanding (among other things) that Marquette “Remove race from DPS [Department of Public Safety] reports.”

Whom do they think that would fool?

As we reported at the time:

We analyzed all Public Safety Alerts issued between May 2014 and April 2015 (inclusive), and found that of 44 offenders whose race was reported, 37 were black. (Four were white and three Hispanic.)

Indeed Marquette did, for a while, conceal the race of people committing crimes near campus. But we outed the policy right here. Marquette got chewed out by Charlie Sykes, and perhaps because of that (or perhaps because the Clery Act might leave a school open to a suit if key information is not reported) it changed the policy.

People who try to promote their political agenda by concealing information should be assumed to be on the wrong side of any issue. People who are willing to face the facts, and see the truth come out, are those with whom we should instinctively side.

Incarceration Prevents Crime

Liberals have never liked punishing criminals. Oh, they have made exceptions, wanting harsh punishments for “hate crimes” against groups such as blacks and gays, and they really want rapists punished. But garden variety criminals doing garden variety crimes have been the object of a huge solicitude from liberals.

Of course, this attitude reflects the class interests of the sort of people who are liberals. Instead of punishment, liberals’ preferred anti-crime strategy has been a vast expansion of social programs (if we just spend enough money on social programs, crime will go away) and rehabilitation for criminals (administered, of course, by liberal professionals).

But in the real world, failure to keep criminals locked up has nasty consequences. One historic example is from Philadelphia, where a liberal judge imposed a “prison cap,” forcing the release of thousands of offenders based on the claim of prison overcrowding:

Mayor Edward Rendell, a former district attorney, has been battling for years to get the city out from under a devastating eight-year-old prison cap imposed by U.S. District Judge Norma L. Shapiro. . .

Judge Shapiro is one of the worst offenders among that influential cadre of federal judges who have substituted the ACL’U’s prisoners’ rights wish list for the Bill of Rights and have trifled with public safety concerns. She has used complaints filed by individual inmates to gain control over the prison system and empowered a group of court-appointed prisoners’ rights lawyers to micromanage the jails.

In effect, Judge Shapiro has single-handedly decriminalized property and drug crimes in the City of Brotherly Love. Some 67 percent of all defendants released because of her prison cap simply fail to appear in court. The number of outstanding bench warrants for misdemeanor and felony cases has soared to 46,637 in March from 16,595 in 1987. And in the past 18 months alone, 9,732 arrestees, out on the streets on pre-trial release because of her prison cap, were arrested on second charges, including 79 murders, 90 rapes, 701 burglaries, 959 robberies, 1,113 assaults, 2,215 drug offenses and 2,748 thefts.

Black on White Crime in Liberal Portland

In the wake of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case, conservative media have have been having a field day pointing out that black-on-white crime is far more prevalent than white-on-black crime (leaving aside the fact that what George Zimmerman did was not a crime, but rather self-defense).

This is good. The smug, narrow liberal perspective that insists that blacks are forever and always the victims needs to be challenged early and often.

From FrontPage Mag:

Portland is in the middle of a nasty bout of black mob violence. This time directed at bicyclists.

But Tim Oberlander does not want us to know. Oberlander says he wants to be able to live in a city that does good things for good people.

So what’s wrong with that?

Everything.

Oberlander is a news editor at KGW TV in Portland. His city is under attack from black mob violence centered around Martin Luther King Boulevard. This mob has been attacking bike riders, housewives, students, seniors, you name it. These attacks are part of a long — but quiet — history of racial violence in a liberal enclave that prides itself on racial tolerance and harmony.

But you would never know it from Oberlander.

Oberlander and his station are raising money to fix the teeth of a recent victim of black mob violence. “I want to live in a city where people do good things for other people,” Tim said. “Now we’ve raised money for Andy’s teeth, I can say that we live in a city that does good things for good people.”

Tim might be a good person. But some of his viewers say he is a bad and dangerous and unreliable reporter for leaving out the descriptions of the predators in his news accounts.

Here is what Tim’s station, KGW, had to say about a few recent attacks:

“Police were warning bicyclists in Northeast Portland to be on the lookout after two men were injured during separate attacks along Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.”

Andy Sweeney is a biker who is also the beneficiary of Oberlander’s largesse. He was riding home from the grocery store in August when a “group of teens” threw a traffic cone at him. Knocking him off his bike, leaving him with a concussion and two shattered front teeth in what used to be a winning smile.

“It’s crazy,” Sweeney told KGW. “I don’t really understand their motivation or what they were going for.”

Lots of readers figured it out, even if the KGW was determined to ignore it: “Great job ‘whitewashing’ the story,” said David Klassix at KGW’s reader comment section. “And falling to mention the attackers were black.”

Said another, Chloe Ru “Hey KGW. I will help you do something called REPORTING THE FACTS instead of hiding the truth,” said Ru. Another victim said “her attackers were a group of [AFRICAN AMERICAN aka BLACK] teenage boys and she suspects they didn’t stop with her.”

Sweeney described his attackers on Twitter: “Black kids in hoodies.”

