But let's dig into that and unpack the racism a little.
Drugs are easiest to understand. At this point everyone should know that white Americans do more drugs than Black Americans. They also do more hard drugs. We don't consider Drs. offices to be high crime, and yet, opioids.
Black neighborhoods only seem like they have more drug use, because of how we've decided to define crimes around drug use, and how we choose to enforce.
If I tell you that Mexican drug cartels are criminal organizations that illegally sell drugs and cause tens of thousands of deaths, you agree.
But if I tell you that the Sacklers criminally sold enough opioids that their actions killed more US citizens than Mexican cartel wars killed Mexican citizens you will have to run and fact check that, even though you know someone that dealt with opioid addiction.
Enough people overdosed that the life expectancy of US citizens dropped. No jail time!🤷🏿♂️
The war on drugs allows micro-dosing and dispensaries, but criminalizes possession for poor Black folk.
Pretty much any test you can do shows that drug use by white folk is about the same, or in some cohorts, many times more, than Black folk. Yes, even crack cocaine in the 80s. White folk did more crack than Black folk.
There's a false narrative that white folk did powder cocaine and Black folk did crack, and that's why more Black folk are in jail for drugs. It's not true. Poor folk did crack.
But what about theft? If you park your car in a high crime area, you're likely to get your windows smashed!
But, most theft in this country, is wage theft. Mostly rich white business owners, stealing wages from poor Black and brown service workers. Between $8B and $15B a year. Yes I said "billion!" Yes I said "a year!"
But we don't define wage theft by employers as a crime the same way as we define an employee stealing from the cash register, or a homeless person smashing a window. You don't go to jail for wage theft.
Again, this is an arbitrary decision around how we choose to define crime.
We could very easily decide that intentionally stealing more than $1000 from an employee is now a felony! Just like intentionally stealing $1000 from an employer is a felony. But you know that we won't.
Civil asset forfeiture is cops taking cash and other property from folk who are too poor to mount a defense against the theft. Most victims are never charged with a crime. Victims of this theft are disproportionately Black. ~$2B in 2016.
Civil asset forfeiture is not a crime. It's literally done by the cops! 😀
@mekkaokereke How does civil forfeiture square with the fourth amendment? No unreasonable seizure. State laws that permit cops to do that without cause should be unconstitutional and thrown out long ago. I’m sure there are books and books on this subject.
If I say I was driving back from Tijuana Mexico, and Mexican police pulled me over and took $1,000 from me, you will say "Mexican police are corrupt!" and maybe follow up with some racist statements.
But if a Black US driver is driving in Florida, police can just take $10,000 from her in broad daylight, without even bothering to accuse her of a crime.
It's very risky for poor Black folk to do any cash based transaction in the US. Not because they might get robbed by criminals, but by the cops.
I'm not kidding. If you sell your Honda Civic hatchback on Craigslist for cash, cops can take that. If you cash your paycheck, cops can take that. You would need a lawyer that you can't afford, just to get your own money back. Cops stole more stuff from citizens in 2015, than all burglaries in the US combined.
OK, but what about murder? Clearly there are more murders committed in "high crime" areas?
Again, it depends on our definition of murder and even our definition of location. If I stand on block A, and shoot someone across the street on block B, where did the crime occur? A or B?
Do we define murder as where the body fell? Or where the shooter pulled the trigger? Victim focused? Or killer focused?
Even in the highest gun crime cities in the US, there are a very small number of shooters doing most of the killing. Typically fewer than 50 killers in a city of millions.
But we consider entire cities "high crime" because of them, because they rack up astronomical bodycounts.
🤔But... By astronomical we mean 500 to 1000 murders a year, 80% of which will likely be committed by this pod of killers, most of the victims young, Black, male.
But we don't consider intentional negligence leading to 10K or 100K deaths, as creating a high crime neighborhood.
