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.
I hope she gets what she wants and enjoys it. My daughter was at the school ( and ran it) for 8 months this year, and left in Oct for a years commitment as a teacher.
For the first time in her life she doesn't have the filter of her conservative father. For the first time in my life I have to hope my teachings stand up to that of an institution and peer pressure at the same time.
WE here do understand the level of brainwashing that goes on in universities, and has been so and increasingly so since, anecdotally, I can say, from the fifties, when my aunt attended a stint at Catholic in the masters program for teachers during which she became, if not before but solidly, a NYT worshipping liberal, beholden to the government as God, or god. Teaching her children to dutifully contribute to the likes of Obamacare, for the good of all, while her family runs around neglected.
But we do not seem to accept that these institutions take parents’ money and students’ money AND their souls.
Give up Dorothy.
Scott Wasserman Stern has been folding origami since he was three years old. He has been an active member of the Origami Club of Pittsburgh and a regular attendee of OrigamiUSA’s national convention in New York City. Scott has an identical twin brother as well as a younger brother. He and his family live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
read my next post.
Inconvenience is way over rated
Very well thought out. The liberal soul is truly a lost soul.
Did you just make that up? LOL
WE here do understand the level of brainwashing that goes on in universities, and has been so and increasingly so since, anecdotally, I can say, from the fifties, when my aunt attended a stint at Catholic in the masters program for teachers during which she became, if not before but solidly, a NYT worshipping liberal, beholden to the government as God, or god. Teaching her children to dutifully contribute to the likes of Obamacare, for the good of all, while her family runs around neglected.
But we do not seem to accept that these institutions take parents’ money and students’ money AND their souls.
Give up Dorothy.
________________________________
My oldest did the college thing and has turned surprisingly conservative recently and married another homeschooled student. But she is up to her eyeballs in debt and cannot get out of it as soon as she would like.
My next daughter did one year of college in her jr and sr year of high school and tried a second year of college while working full time and decided to reboot and do what she loves. She will be back and plans to find a school she can work her way through.
My son, Voc high school and is making more that the college grads where I work. With another training program company paid in the offing that will add more pay to his packet.
(We are needing to go back to the times of “schools.” IBM school, Banking school, etc, schools to help people get the info and skills they need to continue to grow in their jobs. Sort of like Voc schools for all different groups.
My youngest is not able to figure out her future, so we are graduating her early (homeschooler) because there is nothing like a low wage entry level job to focus the mind.
My three older children are conservative in outlook. I attribute it to the homeschooling. They found it difficult to fit into the general culture but have made their marks where they are.
I expect “Knigger Knonckin’” to start soon.
“Scott Wasserman Stern has been folding origami since he was three years old. He has been an active member of the Origami Club of Pittsburgh and a regular attendee of OrigamiUSA’s national convention in New York City. Scott has an identical twin brother as well as a younger brother. He and his family live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.”
If you made that up it is brilliant and hilarious. If you didn’t it is pathetic and hilarious! I would hope that if young Scott has his skull split open by the feral yutes it might knock some sense into him, but I doubt it.
If only I were young enough to know everything.....
I quit reading after, ‘racist.’ The guy didn’t even allude to race, he was warning about stupid teens running around trying to knock people out. People love being offended. It’s like they get off on being offended like it’s a drug.
Apparently everything (including existing) is wacist. So...who gives a crap.
“there is nothing like a low wage entry level job to focus the mind.”
And to let them know they need to think about where they want to spend most of their life and with whom.
Homeschoolers, of which many of the Freepers are, have to then focus on what next. It’s scary to keep up the eccentricity or, conscientious academics past HS and into adulthood, but buck up.
what is it all about?
Creating or forming productive citizens with a good faith trajectory, good decision-making capabilities and with a joy in life (the pursuit of happiness, which translates from the Greek to Joy, which is not ‘fun’ or ‘success’ but it is, in Catholicism, a fruit of the Holy Spirit, so in other faiths, a communion with God, or so, I guess, but a trust in eternal salvation, I would think).
How to achieve that?
Online Schools, community college, Math and sciences at a university, where they can exercise their apologetics and solidify their faith.
I studied literature at a state school. Fraught with liberal anti American, anti decency.
It helped me with my faith, in that I became stronger, but I was way into adulthood and had liberal teachers who were sincere in their beliefs and were open minded and who liked my writing, said so and gave me the grades. But that was earlier and it was tough.
That’s a good one.
Race card addicts.
“My youngest is not able to figure out her future, so we are graduating her early (homeschooler) because there is nothing like a low wage entry level job to focus the mind.”
Well, you’re wrong on the last part of that. This goes back a number of years but I also was uncertain (rudderless if you will) so I joined the military. Boot camp does an excellent job of focusing one’s mind; 3 years 9 months beyond that sharpens the focus real well.
Thanks 2ndDivisionVet.
Hey Scott, try to safely walk the streets of Bridgeport and surrounding cities/towns, by yourself.
We will pick up what’s left of your probably liberal, whiney little white ass and bury it in a thimble.
Take a look at Williamsburg New York City and see how many attacks by black knock-out artists have taken place in the last few weeks.
You can’t hide behind your parents’ money for too long, Scott. One day you will have to leave the safety of the Ivy Tower and go out into the real world. Guys like you won’t last a week. Give me your address. I’ll send some flowers to you, like Nightshade.
hey, maybe white motorcycle gangs should start to punch out elderly black people—try to knock em out with one blow! lets see how long the Media would ignore this? 2 minutes? two can play this game.
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