After the sanitized version of the bike attacks became public, other victims of black mob violence in that area stepped forward as well, one at Reddit.com in response to Sweeney’s Tweet:

“Same thing happened to me once except it was a rocks being thrown, and thankfully my teeth are intact. The best you can do is just avoid being around any collection of young black males. It isn’t being racist it’s just being practical.”

Many of the attacks are centered around Martin Luther King Boulevard. Maybe local media thinks everyone already knows this is a black part of town. For the benefit of the out of towners, it is.

Some readers provided a link to the Chris Rock comedy bit:

“You know what’s sad? Martin Luther King stood for non violence,” said Rock. “And I don’t care where you are in America, if you’re on Martin Luther King Boulevard, there’s some violence going down.

It ain’t the safest place to be. You can’t call nobody and tell them you are lost on MLK.” (If you do, will say) RUN! RUN! RUN!.

Sad. Sad. Sad.?

One of the recent victims, middle aged woman, wound up in the emergency room. The other passed around a flier, warning neighbors to be on the lookout. Said KGW:

I heard some noise across the street and apparently one of the guy that was trying to vandalize the car came across the street,” said Amy Wilson. “(He) hit me very, very hard. (He) knocked me out cold. I fell back and hit my head on the sidewalk.

She suffered a concussion and needed 12 stitches to close the wound on the back of her head.

Wilson said her attackers were a group of teenage boys and she suspects they didn’t stop with her. “I’m almost convinced that it’s the same group that we’ve talked about that are going against cyclists,” she said.

Then another victim came forward to OregeonLive.com:

It was at least the second time in less than a week that a group of teenagers had assaulted a bicyclist along MLK.

Last Tuesday night, Bill Lynch, 64, had just crossed MLK as he pedaled home from a garden party when someone in a group of “three to five young people” knocked him off his bicycle on the Northeast Going Street Neighborhood Greenway.

“They were walking down the middle of the street like they owned it,” Lynch said. “I don’t know what hit me. A strong fist? Something in someone hand? It hurt.”

Lynch said he was riding past the group and the blow “came out of nowhere.”

“When I filed a police report the officer said similar nighttime incidents had occurred in the neighborhood recently,” Lynch writes in a flyer that he posted in his neighborhood to encourage people to be more vigilant. “I learned there was another attack on Aug. 19. In a couple of cases, the bicyclists were beaten and had their bikes stolen.”

And another. Chris Freeman wrote:

I was also attacked by a group of about five kids on bikes at NE 7th and Stanton at about 11pm on Aug 17. One of them jumped off his bike and tried to push me over. Luckily I didn’t lose my balance after being pushed and was able to get away.

Still another:

Bummer man. I was riding near SEI in North Portland a few years ago with my 3 year old daughter in a Burley behind me when 5 dudes (yes, they had dark skin) jumped our and threw rocks at us. Amazingly, considering how close they were and how many there were they completely missed and I hightailed it out of there, just feeling really sad about humanity.

Some were willing to point out the obvious: “There’s a lot of black-on-white animosity in NE and N Portland. Especially towards white bicyclists.”

All the suspects in all of these attacks are black.

But others in Portland, like Tim, are eager to say they live in a city without racial tension — or violence. Several commenters at the Reddit.com news site say white people do it all the time too.

“But there are dumbass white kids who dress the same that are capable of doing stupid shit like this, too. The kids in this instance didn’t necessarily have to be black, but it is what it is. Dumbassedness knows no racial bounds.”

But none of these people supplied police reports, links, pictures or even anecdotes of roving bands of caucasian youth creating violence against black people — or anyone else.

Others in Portland grudgingly admit that violence is real. But they plead guilty with an explanation: Said someone at Reddit.com identified as Kounterculture:

“I think that a lot of it has to do with the fact that in the african-american community bicycling isn’t seen as a viable alternative to the automobile. It isn’t mostly racial animosity, although I’m sure some of that goes on.”

Black mob violence against bicyclists and others has been a regular — and unreported — feature of life in Portland since at least 2007. Bike Portland reported six years ago several cases of black mob violence against bikers.

The web site mentioned the race of the attackers, largely to dismiss racial violence as having anything to do with it:

I don’t think these attacks are solely about race, but I also don’t think the conversation is real and honest if we don’t mention it.

And I think any mention of race must also include the realities of gentrification in Northeast Portland. I think there remains resentment in the black community about gentrification…but whether that has to do with bikes and whites is hard to say.

Are bikes somehow symbolic of whites and gentrification to the eyes black community? I’m not sure, but it’s a question I’d like to delve deeper into. It’s certainly obvious that Portland’s cycling population could be more diverse.

For those who require some help with translation, here it is: Black mobs attack bike riders in Portland because they are not diverse enough.

More than a dozen examples of black mob violence in Portland are documented in White Girl Bleed a Lot: The return of racial violence and how the media ignore it. Many of these cases are on video.

The book features QR codes that readers can scan with their smart phones to watch the violence on their smart phones as they read about it. Some recent cases:

Last year, 10 to 15 hoodie wearing black people invaded Nordstrom, stole clothing and raced out of the store. On video.

The locals were far from upset. Said one man who called himself the Crazed Sex Poodle to a local news site:

“I am actually sort of hoping that it happens more, it seems like a trend worth encouraging. Giant corporations like Nordstrom and Chevron steal everyday, taking back is something worth fostering.”

