White Girl Bleed a Lot (38 page)

Go Gators.

Let’s head over to another SEC football town, Mobile, Alabama. This incident got some national attention. In April 2012 Matthew Owens saw some black people rolling a basketball down neighbors’ driveways and grabbing things off their porches. He saw something, so he said something.

Ten minutes later a mob of black people showed up, demanding justice for the disrespect Owens showed the basketball-bearing black people …as well as some for Trayvon. When they did not get it, they beat Owens into critical condition. Someone said it was payback for Trayvon.
²

On cue, local police and media downplayed the intensity and racial quality of the violence. Local Deputy Chief Lester Hargrove said “investigators believe only four people, including Terry Rawls, were directly involved. They believe the rest of the mob just watched.”
³

I’m not a lawyer, though I did spend the better part of an hour on
Court TV
(explaining how my reporting resulted in unearthing new evidence that got a black man released from state prison after he was unjustly convicted of trying to kill his white girl friend). But if twenty people “just watch” a crime, doesn’t that make them accessories? And does anyone really visualize a mob of twenty people descending on a home, while only several people break out of the mob and start beating someone, while the remaining people just stand there without a word or gesture of encouragement? Is that what the police say happened? Really?

In Chicago, two days later, two black people beat and robbed a “white boy” in revenge for Trayvon. Eighteen-year-old Alton Hayes III and his fifteen-year-old accomplice walked up behind their nineteen-year-old victim and said “Empty your pockets, white boy.”

They then “threw him to the ground and punched him ‘numerous times’ in the head and back before running away,” police said. After being arrested, Hayes told police he was upset by the Trayvon Martin case, and said he beat the victim up because he was white.
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The rapper Zoeja Jean wrote a song about Travyon called “All Black in My Hoodie.” Let’s just say they won’t be playing this at the next meeting of the Human Relations Commission. Or will they? Here’s a sample:

They did us wrong in Haiti

They did us wrong in Africa

Black folks let’s keep it real

These p—- crackers don’t love us

If we don’t do sh*t

And lynch that cracker

Six months later

They gonna kill another brother

If you were wondering who “they” is, it is probably you.

The high school kids got in on the action as well: Down in Miami Beach one hundred students from North Miami Beach Senior High School participated in a “walk-out demonstration” in memory of Trayvon when they made a detour to the local Walgreens. They ransacked it. Even their vice principal could not stop them. One of the commenters at Mediaite.com remarked: “Everyone knew they would turn this tragedy into a free shopping day.”
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It was all caught on video. And many were kind enough to drop their student IDs during the looting. The police chief, Larry Gomer, issued an apologetic statement explaining why he had to enforce the law.

Over at Twitchy.com, they reported on a Twitter stream of students discussing a riot at a Georgia high school over the Trayvon shooting. More precisely they talk about how they are going to riot. Sounds like a threat to me.

“FUH EVERY ONE THAT GOES TO CREEKSIDE HIGH SCHOOL: THERE WILL BE A RIOT FUH TRAYVON MARTIN AT 2:OOPM! PART 1”

langston had a riot for trayvon martin, westlake bouta have one . tri cities gonna have one on thursday …. umm creekside need to have one.
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And this is just two of dozens.

In Toledo, a seventy-eight-year old man was beaten by a mob of six black people who said they were doing it for Travyon. It was April 2012. Dallas Watts was on his way home from the store when he heard one of the gang say “take him down.” Watts asked “Remember Trayvon. Why you picking on me?” It was very nasty. “At one point, the victim recalled being lifted from the ground so one of the boys could ‘drop-kick’ him in the chest.”
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The next day, the police chief came out and said the story was “causing issues here that should not be here.” Cops on the beat are heroes and warriors. But an increasing number of upper level police officials around the country are apologists for black violence and actively try to stop people from knowing what is going on. You’ve read about it so far in Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Baltimore, you name it. And now Toledo.

Over in Norfolk, Virginia, two reporters in April 2012 were beat up by a mob of fifty to one hundred black people. The white reporters had just left a concert in downtown Norfolk. They were stopped at a red light when “a black male hurled a rock at the car.” When the reporter got out to inspect the damage, a gang of about thirty black people “began punching and pound the reporter.”
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For about two weeks there was no news coverage and the police were indifferent. Finally a columnist at the paper talked about the paper’s decision not to write about this attack. She also disclosed that the day after the attack she found some chilling tweets: “I feel for the white man who got beat up at the light,” one person wrote. “I don’t,” wrote another, indicating laughter. “(do it for trayvon martin) [
sic
]”
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Anyone who has read this book could write the editorial and police reply as to why they had no interest in drawing attention to this mob violence.

It got interesting when bulldogs like Bill O’Reilly, Glenn
Beck, Breitbart, and others got a hold of it and would not let go.

Listeners to my radio show are news hounds, and they write letters and emails to reporters. Many of them wrote O’Reilly saying “Bill, this is happening all over the country, so I hope you do a story about that.” I know because they copied me.

But I also know people write in and say something like: Did you hear about Columbus? Or Greensboro? Or Denver? Or Minneapolis? Or the latest about black-on-Asian crime in San Francisco?

Often the answer is no. And that is how those cities ended up in this book.

