Tag Archives: crime

We hate our criminals more than we hate bad laws and bad conditions.

We’d rather dispose of convicts than rehabilitate them. We’d rather force them to work in chain gangs for government property. We’d rather put them in solitary confinement torture. We’d rather force jailed suspects to pay tens of thousands in bail cash. We ritually kill people who are already serving their life in prison.

Oh, and all of this is a “favor” to convicts.

We have an unforgiving, tyrannical criminal justice system. Even if PoC weren’t present in this country, even if this country and its criminal justice system were exclusively populated by White European Americans, it would still be just as terrible and tyrannical compared to other European-majority countries.

The Congressional Black Caucus and the 1994 Crime Bill

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You know what I’m missing about the #1994CrimeBill?

An actual rebuttal to all the 23 Congressional Black Caucus members who voted for it and all the African-American non/ex-politicians who defend it to this day.

I have read so many defenses and criticisms of the bill from White folks during 2015-2016, but they all center the Clinton family in their explications. Even Michelle Alexander’s rage piece against the crime bill in “The Nation” magazine during the primary centered the Clintons.

What about the African-Americans themselves? Where was our political agency at that time? What benefits did many of us, the Kweisi Mfume-Sanford Bishop school of 23, see in supporting the bill, versus the John Lewis-Jesse Jackson school of 11 who voted No? Why do many African-Americans today still support the bill and its harsher terms of law in the context of its time, and is there a proper rebuttal to *their* supportive arguments?

In the end, this became an election year attack line, and not a moment for reconciling the past with the present. I think those who demand the lessening of mass incarceration missed a grand opportunity for change because the conversation about the 1994 Crime Bill went nowhere this year.

Idiotic Assumptions About Crime in Poor Black Communities

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There is something wrong with the premise behind the statement “Black lives don’t matter to #BlackLivesMatter” and (mis)using FBI stats to back it up, as the always-ill-informed Milo Yiannopoulos has done.

It assumes that African-Americans are not doing anything to reduce violent offenses in predominately African-American urban areas, despite the evidence to the contrary that Yiannopoulos simply ignores.

The “solutions” to “Black-on-black crime” put forward by those most extremely critical of the anti-police brutality protests are usually embarrassingly parochial, petty and emphasizing upon a moral policing of African-Americans which would never reasonably happen to White Americans.

The “solutions” are usually harder militarization of the inner-city police, harder prosecution of the Drug War, re-introducing religious control into the public school system and civil government, encouraging corporal violence against children, shaming single parents, and powerless obeisance to the force of arms.

None of these will bring back the manufacturing jobs. None of these will address our mental health crisis. None of these will fix our collapsing infrastructure. None of these will empower us with democratic power. None of these will address how, as an ethnicity descended from slaves, we ended up here in the wrong way. None of these will fix our education system’s lack of scale. None of these will address how we feel trapped in our own cities in the underclass.

They’re just crap solutions. Meaningless, nostalgic platitudes to violently-flawed bygones. Hypocritical des to a hypocritical culture which masks its violent stench as it condemns Black people for our terrors.

And what’s worse is that the same people who propose these “solutions” do not institutionally benefit from these solutions either! They screw over other White people!

Sad!

Dallas Revenge

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I had said earlier that there was going to be a Timothy McVeigh-Terry Nichols type of reaction when LEOs shoot the “wrong type of people”.

I did not expect a retaliation of this magnitude, not over LEO murders of African-Americans, not in #Dallas. The shooter in the video, who is now dead, looks like he had training to shoot at remote targets from around corners. Snipers.

With his accomplices, he was able to kill 5 officers and wound 5 others. They could have killed many, untold numbers of civilian protesters after they were frightened by the shooting, but they didn’t. Just picking off the LEOs.

This wasn’t an ordinary clapback against police brutality. This was planned, the channeling of emotion from abject despondency to stone-cold revenge. The shooters wanted to make a seething nick in the skin of that institution.

“The end is coming”, he said in the garage. Apocalyptic. No one expected this. I thought there wasn’t going to be this sort of channeling. Just more protests, more arrests, more burning of buildings.

But this. THIS. Stone-cold, planned revenge. A selective propaganda of the deed.

Interestingly enough, I read that McVeigh and Nichols were trained and stationed here at Fort Benning in the late 80s. Maybe military training? I’m as mesmerized by what happened in Dallas as I am disgusted and despondent over ALL of the unjustified deaths of the last 96 hours.

NOTE 12/28/2017: This is NOT a justification for revenge killings of police, nor of anyone at all. Stop the killings.

Word out from Advocate.com that the guy who had tannerite, a gasoline jug and ammunition in his car next to L.A. Pride may have been trying to escape a child molestation charge in Indiana. He had sex with a 12yo girl and fled the state, and had a prior misdemeanor charge against him. The tannerite which can be used to build a pipe bomb is actually common to find among gun owners. But this guy had no business with any of this. I cringed when I read it.