A few days before that, a mob of 20 black people chased a white couple into a convenience store. The local papers described the ensuing assault and robbery as a “fight.” The mob left when one of the employees sprayed them with “bear spray.” This too was on video, but the station has since taken it down.

A few days before that: “A large group of kids stormed” into a convenience store and stole everything they could carry. They came back later to threaten the clerk. On video.

A few months after that, a bigger crowd attacked an Albertson’s grocery store, following the same play book: Theft, destruction, intimidation. And no arrests. Despite the video.

Still, people seemed surprised when in June, a group of 150 black people — described by the newspapers as drunken teenagers — assaulted several people in a Portland park, robbing at least one of them. The newspaper — and the TV broadcast — may have shied away from describing the attackers, but the internet site of a local TV station was a little more revealing:

“Both fights involved groups of black teenagers randomly attacking people in the park.

The following night, a group of 20 to 30 black people, came upon three people on a tennis courts at the same park: “Some of the teens began throwing bottles onto the court and calling out to them. They said the teens then began fighting with them.”

In January of this year, a 14-year old white girl was beat down by three black women while about a dozen other black people took videos, shouted racial epithets, and encouraged the assault. Four people were arrested, including a mother of two of the assailants. The mother was convicted of giving police false information while trying to hide her daughters.

Taleeb Starkes describes many examples of black on white crime in his book: The Uncivil War. “Portland is one of the most liberal cities in the country,” said Starkes. “They are quite proud of that. But this same liberalism is causing them to ignore, condone and excuse black on white crime and black mob violence. People who commit these horrific acts of violence are one thing. But people who condone them by ignoring them or refusing to tell the truth about them only encourage more them to occur. Those folks are sicker than the criminals.”

It’s tempting to say that the liberal yuppies on their bikes deserve to be attacked, given their smug notions of political and cultural superiority, and their willingness to make excuses for black thuggery.

That, however, would be unfair.

But it is fair to suggest that in liberal jurisdictions, where liberal media and liberal community leaders make excuses for black crime, there will be more black crime. Where liberal district attorneys and courts aren’t inclined to punish black criminals, of course there is more black crime.

So Portland, as a community, pretty much deserves the black-on-white crime it has. Unfortunately, not all (and probably not most) of the victims deserve the attacks they face.

And then we have the fact that most black crime is inflicted on other blacks. But that doesn’t fit the narrative of black victimization by whites.

Telling the Politically Incorrect Truth About the Zimmerman/Martin Affair

From Richard Cohen, in The Washington Post:

I don’t like what George Zimmerman did and I hate that Trayvon Martin is dead. But I also can understand why Zimmerman was suspicious and why he thought Martin was wearing a uniform we all recognize. I don’t know if Zimmerman is a racist. Yet I’m tired of politicians and others who have donned hoodies in solidarity with Martin and who essentially suggest that I am a racist for recognizing the reality of urban crime in America. The hoodie blinds them as much as it did Zimmerman.

One of those who quickly donned a hoodie was Christine Quinn, the speaker of the New York City Council. Quinn was hardly a lonesome panderer. Lesser politicians joined her and, like her, pronounced Zimmerman a criminal. “What George Zimmerman did was wrong, was a crime,” Quinn said before knowing all of the facts and before the jury unaccountably found otherwise. She was half right. What Zimmerman did was wrong. It was not, by verdict of his peers, a crime.

Where is the politician who will own up to the painful complexity of the problem and acknowledge the widespread fear of crime committed by young black males? This does not mean that raw racism has disappeared and some judgments are not the product of invidious stereotyping. It does mean, though, that the public knows that young black males commit a disproportionate amount of crime. In New York City, blacks comprise 23.4 percent of the population yet they represent 78 percent of all shooting suspects — almost all of them young men. We know them from the nightly news.

Those statistics represent the justification for New York City’s controversial stop-and-frisk program, which amounts to racial profiling writ large. After all, if young black males are your shooters then it ought to be young black males that the cops stop and frisk. Still, common sense and common decency — not to mention the law — insist on other variables such as suspicious behavior, but race is a factor, without a doubt. It would be senseless for the cops to be stopping Danish tourists in Times Square just to make the statistics look good.

I wish I had a solution to this problem. If I were a young black male and was stopped just on account of my appearance, I would feel violated. If the cops are abusing their authority and using race as the only reason, that has got to stop. But if they ignore race, then they are fools and ought to go into another line of work.

The problems of the black underclass are hardly new. They are surely the product of slavery, the subsequent Jim Crow era and the tenacious persistence of racism. They will be solved someday — but not probably with any existing programs. For want of a better word, the problem is cultural and it will be solved when the culture, somehow, is changed.

In the meantime, the least we can do is talk honestly about the problem. It does no one any good to merely cite the number of stops and frisks made on black males and not cite the murder statistics as well. Citing the former and not the latter is an Orwellian exercise in political correctness. It not only censors half of the story but suggests that racism is the sole reason for the policy. This mindlessness, like racism itself, is repugnant.

Crime where it intersects with race is given the silent treatment. Everything else is discussed — and if it isn’t, there’s a Dr. Phil or an Oprah saying that it should be. Crime, though, is different. It is, like sex in the Victorian era (or the 1950s), an unmentionable but an unmistakable part of life. We all know about it and take appropriate precaution but keep our mouths shut.

