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This morning's Los Angeles Times details the findings of the paper's "Homicide Report," a study of the distribution of homicides in Los Angeles County for 2007. Here's an excerpt from the main summary:
An online project of The Times called the Homicide Report has tracked Los Angeles County homicides, as they have happened, since the beginning of the year. The project has yielded a vivid statistical outline of the county's current homicide problem -- at least 520 killings by early August. It also has chronicled some of the damage that rippled through families and communities rent by deaths that happened before their time.
Homicide is not fair, hitting hardest among Latinos and especially among blacks. Latinos are killed at more than three times the rate of whites, while blacks succumb to homicide at three times the rate of Latinos, the Times analysis shows.
Adult males are the eye of the storm. The national homicide rate is about six deaths per 100,000 people each year. But for Latino men in their 20s in Los Angeles County, the rate is 52 deaths, and for black men, 176 deaths. In human terms, that means that losing a son to homicide, a remote possibility in some neighborhoods, looms as a daily threat in others.
In South Los Angeles and Athens this year, for example, there have been at least 20 homicides within a single ZIP Code in just seven months. A few miles away, in the Woodland Hills, Tarzana and Brentwood ZIP Codes, months go by without any.
People living close to frequent violent death find refuge in denial. On the same streets where sidewalks are stained by the melted wax from homicide shrines and young men loiter in wheelchairs, people talk about being "caught slippin' " (letting one's guard down) or about friends having "passed" (not having been killed). Bereaved parents describe years of obsessively protective behavior -- children locked indoors, hourly cellphone calls to check in. Then, in the next breath, they avow that they never thought their child could be murdered.
Be sure to read the story, and check out the chronicles of the victims at the homicide report blog.
I recently posted on the tragedy of America's urban crisis.
I am deeply troubled by these statistics. Urban violence is a national crisis, and the 2008 presidential hopefuls need to address this issue more forcefully. Remedies to the crisis are not to be found solely in the realm of law enforcement, but must also come from changes at the family level.
Stanley Crouch, in his column up today at the New York Daily News, argues that the crisis of violence in urban America cries out for public debate and discussion. Yet, the issue is a hot potato on the presidential campaign trail:
We have now developed an urban badlands which is national and troubling because of the incredible numbers of people who are murdered or suffer the physical and psychological effects of violent crime. Our presidential candidates are quick on the draw when asked about the war on terror or homeland security, but the American people have not heard a peep from them about the concrete killing fields of our cities. Perhaps, because so many of the perpetrators and the victims are "people of color," the donkeys don't want to be seen as bleeding hearts while the elephants are afraid of being called racists.
In the 19th century, murderous cowboys, rustlers and bank or train robbers had neither the arms nor the occasions presented to them that could have resulted in the kinds of carnage we now take for granted. The mob wars of the 20th century left numbers of dead that would be pointed to with pride by a mayor today as proof of how much better things have gotten.
Addressing a dilemma tantamount to terrorism, a few months ago Ben Stein wrote in the conservative American Spectator that, "In the five and a half years since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been roughly 40,000 killings by gangs and gang members in this United States of America, mostly in the African-American and Hispanic sections of large cities." In his book, "The Devil and Dave Chappelle," William Jelani Cobb writes: "Between 1976 and 2004, African-Americans, who are 13% of the population, constituted nearly 47% of the homicide cases in the United States."
Besides all of the human costs of these murders, the burden is estimated by the World Health Organization to cost an annual $300 billion. That amounts to about 150 weeks in Iraq, or three years.
This would seem a good subject for presidential debates, right? Wrong, apparently.
But just last week the news media were often given to breast-beating as they reported on the three college students who were lined up against a wall and killed execution style in Newark. Newark youth worker Shamonique Jones, who lives in the area where the three were gunned down, told The New York Times that the tragedy was a matter of "being in the wrong place at the wrong time" because the Crips, who ominously trouble the neighborhood, do much of their recruiting in the summer months. On CNN those murders were put in the context of slaughters taking place at nauseating rates in many other American cities.
One Newark man interviewed by CBS seemed to speak for all of those living under the oppression of violent crime when he said that the neighborhood where the three young people were murdered is under siege. There seemed to be more robberies, burglaries and carjackings. But Newark Police Chaplain John McClain, who is the great uncle of one of the three victims, said that the killers should be thought of as what they are, terrorists.
A New Jersey resident asked a fundamental question, "Will these knuckleheads have to join the Ku Klux Klan before this country wakes up and faces the horror of what they are doing?" I think that question should be answered by every one of those running for President because the corpses will not have stopped piling up throughout our concrete killing fields when the next commander in chief is sworn in.
Croach is perceptive in his point that those on the left avoid the bleeding heart tag and conservatives hestitate to speak truth to race politics for fear of the racist label.
I've commented before that the Democrats, at a recent debate, missed the chance to seriously address the crisis of black underclass crime. Both parties, however, have an historic opportunity to make urban policy a major platform during the 2008 race. This shift would be especially smart for the GOP, as it moves to reestablish itself as the party of competent government and the champion of traditional values.
