Posted on 10/29/2002 5:51:59 AM PST by Clive
Just after 1 a.m. on Monday, Kevin and Jermaine Ebanks were shot outside an after-hours club in the northeast part of the city. They were brothers, aged 27 and 18. Kevin left three kids behind. They are now known as homicide Nos. 42 and 43.
Across town, Byron Simpson was shot in the chest outside another club. He is No. 44. No. 45 is Kevin Michael Davis, who died in a hail of bullets at another after-hours club. He had a baby daughter. He was 20.
Four young men shot to death; five other people injured, in an hour or two. It was a bloody Monday in Toronto.
Yesterday, Police Chief Julian Fantino held a press conference to plead for witnesses and to express dismay at the carnage. "These [deaths] are not only a police concern. The question that I believe goes begging is what is happening in our society and what do we do collectively to deal with those concerns?"
He talked passionately about drugs, gangs and guns. He talked about communities in distress and decaying neighbourhoods. The one thing he didn't talk about was race.
"How many of the victims were black?" someone asked at long last. He said he didn't know. "I'm not making this a race issue," he declared.
The answer is that all nine victims were black. All but one of the suspects are black, too. What hung unmentioned in the air is something everyone knows so well it scarcely bears repeating. Violent black-on-black crime is a serious problem in Toronto.
It's been a tough few days for Chief Fantino. Last week, the force came under fierce attack after The Toronto Star ran an investigative series that showed, quite persuasively, that black citizens are disproportionately singled out by police. Young black men behind the wheel are pulled over out of all proportion to their numbers (a victimless crime known as DWB, or driving while black). The Star showed that even higher black crime rates couldn't explain the discrepancy in treatment. The ugly charge of racial profiling hung in the air.
At first, the chief went into denial mode. Then Lincoln Alexander, the widely respected black former lieutenant- governor of Ontario, weighed in. Wisely, the chief caved, and announced the umpteenth inquiry into racism on the force.
As Chief Fantino knows all too well, racial profiling is among the most explosive issues on the planet. The only one that's worse is race-based crime rates.
The fact that some groups commit more crimes than others is so fissile that the Toronto police don't keep racial crime statistics any more. They stopped in 1989, after a well- meaning cop told a race-relations group that, according to police records, blacks in some neighbourhoods commit a disproportionate share of crimes. Black activists went ballistic, and insisted that keeping such statistics was itself racist. The hapless cop was Julian Fantino.
Our society is deeply conflicted over minority-group statistics- keeping. When it's for socially progressive reasons, such as employment equity and affirmative action, we think it's virtuous. But when it records negative behaviour, we think it's terrible. And now, black leaders are themselves divided. Some want the police to start keeping statistics again, so they can prove racial profiling is a reality. Some are against it, because they're afraid the evidence will be used to stigmatize the community.
The facts about black crime in Toronto are rather grim. In a follow-up piece, the Star found that, while blacks account for 8.1 per cent of the population, they account for nearly 27 per cent of all the charges laid for violent crimes -- homicides, sex assaults and gun offences.
The Star also reported something else everyone knows but no one wants to say. The young men shooting each other in those clubs aren't Ethiopians or Nigerians or Sudanese. They're disproportionately Jamaican. Jamaican-born Canadians account for 2.4 per cent of Toronto's population but 9.5 per cent of all the charges laid for violent offences.
What everyone knows but no one says in polite company is that the guns-and-drugs culture is heavily Jamaican, and it's spinning out of control.
Racial profiling has a context. That does not excuse it or explain it away or make it right. But it has a context.
"For us," said Chief Fantino, in the mildest of allusions to the issue, "it's a no-win situation."
The chief is right about one thing. The bloodshed in Toronto is something we all must face together. We also have to tell the truth, however painful. Without the truth, expect more bloody Mondays. And remember: The dead are disproportionately black, too.
If racial profiling were a crime, we'd all be guilty. I'm guilty of it. You're guilty of it.
It is a problem everywhere.
The lesson here is, if you don't want to get shot by gang-bangers with illegal firearms, don't hang out at "after-hours clubs."
If they wish to be treated as a black-lobby group for purposes of reparations and preferential treatment then perhaps they should similarly tell us what they contribute to society as a group.
What percentage of blacks pay income tax, property tax?
What percentage receive government handouts?
What percentage have criminal records?
I'd like to see the same stats for every racial group that the Feds keep records on.
I can't believe this was published. Based on a couple of other stories currently active, I expect this editorialist will be sent to a re-education camp to be engrained with PC thought, and taught to never make truthful observations like this ever again.
Wisconsin student attacked because of non-PC interpretation of inner city beating death
Teacher's note causes uproar - Note Attached, said most poorly behaved students were African-Amer.
I can predict the responses to your questions: they don't tend to pay income tax or property tax, because they are kept down in society by white oppression, and can't get high-paying jobs or own land. They therefore need a lot of handouts. And they have disproportionately long or frequent criminal records, partly because of racial profiling and selective prosecution by police, and partly because of being kept out of the white business world, have nowhere else to turn than crime.
Larry Elder makes for some very good reading. He talks about this, raising the same sort of issues as I did, and then demolishes them. (He's a black Libertarian, if you didn't know. Being black, he can make un-PC statements.)
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