We don’t doubt that Zimmerman profiled Martin partly because he was black.

But as Reuters reported:

Though civil rights demonstrators have argued Zimmerman should not have prejudged Martin, one black neighbor of the Zimmermans said recent history should be taken into account.

“Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I’m black, OK?” the woman said, declining to be identified because she anticipated backlash due to her race. She leaned in to look a reporter directly in the eyes. “There were black boys robbing houses in this neighborhood,” she said. “That’s why George was suspicious of Trayvon Martin.”

Of course, it’s also the case that Martin was apparently acting suspiciously. Zimmerman said “This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.” In other words:  had Martin been walking purposefully back toward his father’s house, Zimmerman would not have found him suspicious.

This disproportion of black offenses applies nationwide, and certainly to Milwaukee. For example, if we look at “violent crimes” (as defined by the FBI) the average black person in Milwaukee is 7.99 times as likely to commit an offense as is the average white. Underneath these averages, however, is the fact that young males produce the most crime in any racial category.

Liberals somehow insist on shouting “racist! racist!” when anybody points out that blacks (especially young black males) commit more crime than any other demographic group.

But they won’t flatly deny it, because they know it’s true. They will just try to shut up discussion of the issue, because it contradicts their narrative of black oppression at the hands of a white majority.

But you don’t, unfortunately, help any social problem by refusing to tell the truth about it.

Marquette Backs Off: Reveals the Race of Armed Robbers

After we publicized the fact that Marquette was concealing the race of people who robbed Marquette students with the use of a weapon, and after Charlie Sykes thoroughly chewed out the University on yesterday’s show, Marquette has apparently relented and decided its position is indefensible.

From a Public Safety Alert sent out shortly after midnight last night:

An armed robbery was reported at 11:50 p.m., August 30. An alumna and a student were in the 800 block of North 22nd Street when they were approached by two males who showed a weapon and demanded cash. One of the subjects took the alumna’s purse, then both fled northbound on foot on North 22nd Street then westbound on West Kilbourn Avenue. Both subjects are described as African American males in their late teens or early twenties, clean shaven with short hair. The first subject, who was armed, was described as wearing a gray hoodie with blue lettering and dark shorts. The second subject was described as wearing a dark hoodie and dark shorts.

It’s good that Marquette has backed off a silly, excessively politically correct policy.

But the University’s failure to honestly acknowledge the policy still leaves a bad odor.

Marquette Students Victims of Armed Robbery: University Conceals Race of Suspects

Marquette routinely sends out “Public Safety Alerts” when there has been a crime near campus. Those alerts serve to warn members of the Marquette community to be careful. But also, the alerts virtually always include a description of the suspect or suspects. Presumably, some alert person might see and report the suspects.

Until just recently, the descriptions have included the one most useful piece of information: the race of the suspect.

A public safety alert in 2008, for example, described two armed robbery suspects as follows:

Subject 1: Black male, 18-20 years of age, 5’8”-5’10”, medium build, wearing a black-hooded sweatshirt and black jeans

Subject 2: Black male, 18-20 years of age, 5’8”-5’10”, medium build, wearing a black-hooded sweatshirt and black jeans

And as recently as July 1 of this year, a suspect in another armed robbery was described as:

The subject is described as a black male, 25 to 30 years old, 5 feet 10 inches tall, slim build, dark complexion, short black hair, wearing a gray T-shirt and blue jeans.

But on August 1 of this year, another Public Safety Alert, described yet another armed robbery:

Marquette Public Safety responded to an armed robbery about 11:30 p.m. Sunday (July 31). An alumnus was approached by two suspects with a weapon in the 700 block of North 23rd Street. The victim surrendered his cell phone and some keys. The two suspects fled northbound onto North 23rd Street and then westbound onto West Wells Street. The victim was not physically injured during the incident. Both DPS and the Milwaukee Police Department searched the area and are still investigating.

What is missing? Any description of the robbers at all.

We thought this odd, and made an inquiry with Kate Venne, official spokeswoman for Marquette, and was told that the only descriptions available from the victim were too vague to be of any value. We called Public Safety, and an officer there told us they did not want to “profile” on the basis of race, and repeated that the descriptions were too vague.

The Pretense Blown

But then Saturday night, we got yet another Public Safety Alert, describing yet another armed robbery. The description of the suspect was given as follows:

A man, described as in his 40s, approximately 5’8” tall, wearing a white t-shirt, dark pants, a black baseball cap and a fanny pack, approached a student outside a residence in the 2100 block of West Michigan Avenue.

This isn’t vague. In fact it’s pretty precise. Yet there is no mention of the race of the robber.

We wrote Venne, asking why the race of the robber was not mentioned, and she responded that:

Hi John: Those decisions are made on a case by case basis in consultation with DPS.

Thanks.

This, of course, was an evasion, not an answer. So we e-mailed her back and asked:

Then perhaps you can explain why, in this case, there was no mention of race?

It’s not credible that the race of the offender was not known. It is also not credible that it would not be helpful in identifying the person, should he try to rob somebody again.

