White Girl Bleed a Lot (29 page)

According to Transit Police, a group of young people ended up at Downtown Crossing and started a fight in the station that spilled onto the street. Clashes were also reported at other stops.

Help me out here: If you are keeping count, how many riots is that: Well, we have racial violence at one beach on three days. Then to and from, those crazy young people were engaging in their summer revelry along the way.
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And they all took the train. Ain’t that grand.

Here’s a bonus for the Bean Town readers. In March 2013 a group of fifteen to thirty black people surrounded a bus at 1:15 a.m. and attacked the driver. “It is unclear what prompted the assault,” dutifully reported Metro.us.
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Police arrested one suspect after receiving a tip that he was bragging about his exploits on Twitter, said the Boston Globe. “My hands hurt from last night,” he said in a Tweet. His lawyer said although that may have been his account, there was no proof her client was the one who sent it out.

Prosecutors say he was part of “more than a dozen people who charged onto the bus and began assaulting the driver, while another group attacked him through the bus window,” said the
Globe
.
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No one knows what the two white women were doing on the Metro in that part of Washington, D.C. They “did not want any trouble,” they said. To the black mob that confronted them, threatened them, beat them, and robbed them, it was no trouble at all. The mob grabbed the girls’ iPhones, but not before the girls fought back to retrieve them—unsuccessfully. “Metro Transit Police Deputy Chief Ron Pavlik says his officers responded minutes after being notified. … Pavlik says two juveniles were arrested.” Yes, they were all black -- as the video showed -- but no, the report didn’t mention that.
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This mob calls themselves the 44
^th
Street Crew in southeast Washington. For those not familiar with the different sections of Washington, that is not the lobbyist/media/functionary/dinner-party part of town.

Reporters at the Fox affiliate in Washington seemed surprised at the mob violence. But to people who ride the metro, it was just another day.

Metro police seem resigned to the violence and suggest that resistance is futile. Deputy Chief Pavlik said “There’s nothing worth fighting over and getting assaulted for. There are lot better ways to fight back.”

Some people devote entire blogs to the lawless Metro, where black mob violence is often seen but seldom reported. An anonymous poster to the blog Unsuck DC Metro gave a harrowing account of Metro violence that never made the
Washington Post
:

I have never been more disgusted or shocked by what I witnessed Saturday night at the Anacostia Metro. I went to pick up a family member at the Metro, and just as she was telling me about the fights (Yes, plural!) that happened on the Green Line train [between L’Enfant and Anacostia], we witnessed a group of 6 to 8 young black teenagers kick, stomp, punch and push a lone teenage girl.

I could not believe my eyes! I also could not believe there was not an officer in sight.
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When the anonymous poster’s cousin got in the car, she told her story:

When she got on the train toward Anacostia, a group of teenagers proceeded to verbally and physically assault a group of young women. One of the boys threw a bottle and another threw the contents of a bottle in one of the woman’s face. The assaults got so out of hand that some people landed on a woman and her baby.

The attacking group had the doors to the train blocked so people couldn’t get off the train. My cousin told me she was so scared that she hid behind some seats and pulled out the box cutter she used for work.
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Every story like this prompts readers to tell their own stories. There were dozens of comments to the main story. This is a typical one from Chris:

I was leaving a friend’s place around 11pm on a Saturday a few weeks ago and groups of teenagers were harassing everyone at the top of the escalator on the north-bound side of Eisenhower station. I could see it getting bad fairly quickly and was lucky to catch a train after only about 2 mins of being on the platform.

Over at DCist.com, they are also not in any danger of running out of stories of violence from the Metro beat. Whether it is a “huge fight” of a hundred black people, or violence on a more modest scale, they got the goods. “Stunning is the sheer number of participants in this fight,” said DCist. The site does not report the race of the participants.
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TBD.com also reports on the Metro. The big story in 2011 was when Allen Heywood was attacked in the early evening. A black mob attacked Heywood as he was reading a book waiting for a train. “Haywood was trying to transfer to the Yellow Line around 7:15 p.m. when the assault happened. He was headed home to Fort Totten after working out at Results on Capitol Hill, a gym bag slung over his shoulder and a book in his hands. As he read with his back to the station wall, ‘all of a sudden someone whacked me on the back of the head really hard,’ he recalls.” Haywood repeatedly asked the girl why she was attacking him, pleading with her to end it. That got a good laugh from other members of the mob, who laughed and “egged her on” while taking videos from their cell phones. They left him dazed and bleeding. One of the spectators who was taking video offered it to Heywood to use as evidence against his attackers, but only if he paid for it. Heywood was so upset that no one helped him that a few days later he stood outside the station holding a sign that read “I was attacked at L’Enfant metro Sunday at 7:15 pm. No one helped. Please be careful.”
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This next episode comes from TheGrio.com: “Our lives … Our World … Our stories.”

