Facebook, really? A picture of a cop having his throat slit does not violate community standards?
“That narrative came first and influences how mass media chooses the stories it covers and the manner it is covered.”
Do the city of Chicago (or other big city) statistics lie? It is not “media narrative” that I am safer in some parts of the city than others. It is objective truth.
TatinG, why do you keep going to the lowest common denominator on this? We all know there are crazy people out there. Why keep giving them an audience?
I don’t understand your comment at all. If Facebook has not taken this down, something is wrong at Facebook.
Yes, if we’re trying to have a constructive conversation. Giving light to far left and far right hate speech does nothing to bring understanding to the issues. For every cop-killer sympathizer, I could find a Dylann Roof sympathizer who thinks that it’s OK to kill black people. So what? It’s not helpful.
ETA: You edited your comment so mine sounds off, but I’ll leave it as is.
While it is a tangent, I am shocked by what Facebook apparently allows. They are the ones allowing hateful pictures to be circulated.
Re: post 152
Several of the states you mention with higher danger for cops also have a higher percentage of African Americans, in some cases higher than the national percentage, than some of the states you mention with lower cop danger. I would agree that the higher percentage of guns plays a role in the difference. Since it is disproportionately likely for a cop to be killed by an African American male, I would venture to guess that the demographics play a role also. I am not saying all African American people are the problem or suggesting that some African American people are not victimized by police. Just emphasizing the point that we have many issues contributing to this mess.
Some counterpoints to your post:
Back when I was living in Boston for several years after college(early-mid-'00s), there’s certain parts of Dorchester and Southie many locals including Irish-Americans wouldn’t recommend someone go into…especially if one happened to be Black/other racial minority. Incidentally, some racial epithets were yelled at us as we were doing our Census rounds in those areas because we weren’t White*.
I got a glimpse of this when I was doing the Census in the summer of 2000 in those areas when the local Census Bureau officials including a few LEOs felt the need to send us enumerators by arranging drivers and having us go into each building as a large group rather than individually because of that danger. Ironically, they didn’t feel the need for us to do so in Roxbury which still had a sizable Black population back then before gentrification.
Also, if one wants to avoid high crime NYC neighborhoods which happen to be majority White at the time/currently, I’d avoid Howard Beach, Ozone Park or Bensonhurst until the late '90s**. Especially if one happens to be non-White.
- Those areas were/are still heavily dominated by working-class Irish-Americans with long-simmering racial tensions arising from decades of hatred against Black and non-White immigrant groups and this was only underscored by tensions related to school busing in the late '60s and '70s. Bitterness/hatred about the latter was still fresh in many of those locals' minds in 2000.
** A HS friend whose family is Eastern European in origin and is a multi-generationed American grew up in Bensonhurst back when it was a majority working-class Italian-American neighborhood with a high crime rate. He remembered the racially motivated murder of Yusef Hawkins and said the same White teens/young adults who murdered him were well known among locals for mugging/violently assaulting people who weren’t White or part of their particular Italian-American group. He was personally mugged many times by members of that group while growing up in Bensonhurst in the '80s/early '90s.
From his perspective as someone who grew up and is still living in the same house currently, the crime/safety issue only dramatically improved when that particular group of Italian-Americans moved out of Bensonhurst to Staten Island, New Jersey, and Long Island in the late '90s.
You’ve not “counterpointed” me at all. In my particular city, the dangerous neighborhoods as measured by objective crime statistics are overwhelmingly black. That’s simply fact. That’s not opinion and it’s not “countered” by what your HS friend did, said or experienced. If you have data showing that the predominantly white areas of Chicago are the most dangerous, have at it.
Re: no. 165.
And you’ve given them a whole new audience.
You were making the point of associating Black dominated neighborhoods with high crime. I was presenting several examples of White dominated neighborhoods with high crime rates/serious safety issues.
Main difference, the centuries old narrative I mentioned in a previous post influences mass media to continue presenting/playing to the same old narrative by emphasizing greater coverage of crime in Black dominated neighborhoods while providing far less proportional coverage of crime in White dominated urban neighborhoods like the ones I named above.
In the latter case, not only was there far less coverage of crime in those areas due to the narrative…the lack of coverage and action was also facilitated in some cases by some corrupt deals within some elements of local and sometimes even the Federal LEOs. Regarding the last…just google Whitey Bulger…
My heart breaks for these families.