She has not responded.

Then very shortly thereafter, we received yet another Public Safety Alert, describing yet another armed robbery. The two suspects were described as follows:

The first man is described as between 22 and 25 years old, thin build and was wearing a black hoodie and blue jeans. The second man is described as approximately the same age, thin build, 6’0 tall wearing blue jeans and a grey t-shirt.

Again, we have two very specific descriptions, and no mention of race.

Venne’s claim that decisions to reveal the race of a robber are made on a “case by case” basis simply has no credibility. There is no conceivable justification for including a rather detailed description and omitting race.

What was have here is obviously yet another example of political correctness.

Ironically, failure to include race won’t stop people from concluding that the robbers were black. Given neighborhoods near Marquette, and the well-known fact that blacks in Milwaukee commit proportionally many more crimes than whites, everybody will assume that the offender whose race is concealed is black.

And this applies to people who are too politically correct to admit that they assume that.

What Should Parents Think?

We are sure that parents who pay good money to send their children to Marquette truly appreciate the fact that when their children’s safety conflicts with political correctness, the former is sacrificed to the latter.

And of course we all will draw certain conclusions when Marquette, through its spokeswoman, provides an evasive and disingenuous explanation.

Marquette Students Attacked Last Night, One By a Mob

From a “Public Safety Alert” time stamped Monday, July 11, 2011 1:58 AM.

Two robberies were reported to the Department of Public Safety tonight (July 10), both occurring around 11:30 p.m. July 10.

In the first instance, a student was approached near 17th and Kilbourn, where two males attempted to hit him and tried reaching into his pockets. The victim punched the perpetrator and flagged down a Milwaukee Police Department squad that was in the area. The perpetrators fled south on 17th Street and got into a dark-colored sedan driven by a third person. No weapons were used, and no property was obtained. The victim was not physically injured.

The second incident occurred near 18th and State. A Marquette student and a friend were approached by approximately 10-15 young males and shoved to the ground. A wallet was stolen from the student’s friend. The student suffered minor abrasions but declined medical assistance. The friend was not physically injured. No weapons were used during this incident, and the perpetrators fled the area.

Both DPS and MPD are investigating.

What is missing here? The race of the attackers. It is reported they were male, and even that they got into “a dark-colored sedan,” but nothing about the color of those guilty of the assault.

In the past, Marquette has reported the race of offenders who are still at large. We have a call in to Marketing and Communications asking whether this is a change in policy, or just an oversight.

Our suspicion is that it will be reported to be an oversight, but perhaps only because a source of ours noticed it.

[developing . . . ]

[Update]

We just got a call from Kate Venne of Marketing and Communications, who claimed that the reason the race of the offenders was not included was that they “didn’t have a very specific description.” Did the students fail to notice the race of their attackers? Did Public Safety fail to get a good description?

The argument seems to be this: if not enough information was available to identify a particular suspect, the race of the offender won’t be given. But of course, they gave the sex of the offenders (male) and an extremely vague description of the car (dark-colored sedan). This looks for all the world like back-door political correctness. They are unwilling to say that the attackers were black, although literally everybody reading the Public Safety Alert (even the most politically correct readers) would assume that.

Felons and the Right to Vote

Tonight, in Cudahy Hall, Room 001 at 7:00 p.m., there is a presentation by Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project titled “Losing the Vote: Felony Disenfranchisement and American Democracy,”

The Sentencing Project is a liberal operation that doesn’t like putting criminals in prison.

Which is to say that (although they would not admit it) that they don’t particularly mind people (particularly poor people in high crime areas) being victimized by crime.

Which is not to say that Mauer is wrong about giving felons the vote. Our view tends to be “if you let somebody out of prison, and you don’t think they have been punished enough, just keep them another six months or a year, rather than sticking them with lifetime disabilities.”

Good reading in preparation for the politically correct cant that Mauer is likely to produce is our own essay “Does Wisconsin Lock Up Too Many Blacks?” which deals not only with the racial issue, but with the advantages (now unquestioned by economists) of incarceration.

Crime and Race in Marquette Philosophy Class: Student Defends Cops, Forced to “Apologize”

That there is a racial double standard in academia is not news, so when a student who is a police intern defends cops against charges that they are racist, what would we expect to happen?

Exactly what happened last Thursday in Marquette’s Philosophy 151 (“History and Philosophy of Crime and Punishment”) class: the professor (one Nancy Snow) “suggested” that he apologize. Coming from an authority figure who has the power to determine your grade, such a “suggestion” is more than just a casual piece of advice.

The whole exchange got started with a class discussion of supposed “over criminalization,” the notion that government outlaws too many things, resulting in a lack of respect for the law. It then moved to a discussion of how police supposedly abuse their powers, using traffic laws as a “pretext” to stop drivers in order to, for example, search for drugs.

At this point the student, Greg Karge, chimed in to point out that police often bear the brunt of this disrespect for the law, mentioning an incident he had seen. An Hispanic who was pulled over proceeded to abuse the cops, calling them “racist.”

In spite of the fact that race was explicitly part of the context of the discussion, Snow objected to the mention of the driver’s ethnicity trying to, according to Karge, “stop me in the middle of my comment, trying to give me a wave” and then saying “why did you bring that up?” Another student remembers Snow saying “Greg, this is offensive, we have a diverse group in the room.” Another student said of Snow’s response “it surprised me because I personally didn’t find his response offensive.”

