an epidemic of empty headed emotionally disturbed urinalists spreading fertlizer...is what we have there
I sense that the author is headed for the Media Mattress
Posted on 12/02/2013 7:09:18 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
A couple days before Thanksgiving break, we received an email from Yale University Police Chief Ronnell Higgins. The email’s subject, “Public Safety Update,” certainly sounded innocuous enough, but its contents quickly dispelled this assumption.
“The New Haven police have shared with us that they are beginning to see incidents of something called the ‘Knockout Game’: groups of teenagers or young adults coming up to individuals on public streets and hitting them,” Higgins wrote. “The goal appears to be to hit and then to run away, rather than robbery.”
Higgins proceeded to mention several recent incidents that occured fairly close to Yale’s campus and added that “the ‘Knockout Game’ appears to be a national trend.”
I appreciate Chief Higgins’s concern. I especially appreciate the work done by the Yale University Police Department and the New Haven Police Department to keep me safe.
But Chief Higgins’s email plays into a troubling media narrative. It perpetuates a myth founded not in facts, but in selective statistics and racism. I am certain that Chief Higgins was unaware of the sordid history of his information, yet I feel someone must point out the damaging fallacies undergirding reports of a national “Knockout Game” trend.
In recent weeks, pundits have been sounding the alarm about the “Knockout Game.” According to CNN, the Knockout Game is a trend that is “spreading,” with victims “piling up.” Fox News expounded on this, reporting that “confirmed thugs on the street” are “polar bear hunting” — looking for white victims.
A great number of these media reports claim that the assailants are usually black, the victims usually white. Mark Steyn wrote in the National Review: “Groups of black youths roam the streets looking for a solitary pedestrian, preferably white.” Steyn proceeded to refer to the Knockout perpetrators as “moronic savage[s].” Respected journalists Thomas Sowell and Alec Torres repeated his claims.
The fear that bands of black youths are skulking the streets and terrorizing innocent passersby is hardly new. Following the Civil War, plantation owners reported mobs of former slaves threatening their wives and daughters. For the next century, these claims — wildly inflated and usually outright false — were the justification for lynching and Jim Crow laws. Pundits of that period used racialized language to spread fear of “savages” and “thugs.” Sound familiar?
Many liken the hysteria surrounding the Knockout Game with “wilding,” the idea, popular in the 1980s and 1990s, that groups of dark-skinned youths were on the streets making trouble for mostly white pedestrians. Fears of “wilding” led to the wrongful convictions and incarceration of countless teens, including the Central Park Five. Reports of the Knockout Game have been around since the ’90s, though they remain isolated and rare — often reported with racist code words.
The oft-reported claim of an epidemic of black-on-white street crime is a bigoted myth. In fact, the opposite appears to be the case. In 2011, there were 3,645 victims of “racially motivated hate crimes,” according to data compiled by the FBI. Nearly 72 percent of the victims, an appalling majority, were targeted because of “anti-black bias.”
Pundits have cherry-picked the data in order to wildly sensationalize claims that murderous bands of young men, especially black men, are roaming the streets, knocking out passersby. In this country, aggravated assaults occur at a rate of one per minute. There are more than 4 million violent attacks each year, 125,000 with “hands and fists.” With so many cases of random street violence, to interpret a few isolated instances of Knockout as a national trend is simply wrong.
Philadelphia police have seen 5,000 violent assaults without guns this year, and just one of these has been confirmed as the Knockout Game. There is — and always will be — street crime. But that does not a national trend make. By treating every random and alleged assault as a potential case of Knockout Game fever, the media is attempting to create the false impression of an epidemic — one regularly couched in racist language. As one police spokesman told the New York Times last week, “If there ever was an urban myth, this was it.”
Urban myths derived from selective statistics and racialized punditry allow policymakers to enact harsh laws that disproportionately affect persons of color, such as New York’s stop-and-frisk policy.
These myths also mislead police officers, such as Ronnell Higgins. Chief Higgins’s email, while undoubtedly sent with the best of intentions and thankfully not hypothesizing about the race of the assailants, nonetheless perpetuates this dangerous idea.
The real trend at hand isn’t the Knockout Game — it’s the epidemic of powerful people deceptively spreading fear.
An inconvenient truth no one wants to talk about.
Oy Vey.
There are private High Schools focusing on classical education.
None of the colleges are, save Hillsdale and th eAcademies.