The safe neighborhood I live in is racially diverse. Nearby, there’s a neighborhood that’s much, much less safe… but equally racially diverse. The difference between them isn’t the racial makeup of residents. It’s poverty in the latter.
In my (fairly limited, to be fair) experience, poverty is the indicator of likelihood of neighborhood crime rates, not ethnic demographics.
Another thing is mass media coverage of crimes in some Black neighborhoods tends to be sensationalistic and may not reflect actual reality on the ground.
This was underscored by the hype about Harlem being extremely dangerous which still influences many suburban parents and students I’ve encountered at Barnard/Columbia even within the last few years.
And the Morningside Heights/Harlem area now is far safer than it was in the late '90s when I paid visit to friends attending Columbia and going home at 2-4 am. Had no issues wandering through Harlem/Morningside Heights in the late '90s during those hours back then. As long as one is alert as one should be in any case and minded one business, one is fine.
Each time a suburban parent or student tries to issue a warning about “how dangerous Harlem/Morningside Heights is”… to me I cannot help but laugh as IME…they’re behaving no differently than suburban relatives and friends whose knowledge of NYC comes predominantly from mass media crime stories and movies portraying an extremely outdated view of NYC such as the Death Wish series or the Warriors.
@cobrat, I understand your point of view as I probably walked right past Whitey Bulger without even knowing it. South Boston had it’s project, and Dorchester had it’s project, and Roxbury had it’s project. Walk into any one of them and expect rough treatment no matter what color you are. The sad thing is there are more parts of Boston and the suburbs that are unsafe for any color.
I understand there is more reported black crime. At this point in time, I am skeptical there is actually more black crime than white crime. Certainly in the upper middle class, mostly white, (a few black sports stars) neighborhood where I grew up, white male teens broke into their neighbors’ home (including ours) and stole drugs, alcohol, jewelry and guns. I don’t remember any of those boys actually going to jail for burglary. I don’t remember any of those boys going to jail, ever, even when they were convicted of dealing drugs, or in one case, stealing and reselling from a local drug store owned by a neighborhood parent.
“All the reports I’ve read said while the sniper was following the Neo Black Panthers, none reported he was an actual member.”–what do you get a membership card like the AARP or something?? that’s funny.
I’ve actually stayed overnight at various friends’ apartments in Mission Hill and Roxbury back in the late '90s and early '00s before gentrification really took hold without issues. One group of friends whom I stayed with who lived in Mission Hill were a group of petite Asian-American women who were studying at NEC and NEU.
I’ve also wandered through Roxbury on several occasions for several hours at a stretch alone or with one other friend in that period during the late evening/early morning hours without incident just to explore the area. Never an issue and even struck up some friendly interesting conversations with local residents.
I actually had more fear/concern which was reinforced by warnings from Irish-American friends and firsthand experiences going into Southie and parts of Dorchester while doing the 2000 Census and afterwards. Especially considering the warnings covered not going there even during daylight hours because of the violent tendencies of many in the local community against those who were non-White or even not of the same particular group of Irish-Americans.
“I don’t remember any of those boys going to jail” – it’s a truth universally acknowledged that white kids rarely pay the price that their counterparts of color do. Heck, just days ago we followed criminal cases here on CC where a white defendant got a dramatically lower sentence than a Latino accused of the same crime.
In an upper-middle class mostly White NNJ suburban town my uncle lives in, there’s a persistent problem of local teens drinking, making noise, and causing substantial property damage to the woods and nearby houses like my uncle’s and neighbors.
Despite persistent calls to the local LEOs and lip service to “do something about it”…the problem has persisted for decades and the teens are often let off without even being brought into the police station. Only after the outrage from my uncle and his neighbors combined with several affluenza-like cases in the area/national news reached a crescendo in the last couple of years did the local/regional authorities finally started moving to crack down on those teens and their behavior.
Could it have something to do with the fact those teens were well-known in the town to come from the wealthier part of town from upper-class families who lived there for generations and have enough influence with the local/regional authorities to prevent their kids from even being brought into the police station until public pressure became too much for this state of affairs to continue? Nahh…couldn’t be…