Karge also pointed out that “if you are polite and respectful to cops they are likely to cut you a break,” the implication being that truculent attitudes of many minorities are part of the problem. He also defended using traffic laws to stop people who are suspected of carrying drugs, saying there is “no other way.”

A vigorous discussion ensued. There is, of course, nothing wrong with a vigorous discussion, but a large part of it involved Karge being berated by a handful of liberal students who were “offended.” Two of the blacks in class complained about how they had been stopped because of their race (although they had not been asked to get out of their cars, had not been ticketed and their cars had not been searched). A liberal student told Karge “you have no right to look at something from one side,” a hugely ironic statement, given that the class had been looking at the issue only from the side of aggrieved minorities.

After class Snow took Karge aside and told him that his comments “could have been interpreted as offensive,” mentioning especially offense to black students. She “suggested” to him that he should write an apology to the black students. Instead, he wrote the apology to the entire class. It read as follows:

I would just like to apologize for any of my comments that I said today that may have offended anyone, that was not my intention by any means. I did not articulate my argument the way that I wanted to, but that is no excuse if I did accidentally offend anyone I would like to explain myself [and] deeply apologize.

It is obvious from several accounts of the incident that Karge articulated his position in a perfectly reasonable way, but then caved to pressure from the professor. A student in the class told us “Since Greg wants to be a police officer one day, he’s been working closely with other officers. He was simply relaying these experiences to us in class, and telling us what he saw and heard during these experiences.”

In the wake of this apology, two students from the class e-mailed him to insist that he had nothing for which to apologize. Other students, responding to our e-mails, said they saw nothing offensive in his comments, one saying “I personally didn’t consider the comments offensive. I could possibly see that some might be offended at the example he chose, but the point he was trying to convey is what I was focusing on.” And another: “From my perspective, when Greg was called upon, he was explaining that it is not as though the police officers are the bad guys, but that they are only doing their jobs.”

Thus looking at police/community relations from a “minority” point of view is perfectly alright, but looking at it from a cop’s point of view is not. And saying that minorities often show hostility toward the cops is also out of bounds. As another student in the class put it:

Everything that Greg said could be considered an observation. He mentioned something about how he had tended to see more African Americans and other minorities with a distaste for police officers. This directly correlated to what Husak, the author we are reading, mentioned in his article in terms of the cycle of overcriminalization. For some reason when Husak said it, this statement was not offensive, but when Greg said it the class overreacted a lot.

Chilling Effect?

While Snow’s response was not appropriate, it is obvious that a small handful of liberal students has, in this class at least, been able to stifle discussion. Any politically incorrect comments are met with moans, tapping of pencils and ostentatious disrespect. It is not clear to us that liberal students are in the majority, but there are enough to chill viewpoints they don’t like.

Karge told us that, when the notion of “driving while black” came up in class, “I thought about going against that, but dropped the idea, knowing where it would go.” And further he has “talked to students who have said they don’t raise issues that are controversial, because they know they will be shouted down.”

Another student said the class has a “very liberal air,” and that “anybody who feels otherwise is jumped on immediately.”

Students, for example, are required to read a “fact sheet” from the liberal Death Penalty Information Center which is rife with inaccuracies and slanted data -- for example, the claim that over 120 people have gotten off death row because of evidence of their innocence. In reality, only a minority of people on the list have gotten off because of actual evidence of innocence, as opposed to procedural issues. A clear majority actually committed the murders for which they were sentenced.

Professor Snow failed to respond to two e-mails and one voice mail asking for an interview.

It is important not to overstate this issue, since a fair number of students simply don’t want to get into any controversy, and don’t say things that other students or the professor might disagree with. This is doubtless true of our own classes, and of pretty much any class that debates controversial issues.

But the professor does play a key role. He or she can send the message that differing viewpoints are acceptable – even if they meet with vigorous disagreement – or, on the other hand, that “offensive” views (meaning conservative views) are to be avoided.

Too many professors – especially in the humanities and in education – do the latter. Pressuring a student to apologize for perfectly reasonable comments sends a strong message of politically correct intolerance.

Two More Robberies at Marquette

Actually, one robbery and one attempted robbery.

From an e-mail send to the entire Marquette community:

Marquette University Public Safety Alert

April 5, 2008

Two separate robberies were reported to the Department of Public Safety around 2:40 a.m. on Saturday, April 5. The first robbery occurred within the 700 block of North 18th Street at approximately 2:29 a.m. on Saturday, April 5. The second robbery occurred within the 1700 block of West Kilbourn Avenue at approximately 2:35 a.m. on Saturday, April 5. In both incidents, which are believed to be related, one male suspect approached the victims, including two Marquette students and one person not affiliated with Marquette, and demanded personal property. No weapon was displayed. During the first incident, the suspect implied he had a weapon by placing his hand in his pocket and demanded personal property. The victims refused to hand over their property and the suspect fled the area. During the second incident, the suspect grabbed the victim’s shoulder demanding personal property, the victim threw the property and the suspect fled the area with it. None of the victims was physically injured. The Department of Public Safety and the Milwaukee Police Department immediately responded to both incidents. Victim services have been offered to those involved.