Of all the things that police do with their billions of dollars of budget, the one thing they don't do well at all, and the one thing that some residents of supposedly high crime communities (AKA, Black communities) would actually want them to do, is stop these pods.
I'm not going into assault, other than to say: If in 2023 your definition of assault is "Men beating up men that they don't know," then I don't know what to tell you.
If you know that most assault is "Men harming women that they do know," then no explanation needed.
Great list! But nothing on this list will protect women from the vast majority of assaults. It's missing the 35th and most important tip: It will be a man that you know and trust, not a Black stranger. His gun isn't for burglars, it's for you. Do not allow yourself to trust men with unaddressed misogyny and fantasies of violence.
For violence against women, the high crime neighborhood, is wherever men are.
@mekkaokereke When I'm walking down the street in my lower middle class neighborhood, I feel far more uneasy walking past the white guy who I know has ogled me than I do walking past the Black and Brown men who either live here or work in the area. The Black and Brown men don't ogle, and I know that they are not the ones likely to be carrying a concealed weapon.
Right now, all the US folk reading this are divided into two camps:
A) Um... Yeah? That's not some kind of big revelation. Everyone already knows how many concealed carry permits there are, and who has them. And like, what are they supposed to do? Leave the gun in the car? Not leave the house with it? That's the whole point of the permit. My friend takes his gun to the store every week. No big deal. I learned nothing new.
B) THERE ARE GUNS IN TRADER JOE'S?!?! I go there every week!
C) Yes, I know. But if I think about it, I will lose my fucking mind. But there's a reason I feel safer working remote in Mexico than I do at home in Atlanta Georgia. Because statistically, I AM safer https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings.jsp Atlanta vs. Cancun (I'm actually much safer as Cancun is a city and we're staying on Isla Mujeres, a little fishing village/day trip a ferry boat away).
These numbers are based on perception, not actual crime statistics.
Also there's a HUGE difference between being shot or kidnapped and having someone run your glovebox.
We know there's a huge media push to convince people that crime is high and rising in the US when it's absolutely not. So the numbers for US cities - especially those where conservatives are spreading aggressive misinformation to scare people - are way higher than they ought to be.
@mekkaokereke@courtcan I was shocked a few years ago to notice someone out for a trail run in Cougar Mountain Park near Seattle concealed-carrying a pistol. We were about 2-3 miles from a road, but probably 30 people / hour would go by that spot. Was glad to pass by and get going back down the slope with a ridge between us.
@mekkaokereke Yes. And once you realize and see, you cannot unrealize or unsee.
Spouse and I moved to Oklahoma in 2007. At some point a few years after we'd been attending the same church for a few years, he listed for me all the men he knew of in the congregation who were packing every Sunday morning.
It was a long list.
And every last one of them was white.
@mekkaokereke@courtcan Fun game: snatch one of these dummies' guns right out of his waistband and then tell him in the most sarcastic voice possible what a big badass he is
@liquor_american@mekkaokereke If I did that here in Oklahoma, I'd get myself arrested. After being dog-piled and possibly beaten by all the other dummies in the store.
@liquor_american@mekkaokereke Sadly, statistically speaking, if a woman hasn't been trained in a very specific type of self-defense, it's far more likely that an assailant will take the gun from her before she can shoot him. 🫤
@courtcan@liquor_american@mekkaokereke i live on the Tennessee/Alabama border. I see a guy in Publix occasionally with a large handgun strapped to his waist. People can open carry here. He's a short white man and I've seen him in the parking lot getting into a giant truck with Confederate stickers. He makes me more uneasy than anyone else I encounter in my day to day.
