Wanna know why inner city blacks in Chicago are burdened with such incredibly high crime rates?
It has a lot to do with the cultural distrust of the police and the “No Snitch” attitudes.
There’s a fantastic series in the Chicago Tribune where a pair of reporters write about what they saw at a triple shooting this past weekend. It happened at a street party, sponsored by a neighborhood store. Shots rang out from two shooters and three people were shot, including a 73-year-old grandmother.
Get this: The reporter writes about witnessing the grand-daughter of the old woman telling cops she knew who fired the shots, but she wouldn’t reveal their identities.
If someone shot your grandmother and you knew who did it, would you withhold that information from the police?
That was just the beginning from a reporter who captured the craziness of the crime scene, including bystanders loitering around, obstructing emergency medical personnel, trying to contaminate the crime scene and generally harassing (not helping) the police who responded. It’s a fabulous piece, highly endorsed by the cops at Second City Cop. It captures what police officers in Chicago experience everyday.
‘I know who did it’
By Peter Nickeas and E. Jason Wambsgans
(Chicago Tribune) – “I know who did the shooting,” the woman said with a sneer. “Do you?”
The sergeant stood across yellow tape, and a delayed look of bewilderment briefly overtook his face before he asked, “Well, are you going to tell me?”
The woman said nothing. She kept walking.
Chaos – and some street corner problem-solving
Moments before the woman taunted the officer, neighborhood resident Lou Norris and the sergeant – one who’s been doing the job long enough for the dark chevrons on his shoulder to fade into a powder blue – talked about life for a few minutes.
They stood next to a green light pole and traded theories about how this came to be: Three people being shot here, including a 73-year-old grandmother.
Chaos followed the shooting, with people testing the boundaries of the crime scene on different sides at the same time. The sight of a scuffle or an officer running sent a dozen more off in the same direction as police tried to lock the scene down.
The ambulances lined up on Pulaski, two facing north and one south, and police had to yell at people lingering in the street to move so ambulances could leave.
People yelled threats at the police. They shouted slurs and curse words and at various points in the night, six people were cuffed until things calmed down. Some invoked the shooting death of a teen in Missouri and walked away with their hands in the air while taunting police. The scene would stay testy for about two hours.
Norris, in a clean white T-shirt, dark jeans, black construction boots and a flat-brimmed White Sox hat, shook his head as he and the sergeant solved life’s problems after most of the hundreds of people had dispersed.
The two agreed: Kids need more attention. They need more discipline. They need love. The constant exposure and access to violence is messing with their development. The willingness to shoot instead of fight is not how it always was.
A party, some gunfire, and a grandmother is shot
What brought Norris and the sergeant together was a burst of gunfire that left behind groups of shell casings at the corner of Pulaski Road and Arthington Street at the north end of the Lawndale neighborhood.
Police said at least two people opened fire during a party being thrown by the food and liquor store here, an annual gesture meant to show the community the store’s appreciation. Kids were out but none hit.
The 73-year-old who was shot was already ill, according to Shay Griggs, the woman who taunted the sergeant. She’s the woman’s granddaughter.
“She said, ‘Something’s wrong with my back.’ And the kids started crying,” Griggs said.
Griggs, who had taunted police at other times throughout the night, said she doesn’t know who was shooting.
The tussling at the scene reflected a deep divide between officers and residents. Some on each side – and they often are diametrically opposed to each other – understand the intensity that follows shootings.
“What are you blaming us for – we didn’t shoot her,” one officer said to Griggs earlier in the night. Arguments often follow.
Some officers won’t engage with belligerent residents. Some residents seek to calm down their neighbors. But some residents try to get a rise out of the officers, some officers respond in kind and the situation worsens.
Investigators said that, of the hundreds of people who were outside when the shooting happened, they had a difficult time finding witnesses. It’s not an uncommon refrain.
There’s three more segments to this story that are every bit as powerful and vivid as these first three. Read them.
It’s not America’s gun shops like Chuck’s Guns in Riverdale that are the source of problems in inner-city Chicago.
It’s not the guns at all.
The problem is inner-city Chicago is more like a third-world country (can you spell Mogadishu? h/t to Days of our Trailers) with third-world culture than first-world America.
Hip hop, no snitch and gangsta cultures so prevalent in black culture are terribly destructive to so many blacks.
When will it stop?
I see this every day in my job in Chicago. The soft bigotry of low expectations, the political farming of the dependent black class, and a media culture that glorifies the profane and mocks the scares all contribute to this condition.
There’s no way for anyone to solve this other than the culture itself.
Well consider this.
Telling cops who did it will only serve to get you killed when the cops can’t do anything to the thugs named. Think about all the I solved cases. Think about years and years of actually giving cops information only to be left hanging after doing so.
One cannot absolve the obviously corrupt policing in Xhicago.
There are two sides – always. True the no snitch aspect has merit but so too is there valid reasons why it developed that must be addressed as well.
Show the folks in the ghetto that killers caught ACTUALLY pay the ultimate price and you will find more people willing to help police bring about that end. The fact is that these folks KNOW the only justice they are going to witness IS street Justice. To them – that’s better AND SAFER than Chicago PD justice.
To be clear, I’m not bagging on joe six pack beat cop so much as I am the prosecution side of things up there. That’s the REAL failing.
I’d say young Miss Griggs has just painted a bullseye on her back. She should have just kept her mouth shut. Cause now, the hoods who did the shooting know that she knows and the best way to avoid any POSSIBILITY of prison is dispense with the witnesses.
Which…………in hindsight……….isn’t really a bad thing with this particular breed.
Yeah. I said it.
You know, I recognize the irony here.
On one hand, it’s not the white man holding the black man down as it’s blacks themselves that are killing and victimizing one another to no end.
At the same time, it is the white man holding them down: Specifically white politicians (and a handful of black ones), specifically Democrats that have replaced the father in black families with Uncle Sam.
It’s truly sad.
That’s okay though. When Obama gives citizenship to 20-30 million Mexicans here soon, the black vote won’t matter and they’ll really see what getting ignored by everyone except the race baiters is all about.
Sam