The suspect in both incidents is described as follows:

Black male, 5’8” to 5’10” tall, mid twenties, dark complexion, small build, clean shaven wearing a dark colored sweatshirt.

Anyone having information about these incidents is encouraged to contact the Milwaukee Police Department at 414-935-7360 or Marquette Department of Public Safety at 414-288-6800.

As we have observed, these incidents show the inherent problems of being located in the central city of a large metropolitan area.

They also show that Marquette has a very strong interest in reducing crime in the city of Milwaukee.

Unfortunately, the approaches that are likely to do that (increased incarceration, aggressive policing) are politically incorrect. Thus Marquette will continue to be at best irrelevant, and at worst part of the problem.

Yet Another Armed Robbery at Marquette

From an e-mail sent to everyone in the Marquette community.

Public Safety Update

The Department of Public Safety apprehended five suspects within minutes of an armed robbery that occurred early Friday morning in the 2000 block of W. Wisconsin Avenue. The victim, a Marquette student, was approached by the suspects while walking alone and shown a weapon. The suspects took the victim’s personal possessions and fled on foot. The victim was not physically injured and immediately entered a nearby building to call Public Safety. Public Safety officers immediately responded and were able to catch the suspects. All five suspects are now in police custody. Milwaukee Police do not believe that this incident is related to any previous incident involving Marquette students.

Public Safety reports that the surveillance cameras in place in the area were key in locating the suspects quickly. More than 300 cameras located on- and off-campus provide constant surveillance footage to the Command Information Center located in the Public Safety headquarters.

All members of the Marquette community are reminded to make use of the university’s numerous safety resources and not to walk alone after dark. These services include door-to-door LIMO service, the LIMO Express shuttle, or Public Safety foot patrols. More than 200 blue light phones around campus are also available to call for an escort or to report suspicious activity at any time.

In addition, students leaving town for Spring Break are encouraged to take advantage of Public Safety’s Vacant House Watch program so that their residence can be monitored while they are away. Call Public Safety at 288-6800 for more information.

This is just the most recent in a spate of robberies around Marquette.

Indeed, although Marquette officials refuse to use the word, kidnapping was involved in the previous ones.

Brian Collar at GOP3 has been keeping track of this issue.

Back in the early 1990s, then Marquette President Albert DiUlio felt the need to deal with the perception that Marquette was a dangerous place, and did so by dumping millions of Marquette’s money into a program called “Campus Circle” -- a redevelopment plan that made the area adjacent to Marquette more attractive at horrendous cost.

It seemed to “work,” or at least the bad publicity died down.

But in reality a campus near a dangerous area of a dangerous city is never going to be as safe as a campus in some bucolic rural area.

But the situation in Milwaukee is made worse by the rather lax attitude civic elites have toward law enforcement.

We wonder whether the “social justice” crowd at Marquette will decide that muggers, robbers and kidnappers ought to be punished, or whether they will continue to wring their hands when punishment disproportionately falls on black criminals.

In fact, all five suspects in this particular case were black males. The e-mail doesn’t say that -- something that might be justified given that none of them were still at large. But it’s relevant if we want to understand the crime problem at Marquette. Being located near the inner city is no fun.

This situation should test the old saying that “a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.”

Well, “social justice” advocates, what will it be?

Panel on Crime Reporting at Journalism School

WHAT: “Feeding the Media Beast: Crime Coverage in the Cheese State”
WHERE: Johnston Hall 103
WHEN: Thursday, February 28, 2008

TIME: 7:00 p.m.

COST: Free

Marquette University’s chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists invites you, your classes and your colleagues to the crime reporting panel discussion, “Feeding the Media Beast: Crime Coverage in the Cheese State” featuring:

• Tony Anderson (moderator), managing editor of the Wisconsin Law Journal
• John Diedrich, federal reporter at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
• Tom Held, general assignment reporter at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
• Martin Hintz, author of “Got Murder? The Shocking Story of Wisconsin’s Notorious Killers”
• Michael McCann, former Milwaukee County District Attorney
• Charles Benson (just added), broadcast journalist for WTMJ

The event is in fact open to the public, so members of the Milwaukee community (Marquette and otherwise) may want to come.

Milwaukee’s Top Cop to Speak at Marquette Tomorrow

From the Marquette Law School, and Mike Gousha’s “On the Issues” series:

Thursday, January 10—Milwaukee Police Chief Ed Flynn—Here’s your opportunity to meet the city’s new top cop. Chief Ed Flynn left Springfield, Massachusetts, to come to Milwaukee, where he faces a persistent violent crime problem and high expectations. Learn more about the new Chief’s crime-fighting strategies. January 10, 2008, 12:15 to 1:15 p.m., Sensenbrenner Hall, Room 325.

The series, so far, has been excellent. And anybody interested in Milwaukee criminal justice issues will probably find this event worthwhile.

Note: do not just show up. Registration is required, and is easily done via this web page.

There is ample space at the moment, and people from the community are welcome.