But people also say something else just as often: “Colin, you wrote about Milwaukee, but that has been happening here for a very long time.” It is always worse that I write about. Always.

I know O’Reilly was getting that kind of mail as well.

I do not know why he decided to stick only with one tiny case in one tiny city and ignore the tsunami of black mob violence from the rest of the country, some of it masquerading as sympathy for Trayvon.

But he did. And he does.

No wonder no one knows.

C
rime statistics are the first refuge of the reporters and public officials in denial about racial violence. But here is what they do not know or do not say: Violent crime is often not reported.

A 2012 study from the Department of Justice says more than half the victims of violent crime do not call the police. And if they do, police often do not file crime reports. “More than half of the nation’s violent crimes, or nearly 3.4 million violent victimizations per year, went unreported to the police between 2006 and 2010,” said a Justice Department analysis.
¹

That’s seventeen million violent crimes off the books in five years.

Some say it is even worse. They point to the ultimate crime detector: The ShotSpotter, an anti-crime technology that features an array of wireless microphones that can pinpoint a gun shot to within forty feet.

The system is 96 percent accurate.

Using ShotSpotter,
The New York Times
reports that neighbors
called police only 10 percent of the time that guns were fired in a high-crime area of San Francisco. In Oakland, 22 percent of gunshots prompted 911 calls.

Chief Chris Magnus of Richmond, Calif., a community of 120,000 north of Berkeley that routinely ranks among country’s most violent cities, recalled listening to a ShotSpotter recording of a gun battle in 2010 that involved more than 100 rounds fired from four guns. “It was just mind-boggling,” he said. “This is like 11 at night on a summer night, and nobody even called it in.”
²

Often when people “call it in,” the police do not file a report, further skewing the statistics in places like Baltimore, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, Minneapolis, and Milwaukee.

In Queens, a
New York Times
headline reports “Police Tactic: Keeping Crime Off the Books.”

New York police refused to take a report when a man groped Jill Korber several days in a row. “He told me it would be a waste of time, because I didn’t know who the guy was or where he worked or anything,” said Ms. Korber, a thirty-four-year-old schoolteacher. “His words to me were: ‘These things happen.’ He said those words.”
³

Katherine Davis told the
Times
she hid in a closet when a man entered her apartment, searched the room, and left. After the police arrived and questioned Davis, she asked for a case number so she could follow the investigation. “There is no case number,” they told her.
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In Milwaukee fifty black people looted a convenience store in 2011. Then they moved to a nearby park where they assaulted ten people having a Fourth of July picnic. The following day, several of the victims went to the police station to learn about the status of their case. “What case?” asked the officer on duty. There was
no report. Eventually, after pressure from talk radio and television reporters, police launched an investigation.

Less than one year later, a headline in the
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
said it all: “Hundreds of assault cases misreported by Milwaukee police department. City’s violent crime rate lowered based on faulty data.” Investigators found more than five hundred misreported cases since 2009. “Criminologists reviewed the
Journal Sentinel
’s findings and said they showed a pattern of misreporting that has helped drive down the city’s crime rate.”
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In Minneapolis, a talk show host at the CBS affiliate was patiently explaining to his listeners how a recent epidemic of racial violence in that city was an anomaly. And he refused to believe police and newspapers were ignoring it. A caller named Haley soon set him straight when she told him about how a black mob beat her son, breaking several bones in his face.

Haley set out to find the criminals. And “nobody did anything about it,” she said. They would not look at security cameras videotape. They would not help her look at it. “They didn’t care. I get flamed up thinking about it. They basically told me they had bigger fish to fry.”

Remember the incident in Riverhead, New York, neighboring the Hamptons on Long Island where hundreds of black people were fighting and destroying property in the street at 2 a.m.? The violence was so intense the local police issued a Code 3 emergency call for help from five surrounding police departments. I told you in
chapter 31
how the local newspaper denied anything at all had happened to disturb the peace in her bucolic neighborhood. The editor claimed to know there was no rioting even though she wasn’t there “because there were no arrests. If there had been lawlessness and violence, there would have been arrests.” Riverhead City Councilman John Dunleavy added: “This was simply a very large block party, with no incidents, and
no action had to be taken.”
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Remember Nihan Thai, the gay man who was beaten on the doorsteps of his inner city neighborhood in Seattle? I mentioned him in
chapter 26
. He started his own crime investigation, knocking on his neighbors doors. Many of them had been victims themselves, and they told Thai they’d never reported the crimes to police. “It happens to them so often that after 2 or 3 times they stopped reporting because they didn’t see any progress,” said Thai. Even Seattle’s King 5 news wanted to know “Is crime going unreported in parts of Seattle?”
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As I mentioned in
chapter 24
, Atlanta’s Screen on the Green at Piedmont Park was an annual family ritual for fifteen thousand people who enjoyed movies under the stars. In 2010 a mob of hundreds of black people tore through the crowd, beating, stealing, marauding. Result? According to the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
:

Dozens of eyewitnesses from last Thursday’s Screen on the Green at Piedmont Park offered similar accounts of unruly—and sometimes violent—teens taking over the event with little resistance from security officers. But only one incident related to the fracas was reported to authorities, police say.
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Only one police report? I guess everyone was too busy trying to stop the riot.