@mekkaokereke Lobbying for tax breaks for SUVs, guaranteeing more pedestrian/cyclist fatalities? Not murder
Developing novel chemical compounds as pesticides whose competitive advantage is primarily being better suited to locking farmers into a proprietary system but whose long term effects on public health are likely to have a significant body count? Not murder
Making high powered explosives for a foreign ally currently using such weapons in a campaign of genocidal violence? Not murder
Developing health care policies that ensure a certain proportion of the population will be denied life-preserving treatment? Not murder
Working as a corporate landlord strategically acquiring real estate in a neighbourhood in order to inflate price/profits, despite knowing this will increase the rate of unhoused people, shortening lives as a result? Not murder
Running foreign psy-ops meddling in another country's election to get a reactionary authoritarian leader with pro-US links elected, knowing they will implement policies that directly result in more deaths? Not murder
Being employed in the imperial military to go and shoot foreigners? Not murder
Owning large amounts of shares in dirty energy companies whose public business plans are incompatible with a habitable planet? Not murder.
Civil forfeiture should be illegal. People have their money & property taken, depending on where, even without any probable cause, and cannot do anything to get their stuff back. It doesn't matter if they obtain great legal representation or not. And of course cops are going to go after Black people and other People of Color at a greater percentage, because cops are racists.
Here's a good article that has a link to John Oliver's show on civil forfeiture
I knew someone who was living in his mother's house after he was out of school. He was busted for a tiny bit of weed. This was decades ago. His mother lost everything, including her home.
It's a horrible, horrible law and our lawmakers don't do anything about it
@mekkaokereke
I've seen that story passed around in the last decade, but I only just noticed that it says federal forfeiture. Are there state forfeitures as well?
@mekkaokereke I know someone that was hooked on prescription opiates and there was a point a few years ago where he tried to quit.
One day, I was outside barefoot (I lived on a farm) and I stepped on a broken jar. It was bad, so I needed stitches. At the clinic, that individual was in the spot next to me as I was getting stitches. He had intentionally put his finger in a woodworking router. He said as much. He wanted the endorphin high. He WAS high from endorphins.
He wasn't able to permanently kick the addiction, either, and now his finger is fucked.
Opiate addiction caused by these corporate murderers is terrifying in a LOT of ways.
For one, it makes a simplifying, and in my opinion, very incorrect assumption that a person that becomes an addict from prescription opiods, will overdose on those same prescription opiods. It includes codes 40.2(other opiods) and 40.4(Fentanyl), but doesn't include 40.1(Heroin), or 50.9(drug overdose, unknown)?
Over-prescribing makes more opiods addicts.
Opioid addicts die from many opiods, including non-prescription ones.
A Black man carpenter living in Baltimore wouldn't take heroin. He's no fool, and grew up seeing what that does. One day coming home from work he sees that one of the neighbourhood addicts has OD'd and passed away. Sad.
That day he falls and hurts his back. Doctor prescribes Oxy, telling him it's not addictive. He becomes addicted. A few years later, he's homeless. He OD's and passes away.
His family requests a toxicology screen. It's identified as heroin.
Neither of those deaths would show up in the "analysis" that you linked to, even though both were related to an increase in opioid addicts due to overprescription.
The original person could be coded as "X50 unknown." No next of kin looking for him.
The second person could be coded as "X40.1 heroin."
It's not hard to imagine that the original person could also have been a plumber or carpenter or electrician, 5 years earlier.
@mekkaokereke to me it's still the argument that you'd then see a mortality increase in areas of increased Rx's. The data doesn't appear to follow that and has a more random distribution.
It's definitely not even really fringe let alone mainstream in acceptance yet. The CDC is pushing the accepted narrative hard too. And this goes directly against them and lots of industry...and is what people want to hear.
The deaths from whatever cause are tragic regardless
I think it's evidence of many confounding variables not considered in his analysis. The analysis is too shallow to be useful.
For example, creating 100 wealthy, white Oxy addicts in Virginia, would lead to a lower 5 year mortality to creating 100 working class, Black Oxy addicts in DC, (one of the poorest Blackest places in the US). His analysis doesn't consider race or socioeconomic status.
Also, "rate of prescribing" is not the same as "rate of over-prescription."
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