Flash: America Not Really Going to Hell in a Handbasket

From the November 2007 number of Commentary, an account of how the dire predictions about the decline of American culture in the 1990s have proved to be inaccurate:

As for the social reality underlying this general feeling of decline, a number of conservative commentators, concentrating especially on the areas of crime, welfare dependency, and illegitimacy, undertook the task of quantifying and analyzing the available evidence. The most notable such effort was by William J. Bennett, who in March 1993 released a report entitled The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators.

Over the course of the preceding three decades, Bennett wrote, the United States had indeed experienced “substantial social regression.” About this, the data were unequivocal. Since 1960, there had been a more than 500-percent increase in violent crime; a more than 400-percent increase in out-of-wedlock births; almost a tripling in the percentage of children on welfare; a tripling of the teenage suicide rate; a doubling of the divorce rate; and a decline of more than 70 points in SAT scores. To Bennett, the conclusion was inescapable: “the forces of social decomposition [in America] are challenging—and in some instances overtaking—the forces of social composition.”

But a funny thing happened as American was (in the term used by Robert Bork) slouching toward gomorrah.

In a number of key categories, the amount of ground gained or regained since the early 1990’s is truly stunning. Crime, especially, has plummeted. According to the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the rates of both violent crime and property crime fell significantly between 1993 and 2005, reaching their lowest levels since 1973 (the first year for which such data are available). More recent figures from the FBI, which measures crime differently from the NCVS, show an unfortunate uptick in violent crime in the last two years—particularly in cities like Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Even so, however, the overall rate remains far below that of the mid-1990’s.

Teenage drug use, which moved relentlessly upward throughout the 1990’s, declined thereafter by an impressive 23 percent, and for a number of specific drugs it has fallen still lower. Thus, the use of ecstasy and LSD has dropped by over 50 percent, of methamphetamine by almost as much, and of steroids by over 20 percent.

Then there is welfare. Since the high-water mark of 1994, the national welfare caseload has declined by over 60 percent. Virtually every state in the union has reduced its caseload by at least a third, and some have achieved reductions of over 90 percent. Not only have the numbers of people on welfare plunged, but, in the wake of the 1996 welfare-reform bill, overall poverty, child poverty, black child poverty, and child hunger have all decreased, while employment figures for single mothers have risen.

Abortion, too, is down. After reaching a high of over 1.6 million in 1990, the number of abortions performed annually in the U.S. has dropped to fewer than 1.3 million, a level not seen since the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, which legalized the practice. The divorce rate, meanwhile, is now at its lowest level since 1970.

Educational scores are up. Earlier this year, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reported that the nation’s fourth- and eighth-graders continue to improve steadily in math, and that fourth-grade reading achievement is similarly on the rise. Other findings show both fourth- and twelfth-graders scoring significantly higher in the field of U.S. history. Black and Hispanic students are also making broad gains, though significant gaps with whites persist. The high-school dropout rate, under 10 percent, is at a 30-year low, and the mean SAT score was 8 points higher in 2005 than in 1993, the year Bennett published his Index.

More generally, we are seeing important progress in critical areas of youth behavior. Since 1991 (a peak year), the birth rate for teenagers aged fifteen to nineteen has decreased by 35 percent. The number of high-school students who have reported ever having sexual intercourse has declined by more than 10 percent. Teen use of alcohol has also fallen sharply since 1996—anywhere from 10 to 35 percent, depending on the grade in school—and binge drinking has dropped to the lowest levels ever recorded. The same is true of teens reporting that they smoke cigarettes daily.

All of this is good news, but there have been counter trends.

Perhaps most importantly, some of the most vital social indicators of all—those regarding the condition and strength of the American family—have so far refused to turn upward. Even as the teenage birth rate has fallen, out-of-wedlock births in general have reached an all-time high: 37 percent of all births in 2005. Over half of all marriages are now preceded by a period of unmarried cohabitation, and marriage rates themselves have declined by almost one-half since 1970.

We can hope that the general trend toward responsibility will soon affect illigitimacy and cohabitation too. Of course, powerful cultural forces -- most importantly the mass media -- are pushing things in the wrong direction.

But it seemed those cultural forces were also pushing all the other indicators in the wrong direction.

And a hard core of ideologues, the same people who opposed welfare reform and continue to oppose the increased incarceration that was a major factor in decreased crime rates, is firmly ensconced in college faculties, some think tanks and much of the government bureaucracy.

But they were beaten, and can be beaten again.

How Dangerous is Milwaukee?

Congressional Quarterly has released rankings of the “safest cities” in the United States.

Inverting the list, we find that the most dangerous city is Detroit (number 378), followed by St. Louis, MO, Flint, MI, Oakland, CA, Camden, NJ, Birmingham, AL, North Charleston, SC, Memphis, TN, Richmond, CA and Cleveland, OH.

Milwaukee is rated 343. Not good.

Among the most dangerous cities above 500,000 population, Milwaukee is ranked seventh behind: (1) Detroit, MI (2) Memphis, TN (3) Baltimore, MD (4) Philadelphia, PA (5) Washington, DC and (6) Dallas, TX.

In terms of safety, the Milwaukee metropolitan area ranks 230 out of 333. Not terrible. The worst problems are in the City of Milwaukee.

Can we now get past political correctness, and start taking crime seriously?