They even give you a definition: a grio is a “story teller in West Africa who maintains the oral tradition and history of a village or family.”

So you get it, right? This is a black web site from NBC News.

The headline pretty much tells the story: “Teen mob kick and punches man at metro station.” A local man, Robert Joy, was waiting for his niece when he saw a mob of black teenagers beating another teen. When he tried to call 911, they attacked him.

The teenagers knocked Joy to the ground and kicked him in the face. … Joy’s two front teeth were knocked out. He has six stitches inside his mouth, two stitches outside. His right eye is black and blue and bloody.
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Let’s head on over to Silver Spring, Maryland, just a few Metro stops away from Washington, D.C.

Race riots. Stabbings. Gang members. That doesn’t sound like Silver Spring. It’s supposed to be a nice place where families can enjoy evenings at restaurants and strolling around the neighborhood. That’s not the way it turned out. In the summer of 2011 violence seemed to reach a crescendo.

The incident involved more than 80 people — many of them gang members — fighting for more than two hours in downtown Silver Spring, police said. One of the groups came by Metrorail, the other by bus.

It began about 10:30 p.m. July 1 when 50 to 75 teenagers and young adults — many of them members of a street gang called “88-mob” — exited Metro’s Silver Spring Station, said county police Lt. Robert Carter, a deputy commander of the Silver Spring district.
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If at this point someone told me that the largest organized crime enterprise in the country was a bunch of white guys in Washington who belonged to the Democrat party, I would not disagree.

Let’s not forget Chicago. There have been tons of attacks on Chicago Transit Authority buses and trains. The head of the CTA said riders should be more aware of their surroundings. More blaming the victim.

Maybe the riders need some pamphlets on how not to anger the rioters.

In July 2011 three black teens shouted racial slurs and attempted to attack a gay man in the Chicago Millennium Station. “The teens approached the 23-year-old south suburban man in a restroom and started making fun of his hair, threatening him and hurling anti-gay comments. … The victim said he didn’t want any trouble, but when he pushed past the defendants, they followed him out onto Michigan Avenue and continued to yell insults and threats, according to the report. The victim called 911 after he saw [his attacker] drop his book bag and walk toward him with his fists clenched.”
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And here is a story about a boy in 2011 who got beat up at a train station by a group of people—and the
Chicago Sun-Times
actually identifies the attacker by race. The victim was a fifteen-year-old boy. He was approached by a group of seven black males. One of them had a gun and another one struck the victim. “The offender with the gun was described as a black male with a dark complexion, about 19, 6-foot-1 and 170 pounds with brown eyes and black hair in dreadlocks. The offender who struck the boy in the head was described as a black male between 15 and 18 with brown eyes and black hair, also in dreadlocks.”
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A headline from another story in 2011: Flash mobs ride CTA to commit crimes, mayhem on Near North Side. “Chicago police and Streeterville universities are warning residents and passers-by to be aware of traveling mobs of teenagers who use the CTA …”
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Better find another way to get to school or work.

Let’s not forget Philly. They’ve had their share of marauding teens. In 2011 a group of thirty to forty black teens attacked an El train, making the return trip from the fireworks show in Center City “the commute from hell for hundreds of Market-Frankford Line riders as a flash mob struck and robbed a passenger at 30th Street Station. … Two SEPTA Transit Police officers were stationed in the fare gate area at the mezzanine level of the station at the time of the incident. The mob was chased off without any arrests made,” even though one young lady was punched in the face and robbed of her cash.
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And probably the absolute craziest story of this or any other chapter is when two black men open fire on a bus with an assault rifle and handgun. They allegedly were called by their friend, Penny Chapman, who was on the bus. A man supposedly threatened to turn her in to the DHS after she spanked her child. When the bus stopped, Chapman got off and “allegedly pointed out the man she wanted shot. She said ‘shoot him’ and they opened fire. And it was all caught on tape by seven SEPTA cameras.”
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In 2010 a black Seattle teen was followed from a nearby mall to a bus tunnel. The perpetrators told the victim she had nice stuff and was acting white. The fifteen year old “was badly beaten … as three unarmed security guards looked on.” The teen “told investigators that she thought the men would protect her.”
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The Seattle transit security is now reviewing their protocol for security guards.