Sheriff Harry Lee
Posted on 10/27/2006 6:18:13 AM PDT by Ellesu
It was 20 years ago that Sheriff Harry Lee said black people in white neighborhoods were probably up to no good and threatened to pull them over if they were driving there.
Now, with a murder rate in Jefferson Parish that is almost double what it was last year, Lee said deputies will soon begin stopping black people in violent neighborhoods and searching them.
Deputies have said it has become like a war zone on the Westbank of Jefferson Parish. Violence has spread to neighborhoods that had very little pre-Katrina crime and has exploded in others.
They blame it on old problems: drugs, and a new one: evacuees.
“What happens is there are different players coming in to the same boundaries. So where the bad guys used to respect each other's territories, now they're fighting for their territories,” said Sheriff Harry Lee.
So far this year, there have been 45 murders in Jefferson Parish, as compared to 26 last year. Nine of the victims have been white, and 34 were black.
As for the arrested suspects: two were Hispanic, four were white, and 30 were black males.
“The white community is not the problem. The black community is the problem,” said Sheriff Lee. “I think in the last few months now, the black community is recognizing it, and they’re willing to say, the sheriff is right. The problem is in the black community and we have to start doing things differently than we did in the past.”
Local NAACP chief Dannatus King, whose organization accompanied Lee on a recent trip to Boston to look at their crime fighting techniques, called the comments "saddening." King said the comments threatened the goodwill that Lee and the NAACP have exchanged. He said he planned to talk to Lee Friday and hoped to have a joint comment.
Sheriff Lee said the first thing he is doing differently is cracking down on illegal guns, and to do that, he plans to have deputies patrol high-crime areas and “shake down” the neighborhoods.
“So what I'd like to do is when our task force goes in, we see a bunch of people on a street corner just milling around, I'd like to confront them.”
Lee said that could entail questioning, pat downs and background checks.
Twenty-years ago Lee faced a firestorm after a comment he made about an outbreak of armed robberies in Metairie where 90 percent of the suspects were black.
“We will be stopping a lot of black people in white neighborhoods,” he said.
Lee later apologized and rescinded the order, but he said this time, random questioning seems to be his only answer and he’ll let black residents decide how fair it is.
“The allegation will be true that we are only stopping black people, and I'm saying yes. And if that is offensive to the black community, we won't do it. And then they'll have to live with the continued shootings, the continued killings and the continued violence. And that's a choice they're going to have to make.”
OMG!
I need popcorn for this one.
Idiot called the comments saddening. How about calling the violence saddening? Here again, PC will prevent a real solution to the problem.
PC kills
"King said the comments threatened the goodwill that Lee and the NAACP have exchanged."
Why does the NAACP think that the law has to answer to them, rather than they themselves answering to the law?
Apparently Sheriff Lee is black or he would be lynched by the NAACP and the media. It's refreshing to hear someone so UnPC.
I was wrong. He's Asian.
Sheriff Harry Lee
Lee isn't black.
I would like to see more sheriffs tell the truth.
Too bad the idiot PC bucket brigade will spend so much time splashing water on everything OTHER THAN the fire while Rome burns.
This happened in Cincinnati.
In addition to the previous incident, Lee has blocked streets that cross from Orleans into Jefferson Parish to cut down on "crossover" crime from New Orleans. He's also been known to use the media to his advantage. Some years ago, after public outcry that his officers were "stopping black residents without cause" - again in West Jeffeson Parish (Avondale, IIRC), Lee went on television and said that if the residents didn't care for his methods, he'd pull the police patrols out of those areas. Then he did just that, for a few weeks.
It was all a big set-up. The announced patrol reduction led to a big increase in drug-related crime... but Lee had undercover officers gathering evidence on all the drug-dealing scum that surfaced. When he pulled in the dragnet a few weeks later, the residents who had been complaining sure sounded sheepish.
I'll bet he's about to pull the same trick again.
There is something to what the sherriff is saying, racist though it may sound. In my wonderful town of Indianapolis, we're up now up there with DC in terms of murder, crime, etc. 9 times out of 10, it seems to be black on black and in the bad areas of town.
Wow, call me stupid - but I've never thought of Indianapolis as being a high-crime city.
Tell me. Where are the bad areas of Indianapolis?
Actually there is something wrong with Sherriff Lee's comment. It is not the black community, but the black lack-of-community, that is the problem. If there were still a functioning civil society in poor majority black areas of the country, the crime rates among blacks would not be so high.
Chalk another one up to the liberal judges: the combination of the judicial decision that extended AFDC to unmarried women, which destroyed family formation among the poor, and decisions that created affirmative-action, destroying the need for racial minorities to compete on the basis of quality, and a host of decisions that coddle violent criminals, especially if they are members of racial minorities have created this situation.
What is the alternative? Ignore the problem and let more blacks kill one another? Or take back the streets? Let's hope the prosecutor and judges get serious as well.
At least he called a spade a spade.
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