That’s where they should focus, and go for what they’re interested in. If it’s engineering, then some kind of school is necessary.
No one in their right mind would get into medicine. Not at the moment.
Finance, anyone with on online or basic business degree, with connections. HS football is good for that.
Languages, easy. Fashion, same. History, writing, teaching, on line.
A hundred G debt is insane. They’ll never get their money’s worth from it.
Ditto twenty G.
Oh. And there are AP classes in HS. Have a friend who’s out of school after 3 yrs. She was valedictorian at a huge HS.
Scott Stern, junior, Branford College is gunning for Editor of YDN and the “automatic 322,” or Bones. The poor soul will do anything to fulfil the new anti-police, anti-business, anti-white boy lights of the YDN, a philosophy he will embrace passionately for another two years and then pretend to embrace for another ten, at which point he will start quietly questioning his assumptions whilst spouting the same “counter-cultural” stuff wearing L L Bean and opting for the turbo Volvo. His wife will never know he has ‘private friends,’ and his employees will always believe he stood for the ‘little man,’ so why bother? Even the New Haven and Yale Police know their job is to keep this little priss from harm... And after a few years, he’ll move to a nice, safe, white city. Heck, he might even move to Brooklyn, all the while cursing Giuliani for making his neighborhood safe enough!
It's not just Ivy League schools. My daughter came home over thanksgiving from a non-league school and had a major meltdown. She's not "fitting" in. We are now dealing with what she does for the next term. It is not a grade problem. She knows how to work the grades. She doesn't know how to deal with her conscience.
What is the question?
Her moral formation is either paramount or parents don’t care about their kids’ eternal soul.
Geeze it’s so simple.
>> The real trend at hand isn’t the Knockout Game — it’s the epidemic of powerful people deceptively spreading fear.
You make a good, delusional liberal, Scott.
Not to worry, racist doesn’t mean anything anymore, like whitey, or cracker, or when a black calls another black a nigger. Racist is what many on the left are, and what they call everyone who is conservative, or everyone who tells the truth about black violence. The namby-pambies like to pretend that all of the hate in the black culture is good, or that whites deserve being beaten, raped, mugged and killed because blacks hate them.
The left likes to pretend that all the black on black violence, the fatherless blacks, black dropouts, black drug dealers and crackheads, black thieves, muggers, rapists, and killers are a legacy of slavery and not welfarism, and that it will all be okay if whites admit their guilt, take their beatings and abuse, and give more money to blacks, their tax dollars and any money blacks demand from them. If we tolerate bad behavior from blacks, and act like blacks are acting like everyone else, white liberals and their children won’t become victims of black violence, because they understand them.
White liberals don’t understand that all their cowardliness, negligence, and ignorance is making the world a worse place for decent black families who want to do well, and provide safe environments for their children. May all this evil befall their Ivy League dreams.
My daughter mentioned that college as a possiblilty after she gets back from the missions work she is doing with deaf children overseas.
Remove the science, math, and engineering grads, and firebomb the rest.
It’s not just Ivy League schools. My daughter came home over thanksgiving from a non-league school and had a major meltdown. She’s not “fitting” in. We are now dealing with what she does for the next term. It is not a grade problem. She knows how to work the grades. She doesn’t know how to deal with her conscience.
____________________
What is going on with her conscience?
Scott Stern
Only about one out of every ten applicants is accepted.
Because,of course, and the author certainly knows this, black on white crimes are not officially "racist." Racist crimes are definitionally crimes committed against minority persons by white people. A tiny number of randomly chosen black on Asian crimes are characterized as "racist" for balance.
"Racist" violence is not the issue here. The problem is random violence against people by black gangs or individuals. The term "racist" is only an obfuscational device designed solely to produce guilty feelings in the white population.
SCOTT STERN: Yale condones discrimination. The University has a clear Equal Opportunity Statement, which declares that Yale cannot “discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity or expression.” By allowing ROTC back on campus, Yale has violated this commitment.
Leftists say vote fraud is a myth, the IRS abusing Conservatives is phoney, Begheazi is phoney etc.
What Leftists don’t like is either a myth or phoney scandal.
Good. My wife is trying to get picked with her company’s charity to go overseas to fit poor people with donated eyeglasses. She ran a “vision van” project for them back in 2008 for needy schoolkids in Dallas.
oops...Benghazi
Our young author has found the pit fall of cherry picking stats. Who says the victims of the knockout game are classified as hate crimes?
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