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Will this be the tipping point in Baltimore?
Jolita Berry did not deserve what happened to her last Friday. Not the beating, not the breezy put-down by her Principal, and not the taunts of her attacker, who was free to roam around the school even as Ms. Berry finished reporting the incident and headed out to have her wounds dressed.
But Berry may just find herself an unwitting hero, in the same sense that Rosa Parks did the day she had her fill of being sent to the back of the bus.
Ironically, it was the Monday after the attack on Berry that Mayor Dixon and her yes-man, Police Commissioner Bealfeld, held a press conference to boast about the reduction in the murder rate for the first quarter of the year. Only 50 people were murdered, a reduction of "thirty percent" over the first quarter of last year. But that reduction amounts to only 21 fewer murders, a number that Baltimore's thug element has demonstrated that it can rack up on its scoreboard in no more than a weekend or two.
A change in the number of murders over as short a period as three months is too statistically insignificant to be a bragging point. Moreover, if the mayor wants to credit Bealfeld's tough new policies and new efficiencies in Prosecutor Jessamy's office, she had better be prepared to demonstrate a direct correlation between the policy changes and the number of murders.
Outrageously, this announcement came scarcely twelve days after the death of Zach Sowers, who had been in a coma since a beating he took last summer. In its zeal to close the case, the city cut deals with the four perpetrators that closed out the case in November, and precluded the possibility that any of them will be tried for the murder of Sowers. They will likely be out of jail before they are 30, and it's a sucker bet to say none of them will commit more violent crimes.
That's where the attack on Berry becomes important. Dixon will have to face the fact that irrespective of the number of people who actually died, the number of violent crimes has not been reduced. Nor, I suspect, has Jessamy's dismal record of obtaining convictions. Dixon can stamp her foot all day and utter platitudes such as "This might sound harsh, but I believe we have to come up with some very stern discipline action. Young people now feel, some feel, that it's acceptable, and it's not acceptable." But she cannot escape the statistics, provided ALL the statistics are revealed. And in the aftermath of Berry's attack, it will probably turn out that violent crime is being grossly under-reported. The president of the city teachers' union has said that administrators (read: principals and superintendents) routinely avoid reporting student assaults on teachers, out of a fear that more city schools will be declared "persistently dangerous" under the federal No Child Left Behind law. We can only hope that the union president has kept careful records of her own, and will reveal them.
The city will sooner or later have to face the fact that its main source of violence is black children of school age. Unlike the beat-down of Sarah Kreager, nobody will have the luxury of claiming that Berry used a racial slur against her attacker. Because Ms. Berry herself is black, and by all appearances is not one of that stiff-necked sort that black thugs like to characterize as "Oreos," traitors to the race.
Bealfeld told the press conference that citizens should play a greater role in reporting crimes. Perhaps now he will amend that statement to include school administrators. Notably, neither he nor Dixon have made any measurable progress against the witness intimidation and jury nullification that plague the city; that might be a motivator.
The Baltimore Sun provides a useful database for tracking murders in the city. You can see a map showing the locations where murder victims have been found, and can filter the victim population by age, gender, race, and cause of death, going back as far as January 1, 2007. One thing you quickly discover is that among the hundreds murdered last year, only thirteen were white. That's provided you don't count Sowers, who was murdered last year but didn't die until this year; or the two white would-be witnesses who were tracked into the county and killed.
The conclusion is inescapable that it's far more dangerous to be a black person in Baltimore City than to be a white, Asian or Latino, and few, if any, black Baltimoreans have recently been murdered by people of another race. Unfortunately, none of the local rabble-rousers (such as "Doc" Cheatham, Larnell Custis Butler, Dwight Pettit and his cohort of black defense lawyers, or the myriad "reverends" around the city, not to mention those fierce-looking Nation of Islam guys selling bean pies on the street corners) have enough spine to point this out. They are too busy trying to blame some outside influence, primarily white people.
- The Dr. Spock philosophy. Parents are forbidden any kind of physical discipline beyond sending the kid to his "naughty spot." The argument is that spanking a child is violent. And the result of that has been that the children themselves have grown exponentially more violent.
- This is probably the third generation of children raised in day care. At home, a child is under constant supervision of Mom, and has contact with other children only as she permits it. In day care, there are fewer adults than children, and thus no close supervision. The children learn from each other rather than from the adults, and apparently what they learn is the baser part of human instinct. Certainly nothing polite, noble or altruistic. I don't think many of us are born with those characteristics.
- Black people seem to lack the will to take the next step beyond complaining these days. Most of the murders in the city are black people killing other black people. But when someone like Bill Cosby shows up and reminds people that they have only themselves to blame, for not having disciplined their offspring, he is viewed as having sold out his race. Yes, the audience will nod and applaud in agreement. Then they will go back home to the status quo.
“’There is (a) class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs. … There is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don't want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.’"