Update on Sean Bell; More Crime in Boston

I first wrote about Sean Bell here.

The latest from must-read Heather Mac Donald first exposes the New York Times for, yet again, inaccurate, incomplete, biased reporting:

"A March [New York Times] article, for instance, devoted itself to charges that the police were preying on the black community. After noting that more than half the people whom cops stop and frisk are black, Times reporter Diane Cardwell added: 'City officials maintained that those stopped and searched roughly parallel the race of people mentioned in reports from crime victims.' No, actually, there is no 'rough parallel' between the proportion of stops and the proportion of alleged assailants: blacks aren’t stopped enough, considering the rate at which they commit crimes. Though blacks, 24 percent of New York City’s population, committed 68.5 percent of all murders, rapes, robberies, and assaults in the city last year, according to victims and witnesses, they were only 55 percent of all stop-and-frisks. Of course, the Times didn’t give the actual crime figures. Even a spate of vicious assaults on police officers in the week before the indictments didn’t change the predominant story line that officers were trigger-happy racists."

By these statistics, the problem is not racist cops - it's that blacks in New York City commit a lot of crimes. Reasons for this seemingly vary, depending on your way of thinking: liberals say it's because whites don't care that blacks die, so blacks kill other blacks to get revenge on a white society which doesn't respect or acknowledge black manhood (make sense? Didn't think so.).

Sound-minded conservatives, like LaShawn Barber, offer comments on black-on-black violence here, in conjunction with the Sean Bell case and the first Duke rape case:

"Look, I understand the all-too-human tendency to point fingers, but important to the development of good character is a willingness to face hard truths. Black crime rates are out of control, and it’s not white peoples’ faults. Criminality and incarceration (however brief) is a defining characteristic of black subculture. The least of our concerns are drunk white men at house parties or perceived 'racist' police shootings. If white cops want to kill black men and white boys want to rape black women, they’ll need to kill and violate a hell of a lot of them to catch up to black-on-black crime stats."

Back to Heather Mac Donald's piece: after chronicling the Sean Bell case and its aftermath, Mac Donald offers this solution up to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the "black community":

"Unless black leaders—real or media-created—muster the will to address the crime epidemic among black youth (most of it inflicted on other blacks), the ongoing carnage will almost inevitably include an infinitesimal number of accidental police shootings of unarmed men. Criminal activity among young African-Americans is the poison of cities and of race relations; if Bloomberg can force a conversation about it, he could help reclaim urban America."

Let's hope Bloomberg listens.

Meanwhile, violence continues in Boston with more innocent victims. NY Daily News relays suspicions of gang violence:

"Cops suspect the shooting was related to ongoing violence among Cape Verdean gangsters in the Dorchester neighborhood.
An 18-year-old with multiple arrests and a violent reputation, Jason Barbosa, walked into the hospital minutes later with a bullet wound in his shoulder. Cops suspect he may have been in the car [in which Chiara Levin was killed] at the time."

And, the revealing truth about Dorchester, and the "progress" of the investigation:

"Boston cops said no one was held behind bars.
"'It's possible that someone was being questioned, but no one was taken into custody, handcuffed or otherwise,' said Officer Eddy Chrispin, a police spokesman.
"Neighbors said the party on the first floor of a rundown gray three-story apartment building was a weekly event in a neighborhood stung by gunfire and nearby murders. The building was still sealed off by cops last night.
"'They have parties every weekend. You've got to wonder why he holds them. It's not safe,' said a neighbor who heard the shots."

Predictably, still no arrests.

Mayor Menino's new idea, apparently, is to end after-hours partying....I think real punishments, such as arrests and long jail sentences, might work better.

With violence continuing and no arrests made, it seems as if no progress is being made. Let's hope these crimes are taken seriously and the perpetrators punished to the fullest extent of the law. The climate is right to make an example of anyone caught committing a violent crime, and the example should stand as the rule, rather than the exception.